Books have always led this sort of double life: as vehicles for story on one side, and on the other, as props in a performance. The book you read under the covers in the privacy of your home is not necessarily the one you read in a bar, or on the subway, or during the photo shoot explicitly designed to subvert your image as the stereotypical dumb blonde. With books—as with so many things—who we are and what we want live in tension with how we wish to be seen. 

Last century’s moral binary between people who read and people who don’t (see: John Waters’ oft-quoted edict about not having sex with anyone who doesn’t have books in their house), has morphed into the more specific notion that the bookshelf is a window to the soul. 

What can we glean from the library glimpsed over your shoulder on Zoom? What books on a shelf or bedside table signal not just bad taste but bad character?