BOOKLIST, READING LIST, WISHLIST

Collecting a writer's work is a way
of owning the artist you admire.
- John Baxter
A Pound of Paper

I love books. I own hundreds of books and I intend to own hundreds more. In my place where dogs are not allowed, books are my best friend and the consequence of a disguised blessing: they don't howl, they don't bite, they don't cause allergies. But like their canine challengers to our undiffused attention, books provide us with one transcending quality: they make us interesting.

(Don't tell this to my non-reading friends, though. To them I am a boring companion of the most yawnable kind, a prototype dweeb deprived of true life. I certainly drive them nuts with my inputs on topics of utmost concerns: when they talk about the wives of societal celebrities, I retort back with the erotic qualities of the Wife of Bath; when they discuss the realism of Reality TV, I give my own discussion on the fantastic quality of Magical Realism; when they find horror in the dissolution of Ben/Jen's planned wedding, I narrate the horror of the dissolution of the Compson family.)

Books, like dust, in my flat abound. They're seen and unseen, above and beneath, covered and exposed: under my bed, in hampers, inside closets and cabinets, atop shelves and tables, and of course - in the livingroom Bookshelf.

This Bookshelf, in essence, for all intents and purposes, is my library, my centerpiece not inaccurately my soul, the one and only thing in my entire unit that I wanted people to notice and comment on, good or bad. And my Bookshelf's Books, bestfriends they are to me and us, rarely disappoint.

My Bookshelf, like a true library, is divided into sections - without the bureaucratic machination of catalogues and indexes. I arranged them into categories for easier elucidation, each accompanied here by a description and a wish.

(I, too, have readership shortcomings. I have not read all my books, not even half of what's in the Bookshelf. And there are a lot of good books which I am embarassed to admit I have not owned nor read: Tolstoy's War and Peace, Rand's Atlas Shrugged, any of Charles Dickens'. My knowledge of Cervantes' and Dante's and Milton's works are limited to those taken up in school. I also do not have a book by a Filipino author - but for a reason. I donated what I had to the county library where, through the efforts of our compatriots here, a Filipiniana section had been put up, with my donated books - from F. Sionil Jose to Jessica Zafra to Bob Ong - all catalogued. Likewise, I do not have the titles I already owned back in the Philippines: Huxley's A Brave New World, Wright's Native Son, Orwell's 1984, Lord Jim and other stories by Conrad, and many more; the reasons were practical, financial. Finally, my list does not include the Holy Bible which I do not consider a book but a life element, like air and sunshine.)

And so with no further ado, fellow book readers and prospective borrowers, here are My Bookshelf's Booklist, divided into five sections, the five levels of my literary heaven, books I consider - with certain exceptions - yours as much as mine.

Section 1 - Limited/Special edition: due to their special printing or binding or difficulty in procuring, these books occupy the top tier of my Shelf, books which even the most persistent book robbers cannot take away and most unfriendly fire cannot eat up, or Shakespeare be damned, because they are the ones to come with me at the first sign of hostility, and always, I wish, to remain in my possession until the end of my time.

- The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
- The Complete Works of Mark Twain
- The Complete Works of Kahlil Gibran
- The Tale of Genji (Unabridged)/Lady Murasaki
- The Heritage Club Edition of The Brothers Karamazov/Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Great Documents Of The World - Milestones of Human Thought/Friedrich Heer
- The Impressionists-A retrospective/Martha Kapos, Editor
- The Louvre Collection (anthology)/Editions de la Reunion des musees nationaux

Section 2 - My favorite tier, these are bonafide classics, part of those which Italo Calvino said - ouch I was hit - we always refer to as something we are rereading (but never said 'we are reading...', out of embarassment, what hypocrisy!); these are the books I wish I could commit to memory so that in the horrible event all books in the world are destroyed I will be there to tell my masters' stories, verbatim, word for word, their thought, my voice.

- The Origin Of Species/Charles Darwin
- Ulysses/James Joyce
- A Portrait Of The Artist As a Young Man/Joyce
- Dubliners/Joyce
- The Lost Steps/Alejo Carpentier
- The Kingdom Of This World/Carpentier
- Explosion In A Cathedral/Carpentier
- Middlemarch/George Elliot
- Book Of Disquiet/Fernando Pessoa
- Animal Farm/George Orwell
- The Trial/Franz Kafka
- The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman/Laurence Sterne
- The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
- Swann's Way/Marcel Proust
- Moby Dick/Herman Melville
- The Catcher In The Rye/JD Salinger
- Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges
- Catch 22/Joseph Heller
- A Separate Peace/John Knowles
- The Turn Of The Screw And Other Short Novels/Henry James
- The Power And The Glory/Graham Greene
- The Way Of All Flesh/Samuel Butler

Section 3 - Most of these books could have been part of the prior section but for one qualifying thing, reverential in itself, these books are the works of Nobel Prize Winners in Literature, making this section sui generis, a class in itself. These are the books I wish to give to the first Extra Terrestrial I will meet, books that represent the quality of Earth's literary masters and literary critics.

- The Complete Stories of Ernest Hemingway
- For Whom The Bell Tolls/Hemingway
- A Farewell To Arms/Hemingway
- The Sound And The Fury/William Faulkner
- Soul Mountain/Gao Xingjian
- Hundred Years Of Solitude/Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- All The Names/Jose Saramago
- Stone Raft/Saramago
- Blindness/Saramago
- The Year Of The Death Of Ricardo Reis/Saramago
- Among The Believers/VS Naipaul
- Shosha/Isaac Beshevis Singer
- The Magic Mountain/Thomas Mann
- Labyrinth of Solitude/Octavio Paz

Section 4 - The Modern Classics, these are the books I wish to give to arrogant non-readers, those who do not see any life in my person, those who I wanted converted overnight, for these are the books with the power to convert: easy to read, and in their own rights award-winning, in their own sense breathing.

- Billy Bathgate/EL Doctorow
- Angela's Ashes/Frank McCourt
-'Tis/McCourt
- Anil's Ghost/Michael Ondaatje (autographed copy)
- Liar's Club/Mary Karr
- The House On The Lagoon/Rosario Ferre
- Eccentric Neighborhoods/Ferre
- How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents/Julia Alvarez
- The Corrections/Jonathan Frenzen
- Sabbath's Day/Philip Roth
- Old Gringo/Carlos Fuentes
- The Years With Laura Diaz/Fuentes
- Atonement/Ian McEwan
- Martin Dressler/Steven Milhauser
- Kingdom Of Shadows/Alan Furst
- The Tesseract/Alex Garland
- The Beach/Garland
- Independence Day/Richard Ford
- Empire Falls/Richard Russo
- The Root And The Flowers/LH Myers
- The Ends Of The Earth/Robert D. Kaplan
- A Walk In The Woods/Bill Bryson
- A Thousand Acres/Jane Smiley
- Moo/Smiley
- The Battle For God/Karen Armstrong
- The God Of Small Things/Arundhati Roy
- Prisoners Of Honor/David Levering Lewis
- The Poisonwood Bible/Barbara Kingsolver
- The Things They Carried/Tim O'Brien
- Shipping News/Annie Proulx
- For The Time Being/Annie Dillard
- Waiting/Ha Jin
- For The Relief Of Unbearable Urges/Nathan Englander
- Creek Walk and Other Stories/Molly Giles
- If On A Winter's Night A Traveler/Italo Calvino
- God, A Biography/Jack Miles
- Four Complete Novels/Frank Herbert
- A Good Man In Africa/William Boyd
- Bombay Ice/Leslie Forbes
- Indian Killer/Sherman Alexie
- A heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius/Dave Eggers
- Cold Mountain/Charles Frazier
- Black Mountain/Les Sandiford (autographed copy)

Section 5 - Last but not the least, this level contains anthologies, poetry books and books on literary criticism - the ones I spend most time but least money on; these are the literary forms I am most interested in, and these are the books I mainly received as gifts; these, too, are the type of books I wish to present to friends-readers who, by some reasons and unfortune, do not seem to appreciate the beauty of poems, essays and short stories.

- The 100 Greatest American Short Stories Of The Century/John Updike, editor
- The 2003 Pushcart Prize
- The 2002 Pushcart Prize
- 2001 New Stories From The South/Ravenel, editor
- Contemporary LatAm Short Stories/Pat McNees, editor
- Short Stories By LatAm Women, Celia C. de Zapata, editor
- Sudden Fiction/Shapard and Thomas, editors
- You've got To Read This/Hansen & Shepard, editors
- NYPL's Books Of The Century/Elizabeth Diefendorf, editor
- The Seven Ages/Louise Gluck
- The Dreamsongs/John Berryman
- The World Of The Ten Thounsand Things/Charles Wright
- Selected Poems/Antonio Machado
- Selected Poems/Robert Frost
- The Vintage Book Of Contemporary World Poetry/JD McClatchy, editor
- Eight American Poets/Joel Conarroe, editor
- Cinnamon Peeler/Ondaatje
- Postmodern American Fiction/Geyh, Lebron & Levy, editors

There you go, so now let's read on. "Once upon a time when the world was flat..."