Last September, I finally bought a new bookcase: white, the kind you buy from IKEA and assemble in twenty minutes. The promise of organization was a refreshing change to the lugging of books across continents every time I traveled to Bristol and back.
For years before university, across childhood and through my teenage years, I had organized my books on the wooden shelves above my desk. I had started with one shelf, stacking some of The Magic Tree House books, lone copies from A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Matilda. There were other books too, like Tell Me When? whose content I still vividly remember, especially the page about the invention of paper, and another book about space that my brother had gifted me.
There were other books, somewhere, split between my desk and a smaller unit my family used for our printer. It wasn’t until I was a teen that I began to become more curatorial.
I vividly remember reading The Book Thief for a book report assignment in eighth grade. Death as a narrator was unusual, interesting, but also a little disconcerting. I read Little Women for the first time the same year and became obsessed with it. I’ve gone back to it time and time again since then, as a girl, then as a young woman, the book transforming as my perspective did.
With the literary world’s dystopian and sci-fi phase, my shelves also housed books like Divergent, Delirium, Replica, and Carve the Mark. Before that was the Nicholas Sparks phase (which I blame on my sister—I first borrowed The Last Song from her) with books like Safe Haven, Two by Two, and At First Sight.
Occasionally, a nonfiction or literary fiction book, like The Art of War for Women or Men Without Women, would nestle itself among the rest.
What I became certain of, however, was that throughout my life, the right books seemed to find me at the right time. Or maybe I sought them out subconsciously. It was hard to say, but just like I had read Divergent at a time when I needed a push of courage, my first dive into fantasy books in years was during the initial months of Covid. Unable to leave the house and terrified the virus would steal my first year of university as it had my high school graduation, I found the perfect escape in fantasy worlds.
My shelf welcomed Six of Crows, The Folk of the Air, Shatter Me, Sorcery of Thorns, An Enchantment of Ravens, and many more. I was on the brink of starting my degree at a really chaotic time, and my reading, though mostly an escape and a way of improving my writing, later proved useful to my understanding of YA fiction and my interest in the wider age-genre from a publishing perspective.
Now that I have more shelf-space, I’ve been adding more books to both my collection and my TBR list. Among my recent reads are Babel and Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (my new all-time favorite—brilliant in every way!), and several short stories from The Best American Short Stories 2021 (special shoutout to “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog” by David Means).
Up next on the TBR list are Hamnet, The Poppy War, We Hunt the Flame, The Davenports (which I bought along with The Marriage Portrait and several other books at the latest Jeddah Book Fair), The Da Vinci Code, and An Ember in the Ashes.
So, if you need me, you’ll probably find me lost between the pages!
Tassneem Abdulwahab (she/her) is an aspiring writer and editor with a BA (Hons) Creative and Professional Writing from UWE Bristol. With a strong interest in culture, history, and psychology and a love for fiction, her writing often draws on one or more of these threads to tell character-centric stories. Trained in oil painting, she recently exhibited and sold two portrait paintings in February 2025. In her free time, you can find her buying more books (no, seriously—she owns three editions of Little Women), snapping pictures of the little details, or sitting at her easel!
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