Our new intern, Christopher Shedlock, recently created his Bookprint on You Are What You Read — and it’s full of favorites that you probably love yourself! Which titles would you choose for your own Bookprint? We know it’s hard, but it’s also fun — head over to You Are What You Read and explore what others have chosen, and then create your own! Thanks, Chris!

As a kid the Internet wasn’t nearly as popular as today, so reading books was always my first choice. I would get sucked into books, telling myself to read just one more chapter…and end up reading five or ten chapters and finishing the book. I could visualize the characters and environment that the authors had created for me with a few choice words. You Are What You Read is a great way for me to reflect on the books I’ve read; it serves as a sort of book binding wrapped around my life — a life binding.

I grew up reading the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, beginning with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (I was in fourth grade) and culminating with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (premiered the summer before 12th grade). In a way, I grew up with the main characters Harry, Ron and Hermione so the ending of the series was bittersweet. All seven books added great value to the story as a whole so it’s hard to choose one. But I would say Deathly Hallows was most memorable because it had so much content and tied up a lot of loose ends.

Louis Sachar’s Holes is a favorite, if only for the fact that there were 50 chapters and it was exciting to get to the next one to see what would happen to Stanley Yelnats and his fellow inmates at Camp Greenlake (great name choice by Sachar). Ever since reading the book I have thought that digging holes was a cruel and unusual punishment.

Reading Pete Rose’s autobiography My Prison Without Bars gave me an-opening look into the life of the former baseball great, forever barred from the sport and a place in the Hall of Fame as a result of gambling on baseball games. Rose played and managed before I was born, but the description of his career and personal obstacles showed me ‘Charlie Hustle’ from an angle that couldn’t be understood from a box score. It shows a vulnerable side of Rose, and reveals his remorse for his poor choices.

The most intense amount of detail I have ever seen on a written page can be found in The Lord of The Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien. The lineage of elves, dwarves, and hobbits (just to name a few) is more complete than most family trees, and the depictions of the various places and their landscapes made every paragraph important and enhanced my interest in Frodo’s quest to Mordor to destroy the One Ring.

One of the many children’s beginner books that I enjoyed, Put Me in the Zoo by Robert Lopshire, was just a fun story. The colored spots on Spot and his effort to fit in definitely stood out to me as a kid. It taught me that being different should be embraced, and that there is a place for everyone to fit in. I lost count of the times I read this book before going to sleep.

I’m sure some people will pick the same books that I’ve chosen, while others will have a completely different list. Either way, log on and personalize your own Bookprint, and find out which books serve as the binding for your life.