Please explain to me what "normal" is

[rynling]

Something that's struck me during this playthrough of Breath of the Wild is that almost every house has books, even if it's just a few. All the farmers in Hateno have books. Even the Bolson prefab houses have small bookcases. The gambler in Lurelin Village? Apparently uses his wealth to buy books. People who have a lot of books are proud about it, which you know because they brag to Link.

Meanwhile, not a single one of the houses I looked at in real life during the past two weeks had a single book.

Now that I think about it, none of my mother's family's houses has any books either. (With the exception of the house my dad moved into when I was in high school, which had a dozen boxes filled with paperback copies of Clan of the Cave Bear in a closet. This was and will forever remain a mystery.)

I haven't actually been in that many people's houses in America, so I don't know. Is it normal not to have any books?

Comments

[lassarina]

I grew up in a house with multiple wall-to-wall bookshelves; one of my complaints about my open-design house now is that there aren't enough walls to put bookshelves on! All of my friends have many bookshelves filled with books, but then again, we're all huge nerds who love to read.

That said, I do wonder how many people only have a Kindle/Kobo/Nook now (I have a sliding scale for which books get purchased in dead-tree and which get purchased in ebook; I got the Kindle after I moved into my last apartment, when I stood in the living room surrounded by book boxes stacked up to my waist and went "this is completely unsustainable.")

So I don't know. Everyone I know is a voracious reader, so it would be very strange to walk into their homes and see no books. But then again my friend circle is "people I went to Northwestern with," which is a skewed sample.

[rynling]

> I grew up in a house with multiple wall-to-wall bookshelves

That sounds so nice!! It's my honest-to-god dream to live in a house like this.

> one of my complaints about my open-design house now is that there aren't enough walls to put bookshelves on

I hear you. That's actually one of the things I love about townhouses, that you have at least one side of the house that has no windows. In my open-plan apartment in DC, I had to put bookcases back-to-back to make interior walls.

> I got the Kindle after I moved into my last apartment, when I stood in the living room surrounded by book boxes stacked up to my waist and went "this is completely unsustainable."

This is such a beautiful and perfect image. Thank you for this lmao.

[lassarina]

Haha, happy to be of service!

I've thought about doing bookshelves to make interior walls, but I haven't got very many good places to do that. Clearly I just need to start taking over the guest rooms. Sorry, guests, you shall be faced with a bookshelf full of whatever eclectic nonsense I come up with.

My book collection has outgrown my available bookshelves again, so I probably need to cull it. Sigh.

[feast_of_regrets]

My grandparents and parents all had at least a small bookshelf. (My Grammy was the other big reader in the family and she had books on shelves and in sacks and stacked everywhere, pretty much like I have now). My brother I don't think has shelves but they have kids' books scattered about. My best friend's parents are readers and they have a few shelves through the house, and my friend herself has a few shelves even though she's not much of a reader.