My Library

Hurrah! After the long delayed major clean-up of my room, it is with great pride that I share with you pictures of my bookshelves, photo taken on landscape mode/photo stitch at 5 mega pixels, no zoom.

The books on the rightmost shelves are my law books (as well as the top shelf, from the right). The middle shelf, second from the right has my Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Marquez books. I think it also has Tale of Genji but I haven't read that one yet. The bottom shelf, second to the right, has non-fiction history/social science books. Books on the middle row, bottom shelves are paperbacks of several authors, Ha Jin, Wu Hui, Allende, V.S Naipaul, Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones), Grisham, Amy Tan, and David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day. It would seem obvious by now that I am partial to Latin American and Asian authors. The middle row of the middle shelf has my Harry Potter books, all seven in hard bound, plus Sorcerer's Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Quidditch Through the Ages in paperback. Of course, as you can see, MY hedwig is guarding my HP books. The topmost shelves, second from the left are my earlier paperbacks which include classics such as Oedipus the King, Tale of Two Cities, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Les Miserables (the very first books I fell in love with; I totally skipped the Nancy Drew, Mills and Boons genre), The Count of Monte Cristo, David Copperfield as well as other paperbacks such as What I Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten, and 1984. The middle row of the shelf second from left has my paperback copy of1421: The Year China Discovered the World, the Lord of the Rings and Junjun's Chronicles of Narnia (all 7 books in one thick copy). It also has my travel books (NYC, Thailand and Singapore, Philippines Travel Guide, etc.) The books on the bottom shelf of the second shelf from the left has God of Small Things, When We Were Orphans, The Pianist, etc. My books by and about Pope John Paul II, as well as other religious books are on the bottom leftmost shelf while the other leftmost shelves has some magazines and financial journals given to me by a mentor in the lawfirm I used to work for. The books on the topmost shelf, third from left has my copy of the Rizal biography by Austin Coates and other Filipiniana books. Somewhere there is my collection of Ambeth Ocampo books. I think there are only two of the many he published which I do not have. And yes, one of them has his autograph which I obtained when I came across him at Palma Hall, wearing a brown cassock.

The other bookshelf has my coffee table books and other hardbound books that won't fit the other shelves. It also has my law school reviewers which I just can't throw out. Books from college are also kept here. The lower shelf has my photo albums, though not all. Only those which are size 4R, mostly from law school till present including my albums from my Hong Kong, Boracay, Davao and Agusan, and Singapore trips. There is a Golden Snitch key chain hanging over my photo albums, along with key chains from Korea and Canada given to me by friends. The right bottom shelf has other books from college and selected materials from seminars. The green plastic keeper has my collection of Menudo magazines way back in the early to mid 80s. If you noticed, the colorful stuff in the middle of two speakers are my college and law school notebooks which are of uniform size and wrapped in colorful giftwrappers. =)