A few months ago, a couple in our Florida neighborhood invited my wife and me over to tour their newly re-decorated home.

Wine glasses in hand, we wandered from room to room as our hosts showed us the latest colors and fabrics, new lighting and furniture, flooring, wallpaper, cabinets, counters and window treatments.

The house was beautiful. Yet something was missing.

As we were leaving it finally dawned on me. There weren’t any books!

Books do more than decorate a room. They make it inviting. They give it personality. A home without books is like a body without a soul.

Books are friends, comforters and counselors, repositories of wisdom, sources of ideas. A good collection of books is a university in itself.

If I visit a home without them, I feel cheated.

Why? Because I can spend three minutes looking at your bookshelves and learn more about your taste and interests than I could in a half-dozen leisurely dinner conversations.

Your personal library (ahem) speaks volumes.

At a glance, your guests know whether your interests run toward classics or bestsellers, history or politics (or both), literary fiction or travel, fly-fishing or golf, art or engine repair.

A wildly eclectic mish-mash says a lot about you, too.

And forget the secret ballot. Your political views are right there in plain view. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve had the chance to read your Chomsky or Hayek selections yet. The mere intent is evidence enough.

Your core beliefs also sit on your bookshelf. The family Bible says one thing, the entire “Left Behind” series another. Titles by C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton reflect a subtle theology; Karen Armstrong or the Dalai Lama, a cosmopolitan view.

Of course, not everyone who loves books has them on display. Some, for instance, grow tired of carting them from one address to the next. This leads to tough choices. (Robert B. Parker can be safely jettisoned. P.G. Wodehouse? Never.)

Others have given up reading for cable. Fortunately, I grew up in an era when watching television wasn’t terribly appealing. Transmission and reception were equally bad.

And while my childhood home was thick with books, today my parents use the library almost exclusively. The few books they buy are either immediately passed on (if they’re good) or unceremoniously tossed out (if they’re not).

Then there is my friend Jimmy who insists he’s done with paper and cloth. He’s hooked on his new Kindle.

It’s a neat gadget, but there’s something about the tactile experience of handling a book that I’ll never give up. Who really wants to curl up in front of the fire with an electronic reader?

We all know the value and pleasures of reading. But a personal library affords endless opportunities for something equally important: rereading.

My uncle, Edgar F. Puryear, Jr., is a military historian who has spent a lifetime studying character and leadership. After interviewing more than 150 four- and five-star generals over a 40-year period, he concludes that the greatest leaders, without exception, were avid readers.

In his new book, Marine Corps Generalship - an excellent read itself - he quotes a radio broadcast by Yale University professor William Lyon Phelps in 1933:

“The habit of reading is one of the greatest resources of mankind; and we enjoy reading books that belong to us much more than if they are borrowed. A borrowed book is like a guest in the house; it must be treated with punctiliousness, with a certain considerate formality. You must see that it sustains no damage; it must not suffer while under your roof. You cannot leave it carelessly, you cannot mark it, you cannot turn down the pages, and you cannot use it familiarly. And then, someday, although this is seldom done, you really ought to return it.

But your own books belong to you; you treat them with that familiar intimacy that annihilates formality. Books are for use, not for show; you should own no book that you are afraid to mark up or afraid to place on the table, wide open and face down. A good reason for marking favorite passages in books is that this practice enables you to remember easily the significant sayings, to refer to them quickly, and then in later years, it is like visiting a forest where you once blazed a trail. You have the pleasure of going over the old ground, and recalling both the intellectual scenery and your old earlier self.

Everyone should begin collecting a private library in youth; the instinct of private property, which is fundamental in human beings, can here be cultivated with every advantage and no evils. One should have one’s own bookshelves, which should not have doors, glass windows, or keys; they should be free and accessible to the hand as well as the eye. The best of mural decorations is books; they are more varied in color and appearance than any wallpaper, they are more attractive in design, and they have the prime advantage of being separate personalities, so that if you sit alone in the room in the firelight, you are surrounded with intimate friends. The knowledge that they are in plain view is both stimulating and refreshing. You do not have to read them all.

There are, of course, no friends like living, breathing, corporeal men and women; my devotion to reading has never made me a recluse. How could it?  Books are of the people, by the people, for the people. Literature is the immortal part of history; it is the best and most enduring part of personality. But books friends have this advantage over living friends, you can enjoy the most truly aristocratic society in the world whenever you want it. The great dead are beyond our physical reach, and the great living are usually almost as inaccessible: as for our personal friends and acquaintances, we cannot always see them. Perchance they are asleep, or away on a journey. But in a private library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy. And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They wrote for you.  They “laid themselves out,” they did their ultimate best to entertain you, to make a favorable impression. You are as necessary to them as an audience to an actor, only instead of seeing them masked, you look into their inmost heart of hearts.”

Today, we swim in a sea of media information. We are surrounded by data, by trivia. Where is wisdom to be found?

In books.

Author Seth Lerer observes, “We live not with books themselves but with our memories of books: the bits and pieces we recall, the pages we dogear; the lines we highlight.”

Reading parallels life. It readies us for it. There simply isn’t time to learn everything the hard way.

Whether you’re seeking the practical, the spiritual, the theoretical or the aesthetic, great books - with their mysterious enticements and timeless wisdom - are always there.

And, just occasionally, so are curious guests.

Carpe Diem,

Alex