My first job, newly married and a coworker invited some of us during lunch hour to see her brand new house.

All I remember is many windows and wondering: where are the bookcases? There were none. I am talking early 80s before eBooks.

And when I visit a home with lots of books, I can't resist perusing their bookshelves . Sometimes I find we have many books in common.

There is a great need for a purging of our shelves as we are once again crowding them. This is mostly due to Mr YD as he prefers books to E-books. I on the other hand have not purchased a physical book for myself in years!! I originally got a Kindle because I knew I did not want to add any physical books to our library.

You might often see a whole shelf full of self-improvement books when visiting a woman's home. I've never seen that in a man's home, though. I guess it never dawns on us men that there might actually be some room for improvement in ourselves.

I love mystery series, historical fiction, some fantasy, high adventure and espionage

Mr YD's favorites are Science Fiction

We both love Sir Terry Pratchett and have all the Discworld books. (He has many of Sir Terry's other series as well)

Additionally I have a shelf of more philosophy / zen oriented books. Aren't a lot of self-help books a bit repetitive among themselves? Perhaps many men see self-help books as not so helpful.

Lots of men are not very introspective and not very in touch with their feelings and the feelings of others. Manly men and all that stoic rot. Stoicism is great, but without introspection and empathy it is just a wall and loses its usefulness. I was somehow able to develop introspection and empathy and avoid a lot of manly man pitfalls.

Until recently men haven't faced the same pressures women have, what with the patriarchy and all. But women entering the workforce these days have careers that weren't so readily available to them as in the past and this is layered on top of traditional roles which they accept or reject or find innovative ways to combine. Now things are bit more even, a bit, so we may see a bit more similarities. At the same time, mindsets like those of incels aren't conducive to helping themselves. Lots of men confuse rigidity for manliness.

It mostly holds figurines and picture frames. I have six bookcases (I admit, some are only two shelves) and they're all full of books. I'm at the point now that the only time I buy a book is for a gift. I get my books from the library these days.

To answer your question, yes I do notice if they have books and what they are. I have a friend who I know for a fact loves to read but she doesn't keep the books. She passes them along when she's done reading them.

Also I give away books so I want to see what they like and whether I have something for them.

Very common for YouTubers to arrange their books with certain ones facing the camera, eg, turned sideways on the shelf behind them., and I can't help but always notice those and think about why they picked them.

When I first got to NYC from LA, I was happily surprised to see everyone on the subway reading and I would kind of survey what they were reading.

Just missed a train one morning so I knew I had about 10 minutes to wait for the next one. A person who I assume was unhoused, approached me and I thought he was going to ask for money. No. He holds up a book and asks "Do you know what this term refers to?"

His finger pointed to the name "Icarus" in the title of the book. I told him about the flying too close to the sun and wings melting and he told me how that fit into the character in the book. We talked until the next train came in.

True story: when I first met my husband in 1981 I was a struggling single mother — but I had two fairly large bookcases. While waiting for me to settle the kids, he browsed my collection — long time later he told me how struck he was by my shelf of Japanese literature (in English) — said he’d only ever met one person before me who had read The Makioka Sisters.

For some of us, I guess the books we keep are like perfume or a good wine to the cognoscenti.

I have over 30 meters of books in my home, 12 bookcases. No way have I read all of them. Some haven't been opened for decades, unfortunately. I have so many I have more in storage and I'm wondering how to find good homes for them. When that is accomplished, I will begin whittling down my library.

I take after Thomas Jefferson who said "I cannot live without books." I have a tshirt with that emblazoned on it. It's an affliction I bear but fortunately it is not painful.

Ever heard that?

In 2007 our house burned down and both my husband and I lost all our books. He set out to replace his; I decided to rely primarily on the local library.
When we separated in 2018, I moved first to a studio apartment, then a 2 bedroom apartment, and finally a 2 + den house in 2021. I kept two bookcases to hold books which I bought, and one now holds primarily music CD's. I still rarely buy a book even though I've added one more bookcase. I read mostly fiction or memoirs from the library at the rate of one/week. One bookcase holds predominantly political books and the other fiction by Diana Gabaldon. Yes, I'm an Outlander fan--and I've read the series several times--but to look at the amount of space devoted to books in my house I doubt you'd guess that I spend four or five hours/day reading, or that most of what I read is fiction.

The one I fear is a fire. I'm very sorry. That must have been horrible.

My electronic library is much, much, much larger than my physical print library, which is, pretty large and includes some rare books. I would imagine in print it would easily fill my house.

The electronic library is backed up, remotely. Your comment inspired me to do a physical back up to a disk, something I haven't done for a while, apparently last in 2023.

My library is technical largely, heavily focused on chemistry and physics, a decent sized mathematics library, but I have a fairly large history section, some biology, some philosophy and even some religion, although I'm an atheist. I also have a fair number of art books. I haven't read fiction for probably 30 years, but I do have a large set of fiction books from another time. Also my wife reads fiction, quite a bit of it.

At any given time, I probably have 10 books or so out of the library, which I read in excerpts, rarely cover to cover, usually history or on environmental issues. My library has a wonderful Interlibrary Loan system, and I can get very high level technical books not available at Princeton University's library or at Rutgers library. I request these, take them over to Princeton and use their scanners to make searchable electronic copies.

Princeton University also has a repository, Recap, it shares with Columbia, Harvard and the New York Public library and a few other major libraries. You can request these for use in the library and scan them. I got some very old long defunct journals from the 1950's on the material physics of alloys of plutonium, ancient phase diagrams, which included photographs of an actual three dimensional ternary phase diagram. It was amazing how they did things before powerful computers were available.

My son does that for art books, scanning at Princeton, collecting a huge library on Chinese art before he went to China on a grant to study a Chinese artist. He works for Rutgers, but their scanning capability is not that large.

As for marriage, I can't imagine separating from my wife though, although 40 years ago, she agreed to marry me under the condition that if she ever wanted to divorce me, I wouldn't contest it.

She's still thinking it over I guess, and has been for the last 40 years. She's still here and every morning I wake up thinking how wonderful that is, she's still here and hasn't requested a divorce. I think she'll stay. I can't imagine life without her, but we did come close to divorce early in our marriage, two or three years in. I shudder to think of it, what my life would have been. A therapist saved our marriage. The requirement was that I grow up, as the therapist pointed out, reminding me that a wife is not quite like a mother and no one should expect a mother from a wife.

One of us will die someday, I guess, the other soon after so there's that. Happily for me, I'm a decade older than her, so I'll probably get to go first. I don't think I'd live very long without her in any case.

A fire, I think, would be kind of like death in some way though, and I'm sorry you went through that.

I worked most of my life in various sorts of bookshops, and have a lifelong love for them, in a general sense.

I get out a magnifying glass and look over the prop books in catalog ads.

That would be a dream job. To be surrounded by books all day. When I retired, people asked me what I was planning to do and I always answered "There's a whole library full of books I haven't read."

I retired recently, and wouldn't trade the education I got for a diploma. There are presently seventeen books within easy reach.

We are what we read!
People visiting me often browse my bookcases. I have over 2000 titles, both fiction and non-fiction.
Unfortunately, I have run out of places to put new bookcases.

Like Cicero said, a room without books is like a body without a soul!

All my books are on my iphone - over 200 of them. I'm in a bookclub and most women in it don't even finish the book we are reading. I always do because I can listen when driving, cleaning, gardening etc.

Most people I know have bookcases filled with their main interest.