What’s the first thing you do when you visit someone’s house for the first time? Admire their kitchen backsplash? Poke through the medicine cabinet?
Not me. I go straight for the bookshelves.
I LOVE snooping through other people’s bookshelves. If they have books I’ve read and loved, I know we can be friends. And if not, well, at least now we have something to talk about until I can come up with a polite excuse to leave the suddenly-awkward party.
Back when I had a book review blog, I used to track everything I read in a spreadsheet. At first it was a way to figure out how many books I was reading each year (~150), but then it became a fun way to quantify things like genre, gender of the author, country of origin… I’m a scientist, I like data. 🙂
I lost the habit, but decided to start again this year, largely because I was having trouble remembering which titles in my ever-expanding collection I’d read and which ones I haven’t (middle age is descending upon me, alas). But rather than a spreadsheet, where I’d have to type things manually and only I could see it, I decided to try this newfangled thing called Goodreads all the young folk are talking about.
Consider this your invitation to snoop my shelves! Hopefully we can still be friends. 😀
Are you a shelf-snooper too? Share your stories in the comments.
Have signed up for GoodReads and have sent a friend request to ya!