What the books in our Zoom backgrounds really say about us
To cast your eye across someone’s bookshelves is to understand them. Alan Bennett certainly thought so: 'A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.' Journeying across my own bookshelves I see the spines of my life, not curated or color-coded, but jammed in messily and haphazardly, out of chronological order, just like experience itself. Brideshead Revisited next to Healing the Child Within. Babar next to The Fallen of the Somme. Since I got married, my husband’s books now number among my own; political biographies next to novels, a literary record of our lives before we met, pages and pages of the past.
