A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot."

[Baffled at a Bookcase (London Review of Books, Vol. 33 No. 15, 28 July 2011)]

Simply put, I love books, physical books. I own so many--many of which I have not read (yet). I just need to have them . On shelves. In piles. In random conference tote bags. Paper magazines and newspapers too. Some call it clutter. I call it cozy. It's comforting to know I am surrounded by pages of stories. And, thus, by storytellers.

Through books we can time travel, play make-believe and even create our own intangible art using the words to paint complex and vivid images in our minds. Your own interpretations of what’s on a page, like snowflakes or fingerprints, will never be the same as someone else’s. And to me, that’s the magic that books hold: Preserved in dried ink, on flattened paper, between two covers, that make up the endless world of possibilities lost in a page of carefully curated characters

The unread books that have been staring you in the face for the past five years that you swear you could have read, or books that took you years to read that evolved along with your life; those that were bought for you as gifts or those that you bought yourself as a treat after a testing semester at school. The books that remind you of someone you loved, the books you forgot to return to a friend, or the coffee table books you will likely never read, and be pleasantly surprised by their pages when they are opened for the first time by a visiting friend.

The room was as big as the Duke of Pardloe's library and had at least as many books, and yet the feeling of it was more akin to a small cluttered hole (Pardloe's)
You could tell from the books whether a library was meant for show or not, Books that were usedhad an open, interested feel to them, even when closed and neatly lined up on a shelf in strict order. You felt as though the book took on as much interest in you as you did in it and it was willing you to reach for it.

Jamie felt a strong desire to go across and see what the open books were, to go to the shelves and run his knuckles gently over the leather and wood and buckrum of the bindings until a book should speak to him and come willingly into his hand.

And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.