My Living Challenge

Just realized I am all set for the year with my many reading challenges, and the more important living challenge is as of yet undefined. While I made a simple promise to share the blessings in every way, every day, there are little things that will make the sharing even more fun.

One, I will see my floors and my tabletops again, there are way too many books and things in my house and in my shelves and in my closets. Letting go and sharing the blessings.

Two, I will learn new things: to make me more mobile, to have a more versatile menu, to go out of my comfort zone.

Three, I will be healthier. Whether I like it or not, the gym beckons, and perhaps the dance floor could be a more fun option.

Four, I will travel, oh yes. Greece in May, and New York again in the fall, who knows.

Five, I will always be thankful and I will always remember. Best friends never forget.

Guess you could say this is how I feel right now...
There are places i'll remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends i still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life i've loved them all

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When i think of love as something new
Though i know i'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know i'll often stop and think about them
In my life i love you more

2009 Reading Challenges

When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.

In 2008, even as a reluctant unspoken good-bye was finally said, a torrent of hellos came rushing up to me in the form of the books that found their way into my home in the latter part of the year. One love lost, and a lost love found. Fair trade, I would say.

And the torrent has taken over with much cooperation from me. Among the finished reads in the last two months were Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the first two books of The 39 Clues, John Dunning's Booked to Die, Seth Godin's Tribes, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book [my first Gaiman read!], Leonard Elmore's 10 Rules of Writing, and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. All magical works that reminded me why I opened a bookstore and why I love books so much.

So in 2009, to channel the continuing torrent of books, I have chosen to participate in reading challenges. These are well-defined reading tasks with specific quantitative or qualitative targets, sometimes focusing on genre or authors or a mix, depending on the creator of the challenge.

My chosen challenges are

- The Year of Readers
- The Rescue Challenge
- 1% Well-Read Challenge
- 50-Book Challenge on Library Thing
- The Olympic Challenge: London 2012

Will be blogging more about these challenges as the reading progresses. Found my way back home to me by getting lost in the world of books.

A Year of New Eyes and Quiet Industry

That is how I see this new year. A chance to enjoy my renewed reading energy and map out the how and the where and the why of what lies ahead.

The journey over the last few years has been larger than life, lit up by lights too bright to see what is real and true. Last year, the lights dimmed and things got back to normal, so wonderfully simple, down-to-earth and all-real. What a blessing to finally be comfortable in my own skin, blissfully surrounded by family, friends and a world of books. And to have lived and loved with everything you've got.

So this year, the task is to stick to the real and the true. To find one's way and to continue to make a life worthy of the gift of life itself.

This year I promise but one thing: to share the blessings in every way I can.

Taking on the reading challenge

It's 3:10 in the morning of January 1, 2009. And I finished reading The Purpose of Christmas by Rick Warren. What a great way to start this exciting year.

I have been pretty quiet over the holidays, took the time to settle down and breathe, take stock and be happy about this life I am living with gusto.

So to start the year right, I have also signed up for The Year of Readers, which raises funds for reading charities around the world. For every book I finish reading, I pledge P100, roughly US$2.00, to help a selected charity which I still have to work out.

My reading challenge journey is recorded at Shelfari. But I will be posting longer "reviews" here.

How nice to be able to help out while doing one of my most favorite things in the world --- getting lost in a book.

Organizing the books...Part 2

In response to a discussion thread in Flips Flipping Pages, another group for Filipino bookworms, I wrote this reply on suggestions on organizing one's bookshelf. As I typed out my response, I realized that part of the pleasure in my bookworm's life is the befuddlement that comes from not knowing which book to read next, even with a pile of on-going reads on the bedside table, as well as the surprise that still comes from opening any book I lay my hands on. 

The printed page never fails to captivate me, even at this crazy advanced age of being comfortable in my own skin. And I am so glad that I can still feel this giddy and happy over the simplest and purest of pleasures that is reading a book.

This is my take on how to organize my books...

The books in my library of a house are grouped by genre by room, or at least that is the intention.  

The hallway-long floor-to-ceiling shelf of 24 cubbyholes tries to contain the books loosely according to genre: writing references, harvard classics, non-fiction, history, fiction, blair & robertson, biography, Tolkien, coffeetable books [bottom shelves].  

The den contains fiction I have read, health & wellness, travel, some Filipiniana. The guest room shelf has half of the pop-up books, inspirational, fairy books, left-over inventory from the bookstore which I kept for myself. 

The living room-reading room shelves house most of the coffeetable books on art, history and travel, plus the other half of the pop-up books, the rest of the biographies, and the non-fiction ones that deal on security and terrorism. The chests in the reading room take the load of the Filipiniana coffeetable books and the interior design and crafts books. 

My TBRs are scattered all over the house, such a pleasure to pick up a book and read anywhere you want ;-)  

I have tried to learn the Dewey system, and implemented my understanding of it for the library of a friend. But for myself, I have used shelfari [only partial, mostly my favorites] and library thing [ the ones I have received from bookmooch] to catalog what I have. 

I started an excel file of my books last month, which covered four cubbyholes in the hallway shelf including fiction, history, non-fiction and biography, but am just having too much fun cleaning out the shelves and sorting through the titles to go at the list every day. I guess you can see I having too much fun doing this read and collect and sort and catalogue thing.

In closing, I guess I am a hybrid of the O.C. [wanting everything organized by alphabetical order according to the accepted and very complicated library inventory system] and the spontaneous, as in stuff my books in available spaces and enjoy the surpises that you find whenever you try to locate a book. 

I have obsessed about getting my library organized and catalogued but in the same breath, have just kept adding titles which has made it difficult to get going and complete the dream of a usable library database that tells me which title of which author is in what shelf. 

While this situation seems utterly self-defeating, in fact, it has a rhyme and reason I understand fully well [and I am sure fellow book addicts will know what I mean]. I cannot imagine stopping the book buying addiction just to make sure all the titles are entered into excel and finally put in their proper place. Where would the pleasure in life be then, no newly bought books to open and read, and no disorganized trove of books to fuss over? I think I will stick to my current organizational pattern or, should I say frenzy: obsess about organizing while continuing to scour the bookstores for more treasures to add. 

Thanks for listening. I enjoyed defining my state of book addiction and organization.  

I think I will post this on my blog, as is. 

[So I have posted, with some tweaks and additions along the way. I am sure the best friend will have the last word on this. Again.]

Booklovers all in the family

Sunday is family time, and it is usually a sumptuous lunch [prepared by my mom, of course] by request, gobbled down in 15 minutes or less, [although it took us 20 minutes to clean out the Filipino fare today], and 2 hours of catching up over coffee, dessert and lots of chocolates. [Picture shows mom and I, gobbling down breakfast in London]

As the older ones --- I chose not to say adults because sometimes our children are more adult than we are --- were discussing the latest juicy developments on the national and international scene, the young ones were alternating between fighting over who gets to play Cooking Mama on the wii or running around chasing after imaginary creatures in the zen garden or just nagging the older ones for chocolate or some other sweet treat.  

What made today something worth writing about were the book-related moments that are still making me smile.

The after-meal treat for the young ones was the SPOOKY HOUSE OF HORROR Pop-up Book that I had prep

ared to share with them. We unravelled the four-sector structure with much fanfare and lots of oohs and aahs from the kids... both the old ones and the young ones.  

After that, my favorite niece, Bea and I explored the book PIRATES, which she got to take home, and which  her Kuya Rafa said he would take care of... as he thumbed through the pages right before going home.  Bea enjoys pop-up books as much as I do, and she gets to add to her collection every special occasion that comes along.  She actually was the one who instigated the book moments today when she insisted, yes, insisted on seeing my pop-up books again.

Another Kuya, Luigi my sister's eldest, got to take home the SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES collection that was just sitting in the shelf in the guest room, waiting for its new owner. Luigi has always been a bookworm right after my own heart, and when I saw him holding Book 2, I said I had the rest. To which he promptly gifted me with a huge smile, which led to a quick run up to the second floor to grab the books off the shelf. I did say that was his combined birthday and Christmas gift. 5 brand new books, still wrapped in plastic... He said ok with that smile again,  knowing there would be another gift in December, probably Book 6?

The love of books runs in the family, as we all grew up seeing our parents read, and in turn, our kids, from my 19-year old Gabrielle to the youngest nephew Diego, are growing up surrounded by books and readers. 

It warms this booklover's heart to know that the treasures that cram my home of a library have willing and waiting heirs as early as now. 

A Weekend of Book Sorting... heaven for a bookworm

So I spent the weekend sorting out the shelves in the hallway, while waiting for the TV repairman and the DSL technician and the phone extension guy and the router geeks to fix up the little thingies that make my bookworm's haven also a techie paradise.

While sorting out the titles into the proper categories, I re-discovered some buried treasures, that had disappeared behind the second layer of 99-peso books that flooded into the house last September.  The best friend hasn't seen the hallway in recent weeks, thank goodness ;-)

And I realized that with the present bulging condition of my shelves, there was actually no room for more books. Every possible space has books in abundance, living room, den, landing, guest room, hallway, bedroom... No more room for books?!!! NOT POSSIBLE, NOT ACCEPTABLE AT ALL.

Whether I liked it or not, the sorting had to include choosing books to be given away. OR ELSE...

Out of the 24 alcoves in the hallway shelves, I was able to sort through 4 of them, a good good start. AND, I finally started a proper inventory spreadsheet. As of last night, there were 64 books encoded, still a looooooong way to go. Aside of course from the online inventories on Shelfari and Library Thing, 300+ books listed on each.

Finished Saturday off by cleaning out part of the linen/towel closet. And woke up to a happy hot Sunday with the nagging feeling that I had to pick out more titles to put up for mooching on bookmooch.  Finally got around to doing that tonight, with a partial list that I am posting here to alert fellow moochers of what is coming up.

- Teach Your Team to Fish, Laurie Beth Jones, PB, unopened, still in plastic

- Too Soon to Say Goodbye, Art Buchwald, HC, a good read

- This Year I Will..., M.J. Ryan, HC

- Illuminata A Return to Prayer, Marianne Williamson, PB, scuffs and age marks on edges

- SunShines, Michael Lutin, TPB

- The Don't Sweat the Small Stuff Workbook, PB

- The Sion Revelation, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, old copy, brown marks on edges

- A Haiku Garden, HC, left-over inventory, wrapped in plastic, great gift [reserved]

- Haiku Landscapes, HC, left-over inventory, wrapped in plastic, great gift [reserved]

- Haiku People, HC, left-over inventory, wrapped in plastic, great gift [reserved]

- Baby Gifts, HC, left-over inventory, wrapped in plastic, great gift

- Done Deal, Michael Benoliel, HC

- Benny and Babe, Eoin Colfer, PB, unopened, still wrapped in plastic

- The Masada Scroll, Paul Block & Robert Vaughan, PB, just finished reading, new, interesting if you like historical fiction

- The Right Attitude to Rain, Alexander McCall Smith, HC, ex-library book

That's it for now... still trying to gather more courage to decide what else to send out for adoption to another bookworm home... 

More deals coming up for bookmoochers :-)