It’s that time of the year again. Once every year I leave my house willingly to spend a day outside walking through the streets of Deventer. You might be wondering why that is, and let me tell you. It’s the yearly book fair. Deventer is a city in the Netherlands that holds the largest book fair in Europe once a year. It’s got hundreds of stands lined up along the Ijssel river as well as some of the nearby squares. It’s really impressive if you’ve never seen it before and even going there for the fifth or sixth time it’s still a sight to behold when you take the ferry across the river to get there. Anyway, I’ve been incredibly lazy when it comes to writing in the past few days due to being busy, it being warm and just generally not having a ton of energy so please allow me to slack off one more day and instead tell you about all the fun books I bought. Maybe it’ll inspire you.
I didn’t end up buying a lot though. I have far too many books left to read already so I figured I shouldn’t go crazy. Having said that, I picked out some nice ones. For starters, there was a stand with English books for 5 euros a piece. All hardcovers so they look really nice, but each of them had some marker on the bottom of the pages, so I reckon they were written off, something was wrong with them or something else. I didn’t bother asking, if I’m honest with you all I picked them up because they looked pretty, were cheap and I’ve been thinking about expanding my horizons a bit when it comes to reading different genres. So the four books I picked out were a book about a Chinese banished poet, a book about nature and the rainforest, a fantasy book and finally a book about growing up as an Afghan-American in Afghanistan while American forces were roaming around it. That’s the one that I was most interested in so I’m excited to read it.
I also picked up a really dope illustrated version of The Hobbit. I’ve been wanting some nicer Tolkien books for a long time. Of course I have the hobbit and the lord of rings, like anyone who even thinks they like fantasy should, but they’re pretty boring versions that celebrate the movies releasing. Nothing interesting. This however has a lot more charm to it, and it has a nice hardcover as well. The illustrations are neat although some of the hobbits look completely off their rockers which definitely enhances the experience. It might be time to reread the Hobbit for the millionth time and maybe finally read Lord of the Rings in English, as I’ve only ever read it in Dutch (and I’ve seen the movies many times of course).
Lastly, there was a big stand from the Tolkien store. That’s not where I picked up the hobbit book mentioned above, but I did pick up two other books there. Both are lore books about Middle Earth which have always been more interesting than the stories themselves. It makes sense since the languages and the world were what got Tolkien writing in the first place. The covers have nice relief on them and the art is very pretty. I didn’t buy any other fantasy books since I couldn’t find any of the ones I was missing. I also kept an eye out for Brandon Sanderson as he’s high on my list of new books to try out, but none of his books popped up. At least not in English. There was one in Dutch but it was a fifth part of a series so I didn’t bother picking it up for my dad. And that’s really all I found. It was a lot of fun and we spent like six hours walking along the stalls so I’m exhausted today. Let me know if you’ve heard of any of these books, I’d love to hear your opinions. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 