It’s raining books!
Non-stop monsoon rains recently pounded Manila and caused widespread flooding that put classes, office work, and some businesses to a standstill. I was marooned at home for five days!
So in between working from home on my laptop (good thing I brought home my adorable Lenovo monster), and doing silly arts-and-crafts with my adorable niece Sophie (we made colorful puppets from old socks!), I cleaned up my bookshelf and decided to dispose of some of my old books, you know, to make room for new books! 🙂
Okay, I confess, for the life of me I don’t have a proper bookshelf and these books were actually strewn around my room. And I wasn’t really ditching them, I was looking for their new owners. (Sentimental much.) I wanted to give away my babies … errhm books … for free and did it the fast and hassle-free way — I promptly posted an invitation on Facebook. Oh and yes, there were takers! Despite the info overload from the internet and popular social networking sites, there’s always someone out there raring to read books.
It was a trip down memory lane as I checked out my old books and laughed and cringed at my “dear diary”-style notes usually scribbled on one of the first few pages of a book. The particularly interesting books even had drawings, marginal notes, highlighter marks, and underscores. That’s how I am with books. I’m not a fan of the plastic covered, immaculate looking, put-a-crease-on-my-bookspine-and-I’d die type of books. I want mine dog-eared, riddled with notes and yellowed by the passing years. Just not termite-infested. No. Eeew.
It was difficult deciding which ones to keep and which ones to give up before they become termite food, but when the dust cleared (literally), these were put up for adoption:
Fiction -Short Stories
*Friend of my youth (Alice Munro)
*Cathedral (Raymond Carver)
*Other Fish in the Sea (Lisa Kusel)
*The Best American Short Stories of 1998
Fiction -Novels
*Behind the scenes at the museum (Kate Atkinson)
*The Zero (Jess Walter)
*Spilling Clarence (Anne Ursu)
*The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
*Saturday (Ian McEwan)
Non-Fiction
*Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert)
*Freakonomics (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner)
*Here Comes the Bride (Jaclyn Geller)
Classics
*Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
*A Room with a View and Howard’s End (EM Forster)
*The complete short stories of Mark Twain
*Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
*Tess of the D’urbesvilles (Thomas Hardy)
*The importance of being earnest (Oscar Wilde)
*Four Comedies (Shakespeare)
I just couldn’t find it in my heart to give away Alan Lightman, David Sedaris, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Neil Gaiman, Jessica Zafra’s Twisted anthologies, Ricky Lee’s novels, and my precious precious precious Kikomachine Komix.
I’m also keeping my Umberto Eco and Haruki Murakami books — with the fervent hope that someday I’d have the patience and the iron will to read through them without stabbing my eye with a pen. What verbose, quirky men they are.
Until the next rainy day book cleanup, Foucault’s Pendulum will be parked ominously on my bedside table and it will mock me and my limited vocabulary and knowledge of world history. 🙂
Old books
How to write a memo 