Pragmatic, not functional

I was asked: are most items in your house aesthetic or functional? I began to mull it over and concluded that there is quite a paucity of functionality in my life. I would like to bring a case for the jury's consideration. When I moved into my house, I was pleased – to say the least – with the overwhelming amount of bookshelf space in the front room. I vainly imagined the wonderful things we could decorate those shelves with, quite forgetting that I had brought nothing with me to DC. Well, no matter - my roommates had things we could use. To my dismay, however, we realized that the structure of the bookshelves was such that little but books could fit properly. (Now, that should be the first clue that I am not a "function first" type of person.) We did not have nearly enough books to fill the vast expanse of front room shelves, and consequently, the shelves have remained devastatingly bare and lonely… until last Saturday. Claire and Cammy knew of a book fair in Baltimore where they literally give away books every weekend. You can take as many as you like. And so, in a decisive victory for the aesthetic, we headed off to Baltimore to collect books to fill our shelves. Now, because we only wanted to "fill" our shelves, we were concerned with little but the beauty of the books. No matter that the book was in some unknown Cyrillic language, or that we never had any intentions of raising caribou. As an afterthought, we did remark that our lawyer friends would enjoy the variety of law books we picked up, because really, who doesn't want to read a treatise on international fence laws when they're hanging out at our house? I think that it is clear on which side of the fence I stand, but I would enjoy any votes to the contrary. Now, I may not have presented my case in the most non-biased manner, and for this I apologize. Either way, I will let the jury decide.