There is one hard truth about people and that is this: people like to snoop.

I think there’s nothing more than people like to do than hear about other people. It doesn’t have to be in a malicious way. We’re just interested in what’s going on in people’s lives- and in their medicine cabinets.

Some people get their fix watching reality shows, or just being a plain gossip, but I get my jollies in a slightly different way.

I snoop bookshelves.

Part of my excuse is that it’s very hard for me to see words anywhere without automatically reading them, which is why you’ll catch me reading over your shoulder on the bus or on the subway. I don’t mean to pry. I just can’t be near a written word without reading it.

You may have guessed this already, but here’s my official confession anyways: I am a literary snoop.

Case in point: two of my good friends moved a while back and in a gesture of good-friendliness I volunteered to help out. By the time I had gotten off of work they had moved all the furniture and boxes into the rooms and now all that was left to do was unpack.

I stood with my friend in his room, surveying the garbage bags full of clothes, the mattress still leaning against the wall and the general clutter that comes with moving all of your belongings willy-nilly into one room. We looked at all the boxes. We looked at each other. I asked, “Do you want to unpack your books?”

And we did- all twenty-three boxes of them. My friend is also a self-confessed bibliophile and as it turns out, has a collection that’s much bigger and much more varied than my own. You can imagine the fun that we had that afternoon, the kind of sick pleasure we took from realizing that all of his books would have to be double-stacked on his shelves. Even though we were both excited about decorating his new apartment and had endlessly discussed paint colors and the like up until moving day, we just couldn’t stop the conversations that would ensue every time we commented on the books we were pulling out of the boxes, one at a time.

Inevitably, I walked away with a big stack of books that I had borrowed, which is usually the end result of this particular friend and I spending an afternoon together. It is the one benefit to being a literary snoop- I am constantly adding to the growing pile of books stacked next to my bed to read.

And believe me, that stack is ever growing.

You’ve heard about my dirty secret- maybe you have the same one? Feel free to browse my virtual bookshelves to see what I’ve read and what I’m looking forward to reading on my Goodreads profile. My username is- you guessed it- B. More reading inspiration, click here, or check out my Pinterest Book Board.