Due to our utter lack of cabinets, most of them have linens, food, board games, and camping equipment on them. However, I doubt that's what Julia wanted.
The big bookshelf in the dining room:
Featuring photo albums (and my book on gardening-in-apartments):
When a chemist marries a biologist:
and this is after we sold the duplicates, too.
Reference in several languages, plus Howard McGee (thank you again Belle, we still look things up in it at at least once a week!):
The product of a college bookstore which often ended up with dead (white male) professors' libraries, left them on shelves for years, and finally moved them to the 25-cent cart, some of which books I have even read:
The product of a French Lit degree and the fact that French books are much, much cheaper in France (who knew?), plus miscellaneous books left with me over the years and a partial set of Worst-Case Scenario postcards (I used to send my little sister one every week, but ran out of funny ones; the rest are kind of depressing, like 'What To Do If Your Car Crashes):
The product of many people's erroneous assumption that because I cook, I want more cookbooks, bless their hearts. My family gave me Moosewood and the Farm Country ones; I bought both Julia Childs and the French pastry one; the Asian one was my gift to Dr. S, and the rest accumulated:
There is a heap of books next to the bed: Dr. S's Bible, a couple Robin McKinleys, a few stray Economists. I have spared you this unsightly scene.
Where the well-thumbed fiction lives: under the coffee table. (Hey, it's a shelf.) These are the books I read over and over and over and over again. I have a weakness for 'cozy' mysteries, but really don't like violent ones. LMB: my hero. (The rest of her books are to the left except those latest ones with the knife, which I don't like. Robin McKinley, LeGuin: also my heroes. I read a lot of science fiction, but usually don't love it enough to buy, so...
Most books circulate through here, the final resting place for library books on their way out the door. The people at the library know my name. The Snooty U library delivers me books to the library that is downstairs from my lab. I probably borrow several hundred books a year. And I love Laurie King's mysteries, although the non-Mary Russell ones keep me up at night.
Ta-da!
