What does your Bookshelf say about You?

As a little girl, I envied my father's bookshelves, which had pride of place in our tiny living room. They were never far from my eyes or my greasy fingers -- I was forever nicking books and reading them inside the covers of my Social Studies or General Science texts. I was caught reading Anna Karenina at 10, Nana at about 12; I was poring through the complete works of Bernard Shaw at 15, along with generous helpings of Chekov, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Hemingway, Flaubert, Rabindranath Tagore, Neruda and of course, Shakespeare. Then came Camus, Kafka, Schopenhauer (which I persisted in, with the aid of distractions from M & B romances, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Alistair MacLean from the local library.)

All through that time, I never wondered what my father's bookshelves said about him. He was a self-taught reader (English was his second language, as it is mine) -- and his books were filled with notes in our mother tongue, and a variety of underlines.

But obviously folks believe that you can tell a lot about the man/ woman by the books he/she reads. Here's an article that says exactly that:

Your bookshelf is an intimate physical representation of your accomplishments (titles as trophies earned), aspirations (that ever growing to-read pile), associations (that book your boss gave to each employee), personal development (those self-help titles that urged you to talk to strangers), guilty pleasures (50 shades of beach reads), escapes (sci-fi to some, travelogues to others), memories (meeting that author, visiting that indie shop on vacation), interests (the bigger the Star Wars fan, the more Star Wars books) and countless other tells that another reader would unconsciously and immediately compare against their own shelf. And that's just the ingredients – how you organise, arrange, and display these titles should impart even more insight as to a reader's personality.

 
 Perhaps my father's collection showed a well-rounded and insatiably curious reader. I'll have to take a look at the shelves for any deeper insights when I visit him next.

My living room has no bookshelf. All of the shelves are in my study, where they cover two walls, and spur me on or distract me as I write, depending on my level of concentration for the day. They probably show I'm a random reader, with no defined taste, who would read almost anything, depending on her mood on any given day. The pic here is part of the only bookshelf that I could click without bending my back out of shape.

Where are your bookshelves placed, and what do you think they show about you? If you mail us pictures of your bookshelves (you can try me at atozstories at gmail dot com), along with your blog links, may be we could do a blog post series based on bookshelves and their owners.
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