The Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott Lynch

It took me a while to get into The Lies of Locke Lamora because it has a slow build up with lots of exposition. It was never annoying though and the further I got in the book the harder it was to put down. The Lies of Locke Lamora is an excellent book and I can highly recommend it to anyone who likes Fantasy as a genre, interesting characters and good solid world building.

The fictional city of Camorr, where the titular Locke Lamora lives and steals things, is almost a character in it’s own right in that is is so richly described and full off nooks and cranny’s yet to be discovered. I enjoyed Locke’s character quite a lot, although like the book itself it was one that had to grow on me while reading. (I often like roguish characters instantly, so this was different from the norm for me.) I also really felt connected to Locke’s friend Jean Tannen. There are so many different and interesting people in this book, and I feel like each and everyone of them could be the main character of a next book. For the bookmark I have chosen some symbols that refer to some of these characters, and all together they could stand for Camorr as a whole. I hope that those of you who’ve read The Lies of Locke Lamora will see what I tried to get across in this bookmark. Because I can’t get my scanner to work with my new computer, it took me a while to find a workable alternative. The scanner at my job does some weird auto contrast thing that doesn’t really look good for soft pencil work like with this bookmark, so in the end I just took a lot of photos with my camera trying to get the best angle. It’s not ideal, but it works.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

I really enjoyed reading The Great Gatsby, something I was worried wouldn’t happen when I started. I know it’s a famous classic, but that does not mean it is an accessible read, especially to a non-native speaker like me. But I got used to the style quite quickly! The most surprising thing to me was how much I related to the narrator, I really liked him and trusted his point of view.

When it comes to The Great Gatsby a lot has already been written and symbols have been dissected. The library copy I read included a very long introduction which analyses the book. I had started reading it, but decided to stop because I want to read a book and not be stuck in pre-conceived notions about what is important, but rather let things jump out at me and afterwards see if they were the same things.

I had expected there to be a lot more references to the green dock light, because I had seen a vlogbrothers video in which John Green talks about the Great Gatsby and mentions it a lot. But when I was actually reading the book, I got much more attached to Gatsbys car. That is why I drew it on the bookmark, and made it be the only thing that has colour to contrast it with Gatsbys house, which does not actually feel like a house but is just a backdrop.

I had a lot of trouble with this bookmark, I’m not a car-person, so drawing one was not easy for me. I had come up with several sketches that I didn’t like, car- or house-wise. But in the end I found a couple of reference photos of 20’s cars online that gave me an idea of what should go where as far as the car was concerned. I hope you like the result.

The scan of the bookmark looks different than the other bookmarks, because I can’t get my scanner to work on my new computer, so I scanned it at work. The bookmark is winsor & newton ink with a bit of watercolour.

Ik ben er voor niemand – Ingmar Heytze

Let me start by saying this is one of my favorite books. To my knowledge it has not been translated into English, but I wanted to do it for I found a bookmark anyway, because I love it so.

Ik ben er voor niemand (I’m here for nobody/I don’t exist for anybody) tells the story of a guy called Return to Sender. He talks about his life and the strange creatures who are a part of it, most notably a girl he names Egel (Hedgehog). Their relationship, though now over, informs a lot of his life. Other important characters are the unicorn, who sends him letters because they always seem to just miss meeting each other, the gnome who makes others feel little so that he can feel a bit taller himself and a fox who talks mostly about how to devour small animals like hedgehogs. Ik ben er voor niemand has very loose story structure. Heytze is a poet (I also really love his poetry) who tells this story in little self contained snippets of text. All of which are easily quoted on their own as having something interesting or funny to say. Together they tell a larger story that reveals itself to the reader as you get further along in the book. It is not a large tome, but it feels good to let the individual pieces of prose linger in your mind a bit before going to the next one.

The bookmark I made refers to one of the little stories about the gnome, who I always find hilarious. In it the gnome gets stuck in the roots of a large oak tree. It is made entirely with water colour pencils, and I’m really happy about the colours.

If you can read Dutch I highly recommend reading Ik ben er voor niemand.