I grew up in a library. The first floor is the reference section: dozens of encyclopedias, the complete Harvard Classics, and the 20 volumes comprising the Oxford English Dictionary line the walls of my living room; two bookcases with titles ranging from Consider the Fork to The Oxford Companion to Food are housed by the dining room; and cookbooks chock-full of heavily annotated recipes are strewn across the kitchen. The second floor is fiction: eight more poorly alphabetized bookshelves chronicling the evolution of literature from Homer to Hemingway stand in the playroom, and the study holds the memories of my father’s time as a law student and math teacher. My siblings’ and parents’ bedrooms each house an additional hundred-odd books, a mix of sentimental stories from our childhood and works we hope to read but probably never will.
The chaotic sea of books that engulfs every corner of my home is not just a tripping hazard—it’s a testament to the role they played in my childhood. It was impossible to avoid reading, constantly surrounded by an abundance of books. Everywhere I turned, I was met with a new story. Their constant presence brought a gravitational pull that seemed to pull me in without me even knowing it. I was always reading.
I treated books like scattered toys, picking up an errant novel and reading 30 pages whenever I was bored. Taste-testing books became my favorite pastime. As I became a stronger reader, 30 pages became 300, and I pored over anything I could get my hands on. I vividly remember delving into To Kill a Mockingbird in third grade. It wasn’t a deliberate choice or a calculated decision; it was a spontaneous act fueled by curiosity. I picked it up, not fully grasping the weight of the narrative or the cultural significance it held. Still, I devoured its pages, captivated by the story before me. It was a testament to the whimsy of my reading, where the allure of a book often lay in the unplanned and unexpected.
A few years ago, my family tried to sort through our books, discarding and donating just enough that we wouldn’t trip over stray novels on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I found that most books fell into three categories: books that we had already read, books that we would read in the near future, and books that were destined for a life nestled on our shelves. Most of the books in the first and last categories would be given away.
This minimalistic filtering method inevitably leads to mistakes. There’s no real way of knowing what you’ll want to read in a week, much less months or years down the road. Our tastes are constantly evolving; many of the books we plan to read, we quickly forget; many of the books we choose to part with make their way back into our lives. Books have a peculiar way of finding us at the right time, and in the process of selecting a subset to stock the shelves, we deny ourselves the chance of letting this happen.
Minimalists like Marie Kondo advocate for keeping only items that spark joy. Despite her fame, her advice does not apply to books. Take my father’s book collection. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is a horrifying story about a 14-year-old who joins a group of mercenaries hunting Native Americans. Reading it certainly does not bring my father joy, and yet it stands on his bedside bookshelf. He even made room for The Road, another McCarthy novel that tells the post-apocalyptic story of a father and son traversing an obliterated world. The tale is so dark that my father has never finished it, despite starting it many times. He loves both of these books and will likely never part with either of them. Kondo’s own website reads, “Through the process of selecting only those things that inspire joy, you can identify precisely what you love – and what you need.” In this instruction, Kondo fails to recognize the value of books and other belongings past their ability to engender joy.
This summer, my co-archivist Luke Wagner ’26 and I swapped titles back and forth, sharing stories like As Breath Becomes Air and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow with each other. In these exchanges, I found the essence of my family library—a shared space where stories intertwine, creating connections that transcend pages. The books that line my walls carry bits and pieces of my family members in them, just as the books Luke recommended to me represent parts of him.
Had my family embraced a minimalist approach, adhering to Kondo’s principle of keeping only what sparked joy, these literary conversations, born out of a vast and varied collection, never would have taken place. The stacks that stand tall on coffee tables and nightstands, the survivors of my family’s unsuccessful attempts to declutter our bookshelves, are not just a physical testament to our rejection of the simplistic ideology called minimalism. They represent a lifeline to a passion for reading that I carry with me today.
As I walk through the halls of my home surrounded by the literary haven that is my family’s library, I am grateful for the clutter, the chaos, and the seemingly endless stacks. For, in each book, there’s not just a story waiting to be read; there’s a piece of my own narrative, a chapter in the ongoing saga of a reader shaped by the whimsy and wonder of a library that refused to conform, a library that allowed stories to spill over their edges and into the very core of my being. I do not know where I will live, nor what my home will look like, but I can assure you of one thing: I will always live in a library.
Jonah Karafiol ’26 writes Forum for The Independent. Forward all book recommendations to jonahkarafiol@college.harvard.edu.