I talk about the book fair regularly, as I visit it once a year. It’s a colossal event where an entire street and several squares are filled to the brim with stands where people are selling books and things related to books. There’s comics, maps, some art pieces, cds and vinyl and even some D&D stuff and manga these days. It’s held in Deventer in the Netherlands and according to the radio broadcaster this morning they were expecting around 25.000 people to visit, which is a lot. The stands are all numbered and the number went all the way north of 500, so that’s a lot of stands. This must be the work of an enemy stand! Sorry, I did see some JoJo volumes, but I’m not quite financially prepared to start collecting those hardcover editions that are very common.
Normally I would use this post to talk about my book fair haul, and show off the books that I bought. I bought some fun and interesting ones last year that I ended up reading quite a few of. I can recommend 99 nights in Logar as well as Master of Poisons from the ones I bought then, and although I haven’t read the cool edition of The Hobbit yet, I am of course already familiar with the story. But today I am not here to show off my haul because I didn’t end up buying anything. I did take a couple of pictures so I’ll post those, but none of them are pictures of the books. We all know what books look like, after all. But let me tell you a little about how it was.
For starters, the weather was once again great, although a bit windy. The street that has the majority of the stalls is next to the Ijssel, which is why it was so windy. But besides that, it was sunny T-shirt weather, and even though some rain was predicted, it was mainly in the evening when we were long gone. Since I only read English books as that’s my preferred language, I can visit pretty much the entire book fair since I skip a lot of stands that only have Dutch books. I did see a few fun stands with some D&D related stuff, but it’s all stuff I don’t really need and I probably shouldn’t buy too many random things just to have them.
The big problem I ran into this year is that I don’t really want to buy any new series all that much. There were only two book series I was looking into that I found likely to be there, as well as some other stuff that I was keeping an eye out for in the meantime. The first one is Dune, which has been rising in popularity lately and has always sounded interesting to me. But every book I found was basically just what you’d find in the store and priced the same way, so at that point I’d rather just buy one that’s fully new and not looked through by twelve dozen people. I was also on the lookout for Brandon Sanderson books and although I saw a lot of his books, more than I expected, there weren’t any really good starting ones. The only one was Tress and the Emerald Sea, but that had the same issue as Dune, it was just a new book at full price and I am very much at the fair to buy cheap second hand books.
So yeah, long story short I came home with nothing but some bits of Stroopwafels which I ended up giving to my brother because he loves them more than I do. I’m a good person. I’m still catching up on reading a lot of manga and will definitely be talking more about some of the ones I’m currently reading. I finished the physical volumes of Tbate (won’t be talking about that one, I like it but I don’t have a lot of interesting thoughts on it other than that it’s good), and I’m now reading Sailor Moon, which I do have quite a few thoughts on – mostly positive. So I’ll be talking about that in the future, as well as Solo Leveling and Soul Eater, both of which are next on the to-read list. After that I’m going back to some more books/light novels and less manga for a while. There’s not a lot coming out either in the upcoming months and I have at least 50 thick fantasy books laying around that I need to read at some point in my life, so maybe now is as good a time as ever. If you made it all the way through this post, thanks for taking the time to read this, I appreciate it. I’ll be back on Friday with some Hesitant Hero updates.
Opal Kaharis 