What the Books in Your Dorm Say About You
The night before leaving for campus, I conducted a last-minute check of items I needed for my dorm room. I had posters to take away from the monotony of the aggressively white dorm walls, binders and notebooks for an organizational system I’ve yet to enact, and extra sheets for use once a semester. Wait, I asked myself, what about the shelf area behind the bed? Don’t I need something for that? And so, I stuffed a handful of books and knick-knacks in my backpack, then headed off for school the next morning. Only later on would I realize that my classmates had almost unanimously made the same decision, placing everything from literary classics to unopened coffee table books on their shelves. Their choices may have been last minute too, but, as Sigmund Freud would have you believe, the decisions you make the fastest reveal the most about you. Here’s a guide to what the books behind your bed say about you.
- Malcolm Gladwell Books (e.g. Blink, David & Goliath)
You’re majoring in Econ. FiveThirtyEight is bookmarked on your computer.
- Sonia Sotomayor’s My Beloved World
If you are a freshman, you did not read this book.
- Sports books (e.g. Bill Simmons’s The Book of Basketball, Andre Agassi’s Open)
You don’t play any varsity sports, but you are constantly talking about your pick-up games at the OMAC or organizing tennis plans.
- J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series
You posted on the Class Facebook group before you arrived at Brown.
- Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs
You go into advanced CompSci classes looking for your Wozniak.
- Peter Thiel’s Zero to One
You own a suit specifically for consulting meetings and are majoring in BEO.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or J.D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye
You’re an intellectual because you Sparknotes-ed these in high school.
- Your class textbooks
When you’re struggling to fall asleep, you turn to these before melatonin.
- George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series
You know more about what’s inside of these than what’s inside your textbooks.
- Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Big Sur
You’re going through a phase. Images via, via, via, via, via, via, via, via, via