Friday, September 22, 2017

What happens when you stare at your bookshelf too long?

When you don’t go into an office every day, you really start to take notice of all of the stuff in your house. 

This includes your book collection. 

Not including two books a friend leant to me three months ago, there are currently 175 books on my bookshelf. Definitely not every book I’ve ever owned, but still a sizable amount. 

For the most part, the books aren’t surprising or particularly unusual. There’s a lot of YA, several rockstar biographies, the occasional creepy teen girl mystery. But when I really got to looking at them, I noticed there were a handful of books that were not like the others — either because they didn’t seem like books I would own or because they seemed like books that only I would own. And when I thought about each of them more deeply, I realized each said something about me as a person.

So, for funzies, here's a rundown of some of the "black sheep" books on my shelf! 

1. Cape Refuge by Terri Blackstock

A faith-based murder mystery, Cape Refuge is already weird on principle. It’s presence on my bookshelf is even weirder.

Fun fact: My grandfather made that little cross!

I have always had a very complicated relationship with religion. Half of my family is very religious, the other half is not. Neither of my parents are particularly religious and so my sister and I were not raised going to church, except for on Christmas and Easter. It was never an issue when I was a kid. However, when we moved to Albany when I was 12, I was forced to confront how I personally related to religion. 

Albany has a little over 2,000 people and more than 10 churches. Going to church is just something you do, without question. Religion is part of everything that happens there and that’s just the way it is. Having not been raised religious, moving somewhere with that culture wasn't always easy, but I made it work. 

Larissa, my best friend when I was a teen, is a devoutly religious person, kind-hearted and wonderful. A lot of things she likes and believes, I don’t agree with it. A lot of things I like and believe, she doesn't agree with. We found one of our first real compromises with the Cape Refuge series. 

Cape Refuge — and its sequels, Southern Storm (which I also own), Rivers Edge and Breakers Reef — are unabashedly faith-based books. They are also unabashedly murder mysteries. The murders are still some of the most creative ones I’ve ever read or seen, but the first people murdered also run a beachfront ministry. It’s half-Larissa, half-Britny. It stands as a weird symbol of our unlikely and endearing friendship and for that reason, it will never leave my shelf.

2. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America by Joshua Gamson

Claims to Fame is one of the few actual books I had to buy for a college class. My Journalism classes didn’t require much reading and my Radio-Television-Film (RTF) classes favored course packets full of articles over textbooks.

Like the other three books on my shelf left over from my time at UT (pictured below), I didn’t actually read Claims to Fame. For someone who finished every book assigned to her for 12 years (except one: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair), I read a remarkably small amount of what was assigned to me in college. Even more remarkable considering how much I talked in class!


That’s what Claims to Fame’s presence on my shelf represents about me: my college experience.  It is a book that sounds at once excessively boring and extremely interesting and I took it for a class that sounds made up, “Critical Studies in Film & TV Stardom.” It was literally a class about what “celebrity” means and has meant throughout the history of Hollywood. It was a quintessential, “This is really what college is” class — and like with all of my RTF classes, I spent it practicing the real college experience: forming opinions on the spot and making other people listen to them.

I usually joke that my RTF degree is my “degree in watching things” and if you listen to me talk about stuff that I like, I know I give off an annoying "film school” vibe. A book about celebrity being on my bookshelf, even if I haven't read it, really only makes sense.

3. Positively Pooh: Timeless Wisdom from Pooh by A.A. Milne


I received Positively Pooh as a high school graduation gift. It is a compilation of inspirational quotes pulled from A.A. Milne’s classic tales of that willy, nilly, silly old bear, Winnie the Pooh. 

With chapter titles like “For your inner bear” and “For those bothersome days,” it is excessively cute and also 100% something that looks like it belongs on the shelf of a five-year-old…or their mother. Instead, it’s on mine.


But it’s also very me that it’s there. Aside from the actual Bible, this is the only remotely philosophical book on my shelf. As a lifelong Winnie the Pooh fan, it made total sense for someone to give this to me when I was setting off into adulthood (a.k.a. college, which we all know is not really adulthood). Somehow, despite its stark contrast as something light and fluffy, it works well on a shelf alongside books with names like Everybody Loves You When You’re Dead and Brat Pack America.

Bonus: Some of the reasons I’ve always loved Winnie the Pooh are its frequent use of bumblebees and that I’ve always felt spiritually connected to Eeyore. Throughout my life, I’ve cultivated collections of both Eeyore memorabilia and stuff featuring bees. Anything Winnie the Pooh-related bridges the two! 

4. The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rockstar by Nikki Sixx

My having a book written by Nikki Sixx is not at all surprising. I own over 20 books about music, written either by musicians themselves or music writers.

But this one is different. Rather than a typical memoir or biography, The Heroin Diaries is compiled from the notebooks Nikki kept for a year during the height of his addiction to heroin and other drugs. Coupled with the terrifying, heartbreaking entries are brutally honest present-day (now 10 years ago) accounts from those who knew Nikki at the time. Unlike typical rockstar books — which recount addiction and decadence in a hazy, “This was bad, but that’s how it is” kind-of way — this book focuses on the real horrors and darkness of feeling like you have to have something that is slowly killing you.


Much like with other books on my shelves, this one has also served as an unlikely source of inspiration. At different times in my life, knowing that Nikki struggled with these things behind the scenes of some of Mötley Crüe’s biggest moments — and more importantly, that he came out on the other side of it (though not without dying…twice) — has been a form of encouragement for me to keep going that I can’t even really explain.

Bonus facts: “Life is Beautiful,” from The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack, was the first song I ever had on my MySpace profile. I also wrote about Nikki as an inspiration for my college essay to help me get into UT’s College of Communications.

5. Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion by Jennifer Saginor

Being an outspoken feminist, Playground — a sordid tale of what it’s like to grow up when your dad is essentially the Playboy Mansion’s personal drug dealer — sticks out like a sore thumb on my bookshelf.

But here’s the thing: I’ve always had a preoccupation with media that, on the surface, seems aggressively antifeminist, but underneath could be seen as the opposite. Sleazy rock music? Incredibly sexist — and yet “groupie” is a complicated term, often used by the women themselves as something empowering. (Not to mention basically no rockstar in history would have lived longer than a week without the help of women.) Horror movies? They slash women with reckless abandon — and yet, the Final Girl is almost always who takes down the Big Bad. Playboy is another double-edged sword. Is it purely misogynistic and hurtful to women because it capitalizes on objectification? Or is it empowering because it gives women opportunities to own their sexuality? Is it a beacon of the power of free speech or a shining example of the patriarchy at work? You can judge for yourself — and I’ll continue struggling with how I feel about it.


Playground messes around with that balance and it made a huge impact on me as a teen. It was a peek into a glamorous and disgusting world I’d always wanted to know more about. It was the first time I read about complicated sexism issues from the point-of-view of a woman. It was the first book I read where the “protagonist” was not heterosexual. It was the first and only book I ever special ordered to my local bookstore (RIP Hastings) because I wanted to get my hands on it that badly.

It’s been many years since I read Playground and I’m sure to do so now, with my harder opinions on women’s rights, would be a much different experience. But that’s also why it’s one of the books I like to keep around. Sometimes the things you read when you were younger not only impact you then, but forever because they serve as a reminder that you may not be that person anymore.

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