I hate to say it, but I need a bookshelf.
Nothing fancy — just three or four shelves I can stash in the corner of my office-slash-gear-room commingling with my bikes and skis.
I hate it because I spent months getting rid of practically everything I owned before I moved to Park City. If it didn’t fit into the back of my VW Sportwagen, it had to go. Clothes, furniture, appliances and yes, my lifelong collection of books and magazines.
I told myself this was the new me: unburdened by things, footloose and fancy free. Who needs books when there’s Kindle or Audible? When there’s a perfectly good library two blocks away?
But, book by book, they’ve crept back in.
A book about a former drug kingpin investigated by the FBI given to me by a Bumble date who confessed on our only date that he was the subject of the book. A ski bum memoir gifted by my favorite local ski bum. A Park City biking guide I picked up while waiting for coffee at Atticus. A Book of Mormon handed to me by some kid on a mission. And — for no reason other than it was free and I liked the cover font — a 1980s memoir about two zany flight attendants.
Try as I might to keep my inner minimalist intact, the truth is I love books. Real books. Books with spines and yellowed paper and musty smells. With old checkout cards and forgotten birthday napkins pressed between the pages. The kind of books that feel like they’ve lived a whole life before they found you.
Maybe it started decades ago in a little old library in East Rochester, New York, where the children’s section was hidden in the basement. Metal stacks. No chairs. If you wanted to read, you sat crisscross applesauce on a cold, linouleum floor.
That’s where I met “Harriet the Spy” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Ramona The Pest.” Characters and stories and authors who didn’t just make me want to read. They made me want to write.
These days, my tastes run more toward David Sedaris and Joan Didion — and, yes, I recently checked out “Eat, Pray, Love,” and no, I’m not ashamed. That’s the beauty of libraries and the people who run them: They don’t judge.
In a world where constitutional rights are under fire every day, librarians are often the last line of defense between censorship and free, unfettered access to information. They hold the keys to knowledge and intellectual freedom itself. I often think, in the zombie apocalypse, the real heroes won’t be billionaires or politicians. It’ll be librarians and engineers.
In my advertising career, I once worked with a publisher of reference materials for librarians. We did a deep dive into the librarian mindset and discovered they’re far more than information managers. They’re the guardians of fairness, access and intellectual democracy. The ultimate judgment-free zone.
Want to know if there’s a legal loophole for marrying your third cousin in Utah? Curious about mushrooms that are only slightly poisonous? Looking for ways to immigrate to Canada or train your cat to attack on command? A librarian won’t blink. She’ll just start looking. Not for praise — just because she needs to know.
To test the theory, I once called a library reference desk and asked how long it takes for ice to melt in a glass of iced tea. The librarian said he’d get back to me.
The next day, he called to say he couldn’t find the answer in any of his reference sources, so he went home and ran his own experiment. He literally set a glass of ice tea on his kitchen counter and timed how long the ice took to melt. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have done it better.
Flash forward to now. Who needs a reference book or a librarian? Everything’s online. Anyone can Google anything without ever cracking a spine or speaking to another human being. Want to know how to make a top hat for your pet bee? I kid you not: there’s a sub-Reddit for that.
I recently saw an Instagram influencer brag that she’s never read a book in her life — as if ignorance is a flex. And now, we’re not just banning books. We’re banning words. What next: trigger warnings for dictionaries?
If we’ve been waiting for a sign to show librarians some love, this is it.
Maybe that’s why after giving all my books away, I’m accumulating again. I’m ready to buy a bookshelf. And honestly, it feels like the most subversive thing I’ve done all year.
Books are back. All the books. And I’m welcoming them like old friends who’ve been gone too long. Just like libraries and bookshops, they’re a quiet declaration of belief — in curiosity, in freedom, in belonging.
They represent the right to get lost in your own thoughts. To disappear into other worlds. Ones as self-indulgent as “Eat, Pray, Love,” as bewitched as Narnia, or as squishy as a giant peach.
As Roald Dahl once said, “Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.”
Just like books in a library. Waiting to be discovered.