Eleanor Goymer on the statements we make with our bookshelves
The other day a friend casually told me that she’d once ended things with a boyfriend after realising he had not one single bookshelf. Perhaps that was hasty, but I understood where she was coming from. For a book lover, your shelf says something about you. It’s a shortcut into your taste, your history, your personality even. My new novel, Ask Me What I’m Reading, is all about catching someone’s eye because of the book they’re reading and sharing that moment with them.
My friend’s comment got me thinking about the statement we make with our bookshelves; how much of us we share, and what we keep hidden, by our choice of what to display. I grew up in a house full of books and my own home is now filled with them too. There are the shelves of children’s books that my own children are too old to want to read anymore, and yet I keep them because I can’t bear to let them go and I like to think that one day they might be loved again. I have shelves of books that I read as a child, that I have squirrelled away over the years from my childhood home – harder to do now that I no longer live in the same country. I have the books that I loved as a teenager, a whole shelf of Tolkien, added to over the years following that first summer I lost to Middle Earth and then repeated summer after summer until serendipity had me working on them in my professional life and I got to add even more to the Tolkien shelf.
Then there are the books I read later in my teens, and my early twenties when I was terribly serious and trying to impress everyone. Do I keep those still because there’s a part of me that’s still trying? Possibly, yes. These are hardback editions of literary fiction – serious books for serious people – but crammed right up beside them are my beloved romance books, which I grew up on and read in secret until I got old enough, mature enough and confident enough to claim them publicly for myself. These are the books that I run my hands along and recall the ones I read when I was heartbroken and thought I’d never fall in love again. The ones I read that reminded me that broken hearts heal. The ones that taught me to understand my fellow humans, that the most powerful force in the world is love and those that finally made me decide that I wanted to see my own name on the spine of a book.
And these are the ones I use to remind myself – when I’m stuck on a plot point, or the words just won’t come – that I have written a book before and, despite the odds, I will probably want to write one again.
In Ask Me What I’m Reading, one of the characters is forced to live her whole life through the books she reads. For her and for the rest of us readers, there are worlds contained in our shelves and it’s unimaginable to think we could understand the world around us without them. So going back to my friend, I can understand why she ended things after that discovery. But I like to think that perhaps I’d have first asked him where he went as a child without books to take him there? What lands he escaped to without books showing him the way? And how he can understand the human condition without first finding a love of words and stories? And then, if he had no answer, then perhaps I would have ended it too!
Ask Me What I’m Reading by Eleanor Goymer is published by One More Chapter on 2 July 2026
