How to Set up Your College Bookshelf to make yourself seem smarter and/or get girls

So you are a heterosexual man who just got to college. That’s understandable, I am one of those too. That means you more than likely want to meet girls. Also other people. And I too want to meet girls, and also other people. Both to interact with more people from a variety background, but you know, also to have romantic and preferably sexual relationships with them. The girls, that is, not the other people.

But it’s rough out there; people (including girls) have more expectations than ever, including now that you actually have to be an interesting person with hobbies and interests, which can be difficult if you don’t have those things or the ones you do have are boring or shameful. 

Fortunately, there is a solution to this conundrum. Put on the aesthetics of having hobbies and interests, and let people assume you are an interesting person as a result! And today I will go over one of the easiest ways people of our generation do this: through books. Most of Gen z doesn’t read books, and if we do we read them on an app or something, but physical books now have taken on a new role, as decorations to project the kind of person you are or want to be.

If you want to get girls or just generally seem like a smarter, more interesting person, you can buy and display books that help you achieve that goal. How much this matters for the romance is up for debate, because if the girl is already in your dorm room then you’ve already got most of the way there, but still, every little bit counts. 

If you just want to seem smarter to everyone, you need to have books that seem smart. This does not necessarily mean books that are difficult to read or are noted for being very good, this means books people associate with intelligence. Critically, they all need to be books normies have heard of. You want the Catcher in the Rye on your shelf, not Franny and Zooey. (This is not the main point of this example, but also shy away from books with stupid sounding names.)

If you know the title of the book from pop culture and can name what country and approximately what decade it is from, that’s a good sign. You also want to make sure the book is considered a classic for quality, not because it was children’s literature. Mary Poppins will not make you seem smarter. 

If you want to get girls, you will need to do something slightly different, but fortunately they overlap quite a bit. The main goal will be books by women authors, which because most books in the past were mostly written by men mostly means Jane Austen, but Ursula K Le Guin is also a good choice. Other solid selections include Little Women and at least one Agatha Christie novel. 

You might be tempted to draw explicit attention to your collection of books by female authors, but at this point that might seem desperate, you want to make it seem like reading these books is something you do regularly. Maybe say you are trying to read more books by women and ask for recommendations if that seems like something the girl knows a lot about, but that risks her figuring out how little you actually know about anything.

You should also read a Wikipedia summary of the books you have on your shelf and probably their first chapter. Make sure you vaguely know the plot and don’t just go off your impressions from the very beginning. (A word of advice from personal experience, Mr. Bingley is a bad guy.)

There is also something of an art to properly displaying the books to make sure people get the right impression. You want to make sure the books are prominent and their titles are legible, but you also want to make sure they feel like a real part of your space, not just a thin layer on top of your actual life.

A good way to do this is to put the books on a shelf or desk, and then put other, more functional things on top of them. College dorms are messy, and you authentically don’t have the space for purely decorative items, so don’t build a shrine around them, make them feel like a part of your space. Remember, you are trying to build it into your current image, not add it as a layer on top.

Also keep in mind that all of this is mostly pointless because if a girl is in your room at all, your odds are pretty good. But regardless, the books you have in your dorm are a part of your image, the kind of person you appear to be in the world, so thinking about what they are and what they say about you is very important.