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figmentera · 7 years

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so I’m spending spring break in the room usually belonging to @yumberry‘s brother and i know like two things about him, which are: 1. he’s super pretentious and 2. he looks kind of like a fellow student at our college

and also a passing mention that his bookshelf is super boring, which of course i had to investigate and let me tell you. i am astonished here. a non-exhaustive list of everything i found follows

a top shelf of literature straight out of a high school english class

to kill a mockingbird, great gatsby, christmas carol, great expectations, etc

not one but two copies of “the brothers karamozov” by dostoevsky

an actual individual copy of ‘waiting for godot’, not anthologized at all

it is so tiny and pointless i was unaware that individual copies existed

an excessive number of philosophy books, scattered throughout

nietzsche, hobbes, augustine, freud, probably a bunch more i would recognize if i knew more about philosophy

are these multiple books titled “the ___ reader” philosophy? who knows

not one but two copies of ‘plato’s republic’

a whole bunch of books with titles like “patterns of culture” “obedience to authority” “the human condition” “the theory of the leisure class”

a bunch of books with ‘psychology’ in their title

a collection of classical music

all pretty good classical music, i have to say

i’ve played a good number of these pieces in orchestra

a bunch of old volumes of ‘the story of civilization’

probably the entire collection of calvin and hobbes comics, sticking out like a sore thumb

i have genuinely no idea whether this is the bookshelf of someone who never read a word except when assigned it in a excessively intellectual college class or of someone who just reads the kind of book for fun, all the time. some of the books are obviously grouped with others on the same subject and probably came from a class of some sort. others are scattered with no apparent order. i’m reminded of my grandfather’s library except, impossibly, even more intentionally intellectual.

the rest of the room has no character at all. it’s the quintessential Generic Guest Room. the closet’s full of the kind of clothes my dad wears to work when he has to look extra formal for something. in the corner there’s an incomprehensible device made of part of a music stand and a flat thing with a mysterious cord on it. on the desk there’s a sealed tube of chapstick from ‘[town name] dental associates’ beside a stack of maps and notebooks. there’s a pair of glasses on top of the notebook and a cello case in the closet. also a painting of a dead bird propped up on top of the dresser. that is literally everything in the room that’s not either on the bookcase or an obviously functional device like a lamp or clock.

like, this room looks like it belongs to someone who would be like ‘yes the farther back in time you send me the happier i’d be’ until you actually did it and then they’d immediately realize they have literally no means of coping with any real existence.

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