Bookshelf of the Month
June 2018
My bookshelf of the month story should really be “bookbox of the month”; I moved out on my own four years ago, but a lot of my books are still in boxes. That’s about right for my personality-a bit all over the place. I also consider myself a (mostly) recovering procrastinator.
First, there’s this box from my garage. You can see some of my eclectic tastes in reading. I like to read graphic novels-Civil War is probably one of my favorites, but its not pictured here. I think I lent it out to a friend (I like to share my favorite reads). I like that one a lot because I find the concept unique, to turn the superheroes on each other when each is doing what they believe is right. I’m especially interested in how Mr. Fantastic, Tony Stark, and Hank Pym are driven so much by intellect and a want to respond to tragedy by attempting to regulate, control and organize, that they do some morally gray things.
In this cloth cube I keep current textbooks. I like to really dive in and work with text. Which basically means I annotate the crap out of them! I’m really hands on, kind of a kinetic learner, so I like to highlight and mark things up to help me work through a text. You can see all the flagged pages and highlighting. I love this page from Dubliners where I was mapping out a critical conversation:
This cubby headboard from my old twin bed (from high school no less) has more typical things. The books on the left are all from a book club I was involved in. I am actually quite shy, despite a penchant for being chatty, so I hoped the book club would help me open up and also get exposed to different novels I wouldn’t have necessarily have picked out for myself. I did not read all of them (yet) but I did read Ready Player One and The Handmaid’s Tale. I also made it through most of Fun Home. Also on this shelf are books I bought for myself, school texts, and “chick lit” that I got from one of my best friends. I hardly ever leave her house without being sent off with multiple books.
The bookshelf above my desk, also from the furniture set from my tiny bedroom in my old south-side home, has completely random items. There is a beat up copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, although if you really want to see a beat up copy-somewhere in this home is a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone I’ve read nearly a million times including out-loud at bedtime chapter-by-chapter to my younger sister. I think pages are falling out (and I can almost hear an audible gasp for my having treated a book that way, but it was well loved). Just recently my sister wanted to reread the series, so I bought her one of the earlier ones and wrote in the front cover that I hope she finds reading as magical as when I read it to her when we were kids and that she thinks of me when she reads it. Here’s a picture of us on the Hogwarts Express in 2016, many years after those bedtime story nights:
There’s also several books I got from a library sale and thought were interesting. Also on this shelf is a signed copy of Neil Patrick Harris’ choose-your-own-adventure style autobiography. My other best friend works in a library and always finds amazing books to gift me. Which leads me to my favorite book spot in my house.
It’s not a bookshelf, but if a book is really important to me you can find it here-on my nightstand. My nightstand holds my current reads and usually ones that are important to me. I keep a journal in the drawer along with one of my favorite gifted books, Adulting by blogger Kelly Williams Brown. Adulting is funny but also soo helpful at navigating being thirty in today’s world. The friend who got it for me for my birthday and I often trade homemaking and general “looking like we have our shit together” tips. I listen to audio books here. I lay in bed with my cat and do the most reading here. I have even done grad work here:
And the most important item on my bookshelf is a bit polarizing. It is my Kindle. My Kindle is my portal to reading. I can instantly download anything I want, and a lot of times for free from the library. I can even download audio books. I am also still able to annotate on it and work with the text like I enjoy doing, in fact I have pretty consistent color code: orange for humor, pink for relationships, yellow for general points of interest, and blue for foreshadowing. I’m currently mapping foreshadowing and pieces of unreliable narration in Patrick Rothfuss’ Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear in case he ever decides to finish this series. So you see, I have infinite books on my “bookshelf” right at my fingertips from bed! Don’t get me wrong, I love the smell of books as much as any English major, but the Kindle is truly magical to me. I never dreamed I would be able to have access to so much whenever; and living alone despite being an extrovert, I find the open bedroom window, my fluffy calico cat Lily at my side, and wherever I decide to portal to is the best way to feel far less alone.
I don’t know what my “bookshelf” says about me. I love to read, I love to analyze, and I have multiple books and texts (both traditional and non-traditional) pretty much everywhere around the house at any given moment. I don’t think of myself as particularly “out of the box,” but I know I love narratives and the peaceful, bookish life I have carved out for myself.
With thanks to Alyssa Black, a genuinely awesome person and editor.
