The little three storey shelf is a bustling place. On the ground level reside pale yellow RM8 Penguin editions of James Joyce, Henry James, an Edgar Allen Poe. Also a rickety combination of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, Treasure Island, assorted haunted and unhaunted fairytales, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula where it all began.
One floor up the serious favourites reign – Maugham, Orwell, Dahl and Rushdie hold their own in hard-bound omnibuses, paperbacks and dog-eared childhood copies of both well-known tales and the odd essay or prose.
Still higher is an eclectic mish-mash of pairs, trios and quintuplets of authors who respectfully managed to entice purchases beyond the first encounter - A.A. Milne, John Kennedy Toole, Banana Yoshimoto, Steinbeck, Wilde, Gibran, Carson McCullers and Roddy Doyle.
The rooftop is fashion high street – Penguin Read Red adventures with their crimson overleaf share space with Cecilia Ahern’s pretty, heart-rending brand of chick lit. Skip to the adjacent shelf and tucked in the corner are the Little Books – collections of Cicely Mary Barker, Mitch Albom, Freud and Confucius in appetizer portions resting atop a gift of Chairman Mao’s quotations.
Cross the room and you will find on the lofty top shelf the fabulous Singles. The Beach (yes the Leo DiCaprio movie), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Potrait of a Floating World, Peter Pan, To Kill a Mockingbird, Sylvia Plath, Ken Kesey and a few others powerful enough to evoke realisations, potential heaviness of the heart and laughter that catches you unaware each time attempted.
A jar of pencils sensibly divide these from some paperback heavyweights– the complete novels of Jane Austen, Tales from the Arabian Nights, and the alphabetical guide to Greek Classical Mythology, admittedly yet to be leafed but reassuring in their quiet promise of a good read.
Yet more un-reads on the coffee table by the bed, a variety of short stories, movie tie-ins, plays, and fiction from Shakespeare to Jonathan Safran Foer. Each in this row seems to promise a good time simply by being something new.
I wonder if books could speak, what would they say?
View from Victoria Peak, Hong Kong Island.