My Favorite Books

I didn't feel insulted but rather elated when someone accused me of being bookish, because I thought it was one of the highest accolade for a book lover like me. Books support me. I am bookish in the sense that I truly love books and my affair with them will continue until my eyes can still recognize letters and I can find joy in reading. I am bookish if that means what I teach comes from books especially books that were written by authors that are considered authorities in their own disciplines. I am bookish in the sense that I love books that have been lived, tested, and have undergone revisions. I am bookish because books are cheaper and require little time to read as compared to expensive experience.

I like the feel of a new book in my hand and the smell of print. I like to read the preface of a book, the foreword, the introduction, end notes, and about the author/s that some people take for granted as merely decorations in a book. I enjoy running my eyes over its indices and locating topics that sound new and familiar to find out developments about them. I like to scan the bibliography of a book to see if it is well-researched; and the references are authoritative and up-to-date or in the state-of-the art. In short, I am really bookish. After all, I had worked in a library for some years. I am familiar with books and books are familiar with me. However, we are always on last name basis, that’s the way with any books and I.

There is one small Christian book that I wished of having read earlier in life. This is, Gordon Macdonald’s, Ordering Your Private World. In general it tells about my Christian calling to profess stewardship, self-knowledge, a sense of purpose and unswerving commitment. It is comforting to read that one aspect of being a good Christian is to be knowledgeable and to learn by offensive study or by rigid reading. One does not have to make a choice between pride in acquisition of earthly knowledge and heavenly knowledge.

Another book that is forming me still, is The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. For me, the book is like a course that I follow through life; and it is living up to its promise of recovering whatever you have lost in life like, in my case, my senses of safety, identity, power, or integrity. I would be blocked out from human race from time to time and its author, Julia Cameroon would bring me back down to earth. I would be temporarily lost from my artistic pursuit and The Artist’s Way would lead me back to the spiritual path.

In my profession as a Humanities mentor, my personal books, Annotated Art by Robert Cumming, Art Past Art Present by Wilkins, et al and Frida Kahlo: A Modern Master with their beautiful illustrations and substantial texts are indeed very useful in my class presentations. Just as Frida, in her deathbed swooned, “Paintings completed me”, I would like to also say this early that, “Books completed me.”

I would like to mention another favorite book, The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women by Harriet Rubin, which is about a female counterpart yet, antithesis of Machiavelli’s The Prince. What one can learn from this book is that we are responsible for our lives and we can control our destiny by learning from the way The Prince/Princessa has governed his/her kingdom, paraphrasing either Rubin or the political literary master.