What It Means to Be a Shelfless Reader

I read over 100 books a year. I don't own a bookshelf. And I've never felt like I was missing anything, until recently.

People always react the same way when they find out how much I read.

First, the disbelief. A hundred books? In a year? Like I just told them I run ultramarathons or speak six languages. Then the follow-up question, always some version of: Where do you keep them all?

And when I say I don’t, when I tell them I read on a Kindle and listen to audiobooks and maybe own five physical books total, that’s when it gets interesting. Some people are genuinely fascinated. They want to know the logistics, like I’ve unlocked some kind of reading cheat code. Others look at me like I just told them I don’t believe in bookshelves, which, honestly, I kind of don’t.

And a few of them, the ones who equate being a reader with having a wall of spines to prove it, give me this look like maybe I’m not a real reader at all.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been a library girl my whole life. Longer than I even realized.

When I was in grade school, from about fourth grade through eighth, we lived out in the country. My mom worked a regular 8-to-5 job, and she was our only ride to and from the small town where we went to school. So on the days when there were no after-school clubs or sports, my sister and I walked to the library. We’d sit there for three hours every afternoon in those hard, squeaky chairs, doing our homework first and then reading or drawing in our notebooks until Mom got off work. I’m pretty sure the librarian wasn’t thrilled about two kids camping out in her space every day. And I’m pretty sure some people had opinions about the kind of mom who makes the public library her after-school plan. But the books didn’t care who we were or why we were there. They just let us in. Once a week we’d go to the ice cream shop across the street instead, and that felt like the biggest treat in the world.

The funny thing is, being forced to spend so much time in a library might be what made me stop reading. Once I didn’t have to be there anymore, I didn’t want to. I resented it. Reading felt like something I’d been made to do because we didn’t have other options, not something I chose. So I barely read for pleasure through high school, college, or most of my adult life.

It took me until my forties to come back to it. And when I did, everything was different. Because the way we read had completely changed while I wasn’t paying attention.

I still never bought physical books unless they were for my kids. But now I didn’t have to. When Kindles came out, I was sold immediately. One device instead of a stack of heavy paperbacks, and I traveled constantly for work, so it was a no-brainer.

Then came audiobooks, and everything changed.

I’d gotten hooked on podcasts first (Crime Junkie was the one that did it but shout out to my daily favorite T.B.O.Y as well) because I was doing a lot of driving at the time. Work trips, and back and forth to see my daughter who’d just started college in another state. At some point I stumbled from podcasts into audiobooks and never looked back. But it took me a while to figure out that narrator matters enormously. Some narrators bored me to death. A lot of times it was older men’s voices that just put me to sleep. I was starting to wonder if maybe audiobooks weren’t for me.

And then I found Julia Whelan.

I think it was a Taylor Jenkins Reid book. And my life changed. I’m not being dramatic. There is something about this woman’s voice, the way she delivers emotion, the way she becomes the characters. It ruins you for other narrators. I devoured every TJR book after that, mostly on audio. Then Kristin Hannah. Then I basically worked my way through anything Julia Whelan has ever narrated. Educated. The Great Believers. One incredible book after another. I still can’t figure out if she only chooses to narrate outstanding books, or if the books become outstanding because she’s the one reading them. Either way, if Julia Whelan’s name is on it, I’m listening.

Now audiobooks are woven into every part of my day. I listen while I cook, while I clean, while I sew, while I paint, while I walk, while I drive. Sometimes alone, sometimes with my son or husband next to me scrolling their phones. I’ll squeeze in ten minutes while I’m making lunch or a cup of tea. Any moment I can press play, I do. I’m usually reading one book on Kindle while listening to a completely different one on audio, which means I’m finishing roughly two books a week, more if I’m on vacation. Books are in every crack of my day in a way they never could be if they only lived on a shelf.

And then there’s the part nobody talks about: money. The bulk of what I read comes from the library and Libby. It’s free. For the amount of books I go through, I never want to feel like I should cut back, like reading is a spending habit I need to assess or a hobby that’s gotten too expensive. That would break my heart. I’m someone who’s actively trying to be more intentional about where my money goes right now, and I am so grateful that books aren’t something I have to put on that list. We are incredibly fortunate that libraries exist and that this thing we love is free to access. I don’t take that for granted.

So no, I don’t need to buy books. And I don’t need to display them, either.

I know what those shelves look like. I see the photos on Pinterest, the perfectly styled reading nooks, the floor-to-ceiling libraries with the rolling ladders. They’re beautiful. I genuinely love looking at them. But clutter stresses me out. I went from a house of five to three, and soon it’ll be two, and every time the house gets a little quieter and a little more streamlined, I breathe a little easier. Having stacks of physical books in my space just isn't who I am. And I’ve stopped apologizing for that.

Though I’ll admit, lately I’ve been thinking about making one exception. A small shelf. Not a library, not a wall, just a single shelf of my all-time favorites. My six-star reads. The ones I want to be able to hand to my husband (who is finally getting into reading), or press into a friend’s hands and say you have to read this. Because sometimes telling someone about a book isn’t enough. Sometimes you need to physically give it to them.

And I don’t want pristine copies. I don’t want hardcovers with perfect dust jackets or collector’s editions still in shrink wrap. I want the ones that look loved, dog-eared, creased spines, pages soft from being turned. I want to find them for a quarter at a garage sale or at Goodwill and know they were read and loved by someone before me, and will be again after. That’s the kind of shelf I want. A shelf of books that have been lived in.

But that shelf would be tiny. And everything else lives in the cloud, on my Kindle, in my headphones. And that’s more than enough.

What reading gave me that school never did

Here’s the thing I wish someone had told me twenty years ago: you don’t have to read nonfiction to learn something.

Everyone says the older you get, the wiser you get. And maybe that’s true. But I’m almost fifty and I’m genuinely disappointed in myself for not taking reading seriously until my forties. Think about how much more I’d know, how much more life I’d have processed, if I’d started sooner. The problem was, I always assumed the books you learned from were the boring ones. Biographies, nonfiction, textbooks. The kind of reading that felt like homework. I never liked any of it. So I just… didn’t read much.

Nobody told me about historical fiction.

I know more about World War II now than I ever learned in high school and college combined. Mythology, a subject I literally dozed off to in class, I can’t get enough of now, as long as it comes through a retelling or a novel instead of a textbook. The Civil War, women’s history, entire eras I barely paid attention to in school. I’ve learned more from fiction in the last few years than from decades of formal education.

I’m traveling to Ireland later this year, and I’ve been working through a list of books set in Ireland or by Irish authors. The first one I finished, What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon, was a mix of historical fiction, time travel, and romance, and I learned so much about Irish history, like, an embarrassing amount that I probably should have already known. But I didn’t, and now I do, because a novel made me care enough to pay attention.

And then there are the books that don’t teach you anything except how to breathe for a minute. I just finished The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. I didn’t walk away with a history lesson, but every time I stepped into that book, I stepped out of the daily stress of running a business, being a mom, being a wife. I got to live in someone else’s world for a while. And sometimes that’s exactly what reading is for. Not learning, just escaping. Just getting to exist somewhere else for a few hours.

Books can crack you open or let you disappear. Sometimes both at the same time. And either way, you come back a little different than you left.

The streak I’ll never break

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I went from casual reader to someone who reads over a hundred books a year. There wasn’t a single switch that flipped. I remember reading the Twilight series like everyone else, and then a few years later I needed something to help me sleep better, and reading before bed seemed to work, and then one day I realized I’d read every single day for months. And then a year. And then four years.

I haven’t missed a day of reading in almost five years.

My Kindle used to track the streak for me, this unbroken chain of daily reading that I was irrationally proud of. I lost the official streak count when I started adding physical library books to the mix because I was tired of waiting months for popular new releases on Libby. But I know, in my head and in my heart, that I haven’t missed a day. Some nights during holidays and vacations, I’ve crawled into bed with my book by 11:30 just so I could read before midnight, and yes, sometimes that drives my kids crazy. Mom, just stay up with us. But just like working out and eating well, reading every day is a habit I’m proud of. It’s the one I never want to break.

I started The Shelfless Reader because I needed somewhere to put all the things books make me feel.

That probably sounds dramatic. But if you’re the kind of person who finishes a book and immediately needs to talk to someone about it, who lies awake replaying a scene, or Googles the real history behind a novel at midnight, or cries in the car because an audiobook narrator delivered a line that broke something open in you, then you know exactly what I mean.

Here’s something you should know about me: I’m an introvert. I wasn’t always, or at least I didn’t think I was. I built a successful business from scratch and spent years in rooms full of people, doing dinners and sales and all the schmoozing that comes with growing something. Then Covid hit, the travel slowed, the noise quieted down, and I realized that the quiet version of me wasn’t a pandemic side effect. It was who I’d been all along. I’m a woman of few words most of the time, and I’ve made my peace with that.

But books break that wide open. My closest friends, the ones who know I’m usually the quiet one, look at me like I’ve lost my mind when I start going off about a book I just finished. They can’t shut me up. It’s just a book. But it’s the one thing I will always choose to be loud about. The one subject where I can’t keep my thoughts protected and tucked away. I need to talk about it.

And here’s the part I’m still figuring out how to say: somewhere along the way, whether it’s age, or life, or just the weight of carrying everyone else’s feelings for long enough, the real world started to feel a little muted. Not numb, just… quieter. Like the volume got turned down on things I used to feel at full blast. But books never got quieter. If anything, they got louder. A really good book can rip me open in a way that real life rarely does anymore. It can make me feel joy and grief and longing at a volume I’d forgotten I was capable of. I think that’s why I need them so much.

I don’t know how to explain the thing that happens when words on a page, or words in your earbuds, written by a person who has never met you and doesn’t know your heart or your mind, somehow crack you open anyway. How does someone who’s never met me write the exact thing I didn’t know I needed to hear? How do fictional people make me feel more understood than real conversations sometimes do? It’s wild. And I needed a place to write about that.

I’m not a literary critic. I didn’t study writing or literature. I’m never going to break down a novel’s prose style or tell you whether the world-building holds up under scrutiny. That’s not what I do. What I do is tell you how a book made me feel, what it stirred up, what questions it left behind, what rabbit holes it sent me down, what I couldn’t stop thinking about for days afterward.

I only write about books I’d rate four or five stars. If a book didn’t move me, I’m not going to waste your time or mine writing about it. But when one does, when a story cracks something open or sends me spiraling into questions I hadn’t thought to ask, that’s when I write.

Here’s what you’ll find in this space:

Things I Googled While Reading — my favorite thing to write. When a book sends me down a rabbit hole (the real history behind the fiction, the science I had to look up, the obscure fact that changed how I understood the whole story), I write about it. It’s curious, personal, and hopefully the kind of thing that makes you immediately add the book to your list.

Essays that start with a book and go somewhere bigger — the kind of writing where a dystopian novel makes me think about what I’d actually do if I could only say a hundred words a day, or a historical fiction set in Ireland sends me spiraling into why we romanticize eras we’d never actually want to live in. Books are the lens. Life is the subject.

Honest recommendations — emotional, feeling-centered takes on what I’m reading, who should read it, and why it mattered. I write the kind of review I’d give a friend over coffee. Not a grade, but a conversation.

Reading guides — if you loved this book, read these next. Which narrators will change your audiobook experience. The best order to read an author’s backlist. Books grouped by vibe, by mood, by the feeling you’re chasing. The kind of curation that saves you from the endless scroll of “what should I read next?”

If you read fifty books a year or a hundred, on a Kindle, through your headphones, from the library, from a bookstore, or from a stack on your nightstand that’s starting to lean. If you care more about how a book makes you feel than whether it was “literary enough.” If you’ve ever tried to explain to someone why a novel wrecked you and gotten a blank stare in return.

You’re in the right place. It doesn’t matter how you read. It matters that you feel it.

Welcome to The Shelfless Reader.

I’m just getting started, and I’d love for you to be here from the beginning. Subscribe and I’ll send every new essay straight to your inbox.

- Charlie