Book Catcher Series Six: Courtesy of Enable Ireland (Dublin)

SINCE I AM LEAVING FOR MANILA (PHILIPPINES) VERY SOON, I DECIDED TO VISIT DUBLIN (IRELAND) FOR THE LAST TIME. I visited some of the iconic urban forms (Spire, James Joyce, Temple Bar, Halfpenny bridge, etc.) at the city centre, including Makati Avenue Restaurant owned by a Filipina businesswoman. She even prepared authentic Filipino halo-halo (sweet icy dessert) for my me and my two companions.

As usual, I'm on my book hunt and luckily there was a charity shop nearby. Enable Ireland (Capel Street) is an Irish non-profit organisation that provides free services to children and adults with disabilities and their families from 40 locations in 14 counties.

With few minutes of browsing of its discounted books, I finally grabbed two bestseller copies of The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold) and Northern Lights (Philip Pullman) tagged at 1 Euro (approximately 50 pesos)! The Lovely Bones became a box office motion picture last year and it is a sad engaging story which somehow convinced me to grab the book, while Northern Lights (1995) is the first book of Pullman well-known trilogy, His Dark Materials and this book is also included in the launching of World Book Night 2011 in Britain. Northern Lights is the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award. Im also interested to read the its continuing story, The Subtle Knife (1997) and concluding part, The Amber Spyglass (2000). The Amber Spyglass received the Whitbread Book of the Year Award - the first time in the history of that prize given to a children's book.