Pictures speak a thousand words...

Blink again, you're in the right place. Truth of the matter was that I was starting to miss the stark simplicity of my all white background and so I went and got it back.

...So if you've been reading my blog/paying attention, you will know that I've had this Harry Potter Fantasy in which I stroll into a Salvation Army/Goodwill store and discover that someone donated their entire collection of Harry Potter novels and yadi yadi yada.
Well, I will say that it didn't quite work out that way. As opposed to making a one time stroll into the Goodwill, it took more like 4 strolls. One one occasion I was lucky enough to snag books 4 and 5 on the same day but every thing else was on some walk in and peruse the book section and hope to get lucky.
Aniwoos like the title of ze post says...pictures speak a thousand words so please allow me update y'all picture style on my HP collection.

As of Aug 15, 2009...I, the Original Mgbeks am the proud owner of books 2-7 of the HP collection. For some reason, book 1 has been very hard to find but I aint fazed. Yes we can baby!
How you like me now???



Decided to include some bonus pics of one of the things on my 'Pride and Joy' list...bookshelf numero uno with some of my favorite books.



Ze bookshelf was originally white but one random summer day I decided to engage in some DIY style activities and painted it a lovely mustard color. I still have an unpainted one which I swore I'd paint this summer but *ahem*, it doesn't seem to be happening.
I'd say that a good 75% of the books in this mix were Goodwill finds with one of the most recent being 'A thousand splendid suns' by Khaled Hosseini. I hope it's as good as the 'Kite Runner'.


And in more book yarns:
I'm looking into building an African Author collection starting with the likes of Elechi Amadi, Chinua Achebe etc etc. As I type, I am expecting to receive my Chimamanda books in the mail any time soon. Yay to that!
My dream of owning a personal library that will make the county's public librarian go cross eyed with envy is coming ooo! LOL.

I hope y'all are having a good weekend so far...

Peace & Love.

My Harry Potter fantasy

Thanks for the comments on the previous post. If you saw the humor in it, I salute you! If you felt attacked/didn't see the humor, I still salute you. Make my britigerians no vex and block my application for britico visa o, I still wan chop that Nandos. And my Naija peeps, nothing but love from this end o.

Aniwoos on to the koko, make we yarn the main...the main...

I LOVE the Harry Potter books (Never watched the movies though). I was first introduced to HP back in Naija, when one of my oh-so lovely friends happened to move into the neighborhood and me, being the nice and friendly neighbor that I was, popped over to her house one day to introduce myself, make nice and at the same time do amebo work and see who the new chickito in town was. I think we hit it off (although she insists that we didn't..haha!), but either way I made it a point to visit her more often after I discovered that she had an admirable collection of CD's and books. One day I saw the Harry Potter book lying around, asked if I could borrow it and the rest is history...

I put my sister on it. I raved about it to whoever would listen. I mean, Harry Potter had me at Chapter 1.

So lately, I've been having this fantasy. I fantasize that I will walk into a Salvation Army/ Goodwill store and discover that some random individual got sick and tired of their Harry Potter collection and donated the entire thing to Goodwill, and of course I snatch the donated goods up and end up being the proud owner of all the Harry Potter books. Infact in this fantasy I will pay something along the lines of $12 for all 7 hardback novels (Oh, they gotta be hardback...Harry Potter in paperback version will not be as sexy).
Can you blame me for this fantasy? The friggin' paperback box set is currently going for $35 at the minimum on Amazon, and I believe I peeped the hardback set for $100.

But it seems that dreams truly can come true, and if you fantasize hard enough...ish just might pop off. Last week, I really did walk into the Salvation Army and decided to take a quick mental scan of the books that they had on inventory and SHO 'NUFF I could not believe my eyes when I spied with my little eyes, the 3rd HP book; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Ooooh weee, I was pretty darn elated, and even more so after I ended up paying $ 2.00 for the hardback. So now I believe that somehow my wish of stocking my library with the entire HP series will come true, I just need to keep a watchful eye on the book rack in the Salvation Army/Goodwill.

P.S:- If you are looking to beef up your mini library for cheap, Salvation Army/Goodwill is a good place to check out if you're up for it. I recently got 'The other Boleyn Girl' ( REALLY good book by the way, read it before but I figured that for $1, it would be a good thing to add to the library), A couple of Jane Green and Marian Keyes books (Gotta love the British authors, their sense of humor is off the hook) and a rack of others.

Next up on my 'walk into the Goodwill and I pray I see it' list: Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie. I'm definitely not holding my breath for these ones but hmmm you just never know. Oh, those are pretty good books by the way...Purple Hibiscus was a definite page turner, I stayed up all night to finish it. HOYS was pretyy good too but it took me 3 tries to finish it.

Hmmph, maybe one of these days I will blog about discovering these Adichie books tucked away in someone's goodwill store. *Fingers crossed*... In the meantime, I am truly on a mission to stock my shelves with the other 6 Harry Potter books. Wish me luck!