What's in your library contest

**I've been tagged by my funny and super interesting friend @mrprofessor to participate in the challenge by @wizardave, in which we are supposed to show our libraries. **

I have loved reading books ever since I can remember learning how to read. When I was growing up, most of my friends also loved reading and their families had extensive libraries, so they had a strong reading influence on me. Books became my support and coping mechanism during the difficult adolescent years and they really helped shape my way of thinking and expressing myself.

When my husband and I decided to leave the US and move abroad in 2012, we were faced with a difficult dilemma: what to do with so many of our belongings, including all of our books? We had no place to store them, no families to leave them with and so he convinced me to just sell them or donate them. This was one of the hardest part of moving abroad for me. I loved my books. I remembered where and when I had read each one of them, how I had felt, what the weather was like during the time I had read it...but, if we wanted all our belongings to fit into the bags below before we started our nomadic life, there was no way all of our books could come with us. So, I (secretly) kept only a few hard copies with me and stuffed them into one of these bags. To calm me down, my husband bought me a kindle that year. But nothing can ever replace the touch and the smell of the book pages. I have made peace with my kindle since, but still, I love the satisfaction that comes from a good hard copy read.

That's why my current bookshelf is so small and humble. The rest of my books are on my kindle. The only books I kept from my past were the ones that had been the most influential or that were gifts from people that really mattered to me.

These are basically the hard copies I keep dragging to 3 different countries that we have moved to. The funny thing is that I have never revisited any of them since we have moved in 2012. I always want to read something else, something new and my reading style has definitely changed in the past 6 years.

Yoga books (of course):
-Guide to Yin Yoga
-Ayurveda: the science of self-healing (also my bible 10 years ago)
-The Power of Now

Other books:
-The stranger by Camy
-The Alchemist
-Ignorance by Milan Kundera
-The wind up bird chronicles by Murakami
-Master and Margarita by Bulgakov
-Three cups of tea

The rest are books in Albanian or my husband's.

The next shelf is with DVDs mostly about yoga and learning Spanish and Italian, our dive log books and finally some children books that I have borrowed from the school library for my private tutoring classes.

At the very top of the bookshelf, I have some cooking books, although I mostly use online recipes religiously from Greenkitchenstories, Deliciously Ella and My New Roots.

And now the funniest thing: I receive a FB message from an unknown guy a few months ago. He sends me this picture and the following: "Hello, i'm from Portugal. You lost a Kindle right? I have that with me."

Apparently, I had forgotten my kindle behind in the train on the way to Porto. I had a business card inside the kindle case so that's how he was able to contact me. I was not as lucky as I thought I was initially, because this nice guy does not want to deliver it to any of my friends who have since visited Porto. He said he has my kindle inside a locker at the train station and that the only way to get it back is for me to go there. He will keep it and guard it for me forever. Hmmmm....I am taking this as a clear sign from the universe that this is the end of my kindle era that and the return of paper backs! Hell yeah, it's time!!!

Currently reading "What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng," an incredible true story based on the life of a Sudanese child refugee who immigrated to the United States under the Lost Boys of Sudan program. Can't say I haven't cried this month.

My favorite book I've read so far in 2018 is "Born to Run" - I couldn't stop thinking about it for an entire month! Such an inspiration. Please let me know if there is something similar to Born to Run that you would recommend reading :)

Ciao, a presto!

Flo