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You read a certain kind of book, and maybe it's the first thing you'd admit about yourself. Maybe it's the last. But there's a shelf somewhere, real or imagined, that looks exactly like you.
I've been thinking about that shelf a lot lately, because the readers I meet through this shop are all very different. One of you is quietly working your way through every South African novel you can find. One of you reads history the way other people watch television. Someone who picked up a thriller "just this once" three years ago has still not entirely forgiven themselves. Someone who has very strong feelings about literary fiction has also privately finished an entire romance novel on a recent long weekend and told no one.
Nobody reads the way they think they should. They read the way they actually want to. And there's something very honest about that.
I'll be upfront: I studied literature. Books are not something I feel neutral about, and I have started to build The Story Station with strong opinions already formed. And yes, that influences what ends up on our shelves. A shop is always, in some small way, a portrait of the person running it.
But a good bookshop isn't a portrait of just one person. It's a conversation. So I want to also know what's on your shelf. Not to judge it, but to make sure that what lands here is more of what you'd actually reach for and less of what you'd politely put back down. It's a quick checklist that will only take about 30 seconds.
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