The Stories Told By Your Bookshelf

by Jane Anderson, Featured Contributor

“YOU DON’T HAVE ANY GOOD BOOKS!” That comment from a visiting friend as she perused my bookshelf for titles she considered worth reading. Laughing, I said “What do you mean? I have 2 full bookcases and am ready to get another one.” But I knew what she meant. Where her reading preference was an intriguing novel to fuel the imagination, mine was piloted toward non-fiction, leadership, and destiny.

Her observation though got the wheels in my brain reeling with how reading choices are strong indicators of our interests and maybe even our strengths. Here’s a challenge if you’re up for it. Take a stroll over to your bookshelf or head for your eReader and inspect the volumes stored there. If you’re an exacting type of person you might have your books cataloged, organized by category, and in order by author’s last name. Or you might be living on the edge and shelve your books in no specific order – however, when you want to refer back to a book, you know where to find it. What do your books say about you? What ambitions or character traits are reflected in the materials you feed your mind with every day? I have yet to read the titles on someone’s bookshelf that doesn’t in some way offer insight into where their interests lie.

Recently I was spending the afternoon with my sister who is 10 years younger than me. Due to our age difference we lived in the same home for a very short period of our lives. Our career paths have been vastly different. She’s a successful business woman, president of a consulting firm and I’m a writer. She has lived in Florida 90% of her life and I’ve been in Michigan since the creation of dirt. As I looked through her books though, I noticed similarities in our reading style. Her books, both fiction and non-fiction were titles I either owned or had read. Is it some mysterious part of our DNA or is it environmental, those gravitational pulls toward certain books and genres?

So what have you discovered as you examined your bookshelves? Could you categorize your interests or curiosities? Did you think about your original intent or what possessed you to buy certain books? You could, like me, just scratch your head in wonderment about why some of those books are still there. Maybe your focus has changed since your initial purchase and in this season of your life, you’ve moved on. I have one shelf devoted to books I purchased when my children were still at home. Like 101 Questions Children Ask About God or the Bible In Pictures for Little Eyes by Kenneth N. Taylor. And still favorites at any age, the classic Dr. Seuss book Oh the Places We’ll Go and The Full Collection of Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne. One of my favorite books during this season of my life was by Barbara Walters, How to Talk to Practically Anyone About Practically Anything. I was fascinated by her ability to do exactly what the title conveyed. Bullying is a topic that never leaves my consciousness and I still have the book in my library, Please Stop Laughing at Me by Jodee Blanco.

I treasure the first books that introduced me to coaching and leadership. I hadn’t yet connected pursuit of learning to the discipline of leadership, but I was reading to prepare. The first was Failing Forward by John C. Maxwell which I read before I knew he was representative of leadership networks. At the time I didn’t even know what a network was. Inspired to be a contributing member of a project team I read Innovation to the Core by Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson, a book strongly focused on bringing out the creative side of teams. In that same era, along with the rest of the world, I read the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey and learned that sharpening the saw was critical to continued growth – reading is one way to keep the saw sharp. For the entrepreneurial spirited, which strikes all of us at some point in our lives, I read See You at the Top by Zig Ziglar, Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Visual Marketing by David Langton and Anita Campbell and $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau.

Fast forward a few years to present day where the tales my bookshelves tell is that not much has changed. Current volumes are slightly trended toward a mix of leadership, team building, and social media. I can’t list them all or this story will never end, but to name just a few: A World Gone Social by Ted Coine and Mark Babbitt, The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do by Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller, The Idea Driven Organization by Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder, Lead Positive by Kathryn D. Cramer, and my absolute favorite read of the summer, Soul Keeping by John Ortberg. That surprised you didn’t it? The most important part of my story and the story told by my bookshelf is that my heart and spirit affect every part of life and what I read matters because it feeds my mind which feeds my heart which produces the how in my actions and reactions.

On my bookshelves you will find a section loaded down with technical books XML for Dummies, HTML for Dummies, and Learn HTML in a Weekend. After hundreds of weekends I still don’t know HTML. I guess I actually had to open the book. Then there are the books that promise to make me healthy, make me younger, diagnose illnesses, and explain every vitamin known to humans. Tell me you don’t have anything like them.

Because of the number of non-fiction books on my table, I read only one or two novels over a couple months. I often read myself to sleep at night with a few pages from books like Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline or Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd, or Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult. I’ll let you in on the story of how I converted from diehard non-fiction reader to a daily reader of novels. At one time I would read a book only if it promised to make me smarter. Then the unthinkable happened. In 1999 the radio/CD player in my car stopped working. Since I’m not much of a talker, I couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation as a passenger in a car with a talkative husband. The silence on trips was more than my husband could endure so in desperation he asked me to read to him. All I had at the time was a book I was reading to our grandson, Because of Winn Dixie. At first he said no, never mind, but in a few short minutes he said, yeah, go ahead, read that to me. Our radio has long since been replaced, but 15 years later we are still reading novels whenever we are in a moving vehicle. In fact he offers to take me to dinner in a distant town – just so I will read to him. I barely get my seatbelt on and he urgently questions, well, are you going to read? Good grief! We’ve covered the books by authors David Baldacci, John Grisham, James Patterson and some classics by John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, and Jack London. My husband might sit through 5 minutes of a book on leadership or business but my guess is that even 5 minutes would put him to sleep and remember where we are and who is driving. Any questions?

So it’s your turn. What would I see on your bookshelves if I stopped by for coffee talk? Do you detect a trend in your reading discipline? I call it discipline because that’s an accurate assessment. While the rest of the community is at play, or hunkered down with a thrilling novel, we sit, highlighter in hand, ready to ingest words and paragraphs to convert into actionable exercises. I’ll give you a clue here about my reading conventions. Nobody wants to borrow a book from me that has been loved into action. I use colored pencils, which brings me to the whole reason for writing this story anyway. The books we read, the articles we practically inhale, the podcasts we listen to, movies we watch – they tell on us. They serve our contributions to the world around us. We live what we learn, right? Let me say this though in favor of fiction. There is merit in reading novels. We learn from the stories built around facts through the pens of authors who can craft a spirited tale from impeccably detailed notes. Non-fiction provides a nucleus of thought around specific topics. Fiction provides a circumference of diversity around the human experience.

In an article published by TheWeek on September 6, 2013, Warren Buffet, one of the most successful people in the business world, shares his secret for getting smarter. Buffet estimates he spends 80% of his day in his office reading and thinking. It’s the key to building knowledge. He advises everyone to read productive material and make it a daily habit for the rest of your life. It takes effort, but it pays off. In the United States each year the number of books published exceeds 270,000. That’s a loose estimate based on compiling statistics from various sources. But it’s a lot! And we can use it to our advantage.

What’s your goal for reading? What’s your plan? Choose a topic, choose an author, choose a format – print or ebook. Use the library for print books or ebooks, go to your favorite bookstore, or shop online. If you need help deciding on your next great read, check out book reviews, especially those written by readers. Readers tend to share their favorite parts and their unvarnished opinions of what they found valuable (or not) between the book covers.

So we’re all set then? Let’s get out there! Ready – Set – Read!