Mar 17, 2016 Daily Life, The Daily Post

In response to The Daily Post’s Daily Prompt: Shelf

On one of the bookshelves in my study / work-space (made of mahogany by my amazing husband) are the following:

• A metal bird hanging on the side of it
• Some dust on the very top, along with:
  A tone drum, very beautifully carved
  A pair of clay and goatskin bongos from Turkey (I think)
  A handmade (by my husband) Kora
  A fish scraper (percussion, that is)
  An Asante (or Ashanti) kete bell for kids
• Books by women
• Books by men
• Books on language
• Books on education
• Some Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Isabel Allende
  
• P.G. Wodehouse (the best humor writer in the world, for those who haven’t heard of him – the best, that is, along with James Thurber and Donald E. Westlake! )
• The Joy of Lex
• Six Plays of the Modern Theater
• Prego – Italian textbook which I got back in 1996, when I took six months of Italian, simply because I love the language.
• Accent – French textbook (used, simply because it made me happy to have it; I’d already studied French for four years – two in school, and two in college).
• Children’s books
• A book on Rock n’ Roll
• A book on Ancient Egypt
• A photograph album
• A book titled Stuntology
• The Italian translation of Gibran’s The Prophet
• Some Margaret Atwood
• Some Anne Tyler
• Some Jonathan Kozol
• A book about Gauguin
• A couple of Marion Zimmer-Bradley books, which I don’t much like (I loved The Mists of Avalon, but that’s on another shelf)
• A couple of Cynthia Voigt books
• A book about Twyla Tharp
• A book about Shakespeare’s Flowers
• The Book of Psalms
• Some Ray Bradbury
• Some D.H. Lawrence
• Some Toni Morrison
• Some Barbara Kingsolver
• Some Gil-Scott Heron
• A book about Astronomy
• Spider Robinson Stardance
• Tracy Kidder Mountains Beyond Mountains
• Herbert Kohl 36 Children
• Nikos Kazantzakis – The Last Temptation of Christ, and Zorba the Greek
• A Short Treasury of American Humor
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (all of my other Gaiman books are on another shelf)
• Virgil’s Aeneid
• Tim’O’Brien – The Things They Carried
• Spider Robinson – Stardance
• A book about Oscar Wilde (all my other Oscar Wilde books – and I have MANY – are on another shelf)
• Some Graphic novels, including Beowulf illustrated and reworked by Gareth Hinds, who has done some amazing work, especially his graphic novel versions of King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and The Odyssey)
• The inimitable, but misanthropic, James Thurber
• The recently-deceased Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum
  Ulysses (which I call somewhat grumpily The Great Unread) by James Joyce
  A book on jazz
• A book by Neil Young
  A couple of books by Noam Chomsky
• Several books by Jonathan Stroud and Philip Pullman
• A beautiful book that my Parsee friend Perin Pudumjee (now Coyajee) made of her calligraphic art
• An amazing and moving book called Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
• Journals which are mostly empty, save for a few pages here and there (I’m not great about writing in journals nowadays, unlike how I used to be when I was young)
• Books on language – Italian, French and Russian, which I don’t need anymore, but I loved them when I bought them.  I had visions of learning Russian.  Perhaps, I still might – you never know!
• An English-Portuguese dictionary given as a gift by my husband when I was in love with Samba Bossa Nova songs.
• Oxford English Dictionaries

There are MANY more bookshelves in the house.  We quip that our house is held together and held up by its bookshelves.  We also quip that we’ll never ever move again, because the books were so heavy to carry up our 42 steps leading to the house on a sharp incline, that I sprained both my arms back in 2001, when we moved.  We joke that the only way we’ll ever leave our home is feet first.  (Sorry to sound so morbid here!)

I love our books!  I love being at home!

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Tags: #Books, #Humor, #Languages, #Magic Realism, #Shelf