What's on your bookshelf?

A speaker I just listened to on CD in my car said "Show me your bookshelf and I'll tell you what your priorities are."

Well, duh.

Makes for an interesting personality revealer, huh?

Once every fourteen or fifteen years, when I have time to roam around a library unhindered, I usually browse in the fiction section and feel pressure to find a good, entertaining read. This is difficult, what with all that "not judging a book by its cover" stuff.

So, tonight I had the luxury of half an hour in the library but I headed for the non-fiction section instead. Call me a nerd, but it was so exciting I could hardly stand it. I went up and down every aisle. (This is not an enormous library.) If I'd had a shopping cart, I might have come home with dozens of books. Since I was already carrying my 94-pound diaper bag, (yes, even without the baby I end up carrying the thing - who has time to transfer purses? -- who even has another purse?) I settled on three random gems and headed for check-out.

I have arrived home with Keys to Parenting Your Five Year Old; Good Poems for Hard Times; and Writing Humor: Creativity and the Comic Mind. In case you're interested, I spent a good amount of time perusing the "Western U.S. History" section looking for stuff on the Donner Party and the "White House" section. Literally the White House, not Presidential History. I'm talking books on the design and arrangement of the actual residence.

Already checked out last week and sitting on my end table are: Forever, Erma - zillions of Erma Bombeck's columns reprinted and 1,000 Quotable Poems. I'm in kind of a poetry mood and I'm going with it.

So that's it for me. A little multiple personality disorder in real life translates to a fascinating hodge-podge of borrowed books!