The age of the digitization of books may be upon us, but plenty of us still dress our walls, our coffee tables and our bedsides with paper evidence of our curiosities, proclivities and obsessions. Some people spy in their host's medicine cabinets, but I head right for the bookshelves. So when Unpacking My Library offered the chance to mine Junot Diaz's shelves for clues to his genius, I leapt.

From handsome, custom-made libraries with rolling ladders, to sagging Ikea shelves

—Lucia Silva