This week marks my tenth year of marriage to my favorite book person in the whole wide world.
Like most couples, one thing we bond over is talking about the books and movies we enjoy. We have, over time, combined both our physical and digital libraries and often read each other’s books. There are a few surefire crossover genres and authors we share: speculative horror, meticulously weird nonfiction, haunted houses, Shirley Jackson, John Darnielle, Joe Hill, Grady Hendrix, Stephen Graham Jones, and Peter Clines.
Of course, in life and in literature, we’ve sometimes found the boundaries of our tastes do not neatly overlap, but swell and curve wildly at angles, making the country of our library a strange shape indeed. There are books I find beautiful because their endings are unanswered questions, which he finds simply unresolved. There are books he feels show the poetry of our world, which I feel are just adverb-heavy. On vacation, he loves a huge book full of sorcery and galaxies, while I prefer a mid-length book full of missing murder weapons.
There have been some good surprises, too, times we’ve changed each other’s minds. Joe convinced me to invest the time in Dune, a book that felt so overwhelmingly long and of such grand “iykyk” mythos that I was intimidated to do so, but I loved it. I swayed him to check out Hidden Pictures basically sight unseen, with just a “You have to trust me, read this book!” I introduced him to Alma Katsu, and he introduced me to Keigo Higashino. We both read the Oklahoma City micro-history Boom Town and reference it constantly.
Sharing a library well is a lot like sharing a life. There are things you like more than your partner, and vice versa. There are things you both love, or are at least you are both willing to learn how to understand why the love is there. The best part, though? Having conversations with someone who respects your opinion. Joe doesn’t love all of my grisly true crime novels, but he loves listening to me describe key moments on car rides. I don’t love all of the epic trilogies he undertakes, but I love seeing how his eyes light up when he talks about how well-written his favorite passages are. Even the books we don’t read together, we end up sharing.
When you’re newly in love, or even a few years into it, it feels like you have to have so much in common to build something together. Extra true when you’re young, and you’re also learning how to be adults together. But you just have to trust that your joys will fill in the gaps. The joy you feel together, and the joy you feel as individuals. You have to trust that the joy will carry you through the stress of life.
You can build a bookshelf that holds lots of different kinds of stories. They all belong there together. It’s what makes it worth browsing.
Earl Grey and A Million Words 