In 2021, I realized my books deserved better than being scattered across random corners of my bedroom, stacked on tool racks meant for boxes and hardware. That’s when I bought two white IKEA Billy bookshelves and finally gave my collection a proper home. Now, as I prepare to move from Seattle to San Jose for a new job, I’m sorting through which books will accompany me and which will stay behind with my parents. It’s a bittersweet process as these shelves have become a map of who I am as a reader and, increasingly, as an editor.
My two Billy bookshelves sit side by side in my room, each with three shelves and a cabinet underneath. On top, I keep my stuffed animals (because even serious readers need plush friends). I organize my shelves by genre first, then by author, never by color or size, even if it’s aesthetically pleasing. Authors must belong together, and series must match. I also keep overflow books in the drawers of my IKEA bed frame.
The right bookshelf is dedicated entirely to manga, which was my first love when it comes to reading. The top shelf holds books about manga: the Citi Museum exhibition book about manga from Thames & Hudson, edited by Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere and Ryoko Matsuba; Paul Gravett’s Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics, and Mangasia: The Definitive Guide to Asian Comics.
The second and third shelves hold my yearly reading selections, almost entirely shoujo and josei manga, the genres that center women’s and girls’ interior lives in ways that first taught me what it meant to see yourself in a story. In the cabinet below are my larger collections, some seinen titles, art books, and anime-related materials, which are an overflow of a collection that continues to grow despite my best efforts at restraint.
The left bookshelf is where my non-manga reading lives. The top shelf is nonfiction, and it’s heavy with feminist theory and authors’ autobiographies and diaries. Here you’ll find Anaïs Nin’s diaries alongside Patricia Highsmith’s notebooks, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique next to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, within reach. These are the books that taught me how women write their own lives and claim authority over their stories.
The second shelf is fiction—literary fiction, to be specific. These are my yearly reads, the books I want close at hand: Colette’s complete Claudine novel, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment. Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, and Mary McCarthy’s The Group. One of my favorites is Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater, about an unnamed narrator, a mother with nameless children and wife to a successful screenwriter, who finds herself isolated within her own family. Mortimer is a largely forgotten writer, and I’m grateful NYRB Classics brought this 1960s novel back into print. It’s the kind of book I want to champion as an editor: women’s voices that deserve to be rediscovered.
The third shelf is divided between two seemingly distinct interests: fashion modeling books (including Jean Stein’s biography of Edie Sedgwick) and books on book design and covers. The latter includes Penguin by Design by Phil Baines, The Penguin Classics Book by Henry Eliot, The Design of Books by Adrian Wilson, and Peter Mendelsund’s The Look of the Book. As someone working in publishing, I’m fascinated by how books present themselves to the world, such as how a cover can be an invitation or a statement, and how design shapes our reading experience.
In the cabinet below are my art books, remnants from when I was an artist-in-training while attending art school. I’ve put art on hold for now, but I can’t part with these books. They’re evidence of who I was, and maybe who I’ll be again someday.
If I trace my reading life backward, I can see how I got here. In middle and high school, I loved The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, To Kill a Mockingbird, and East of Eden. These books showed me how stories could carry weight, teach empathy, and complicate easy answers. Those books then led me to feminist theory, to women’s autobiographies, to the kind of literary fiction that centers women’s interior lives. And all of it, eventually, led me to editing and wanting to help bring more of these voices into the world. I’m still building parts of my collection. I’m searching for more books about asexual voices and women writing from religious backgrounds. I have Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, Lucy Delap’s Feminisms, Kate Zambreno’s Heroines, and Susan Sontag’s essays. But there are gaps I’m working to fill, stories I’m still looking for!
Right now, my favorite books are The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, and Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. The book I recently purchased is The Art of Manga, edited by Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, a curated collection that examines manga as an art form. As I’m writing this, I’m looking to purchase The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins, a book on navigating a leadership role at a new company!
To close this tour off, these bookshelves won’t make the move to California, and they’ll stay behind in Seattle. But the books themselves, or at least most of them, will come with me. They’re the foundation of everything I want to do as an editor. They’re proof that the stories we keep close shape the stories we want to help tell.
Franchesca Nicole Lazaro is an emerging editor with a passion for developmental editing and book production. She previously worked with Brink Literary Project and currently works with Tulipwood Press. Her editorial interests center on amplifying perspectives from women, asexual voices, and religious backgrounds, particularly in literary fiction, memoir, and nonfiction that explores feminism, history, technology, and media studies. She is learning Japanese and maintains a blog on women’s comics and reading. Franchesca is relocating from Seattle, Washington, to San Jose, California.
