A bald, goateed man walks onto the stage, and hangs his head as he stares at the people sitting in folding chairs, sipping coffee absentmindedly, bleary eyes staring back at him. He shuffles for a moment and finally admits to his problem, which they say is the first step.
"Hi....um....My name is Cory, and I'm a biblioholic."
I'll admit it readily now. I have a love affair, perhaps an obsession, with books. I started building my library at a young age, with plenty of encouragement from my parents, who are both educators. I can't go into Border's Books without buying something. I think I keep Amazon.com in business. I love reading.
I also tend to learn a lot about others by looking at the books in their lives, or the absence of books. When I enter someone's house or office for the first time, I look at what is on the shelves. I even (partially) chose the people on my dissertation committee based on the similarity of books on their shelves to the ones on mine, figuring that if we tend to read in the same areas, it would likely be a good match. Strong signaling, as it were.
I have found it not uncommon to enter someone's space (especially houses and apartments), and not see any books – anywhere. Never trust people without books in their homes. It's unnatural.
Just kidding....but only a little bit.
One activity to which I thoroughly subscribe is librarianship. This is a good thing, I suppose, otherwise I probably shouldn't have gotten a graduate degree in library and information science. With such a large personal library, a bit of organization is necessary. I use Delicious Library to do the job. It's excellent, and if you're a Mac user, I highly recommend it. It's worth the $40 investment.
I'm working on coming up with a reasonable way of putting my library online. It would take too much space to describe what I like to read, since it cuts a swath across many genres. When the library list arrives, you can explore to form your own conclusions. Incidentally, I never mind loaning books to people, so if you find something in the collection that you've had a hard time finding elsewhere, I'll be happy to loan it to you. (Delicious Library elegantly handles book loans as well.)