Snapshot of a Past Room-of-Mine

My bedroom, March to May 1999?

Since the teddy bear hanging on the wall basket was given to me by a classmate in Grade 8, i.e. December 1998, and the other photos of my room show that the trees visible through the windows are green but that the daylight was dark, it must be spring, in 1999 at the earliest.

As for the books, one of them is Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales (which I read more often at a younger age, though, and which I have found difficult to digest when attempting to read now and then lately), and the memoirs of Agatha Christie, and the Wizard of Oz series, and the complete adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and a short novel, The Well, by Mildred D. Taylor.

Little Women and Good Wives, Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge are in there, too, as well as lots of Lucy Maud Montgomery's oeuvre and The Watsons, begun by Jane Austen and completed by somebody else.

As for the edition of Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, I'm not sure if I had actually read, or completely read, the book by then. (Jane Eyre was gripping enough that I read it practically in one sitting, but Shirley was slightly less approachable.) I might have kept it in my shelves because Mama gave it to me as a present.

SPEAKING of which, the silvery-gold penguin on top of the bookshelf was a Christmas present from my father; one year he gave us piggy banks: olde England-style plaster trains and the penguin. I think that was also the year where he bought a rather elegant miniature train set whose tracks we stored beside the stove for several years thereafter. And there is also a flower press designed for National Geographic in one of the bookshelves, which was Opapa's Christmas present. One tightens velcro straps around two boards, and in between those boards there are pieces of blotting paper with the flowers between them, and cardboard squares to keep the pairs apart.