Book blogs are often filled by photos of books, which makes sense, after all that is what we are writing about. However, when I started my book blog I realized that Swedish copyright law did not necessarily allow me to freely use book covers in reviews. Of course few publishers would complain about free publicity, but it still seemed easier not to use them. On the other hand, a book blog without illustrations would look rather boring. I therefore started to look through my own photos hunting for suitable illustrations for each blog post, with variable success. Sometimes I have been lucky enough to have some actually relevant photos, other times I have tried to capture a mood and, quite often, I have had to go with whatever I could find, occasionally something that only made sense to myself.
Anyway I thought it could be fun to show you some good and bad examples and explain some of my selections.
Relevant photos
Scandinavian authors are usually the easiest to illustrate as most of my photos are taken in Scandinavia. Most of the time I can at least find a photo with the right type of landscape, although not necessarily from the right region.
A pasture for Vilhelm Moberg and a forest for Dan Andersson, each showing the kind of landscapes they wrote about.
Setting the mood
A depressing train station was meant to illustrate the town after The Grey Men took over in Momo and a scary-looking hook was used to illustrate a blog post asking for crime fiction recommendations.
A striking flower was selected to illustrate The Great Gatsby, while a discussion on the publisher Slightly Foxed called for gentler flowers.
Well, I have to use something…
Surely any photo from Russia can illustrate any Russian novel and the flowers on the left did grow in Russia. Too bad none of my readers would know that… Illustrating Midnight’s children also proved difficult as I haven’t been anywhere near India, but at least I could sort of capture the colours of the flag.
Even though the result is not always great I do enjoy using my own photos and like the challenge in trying to find a suitable illustration from a somewhat narrow selection. So perhaps it is a good thing that I could not use book photos as I had originally planned.
During 2020:
It is the last day of the year and although the full reading report will have to wait until the new year (in case I finish any more books today), I believe it is time to report my progress on the various reading challenges I undertook this year.
The darkest day is not in the mid-winter but right before the first winter snow. Few things can transform a landscape so completely as the first snow. What once was a muddy grey-black darkness is now sparkling in bright white and blue, every lost ray of light reflected and multiplied.
Today marks the end of my second year in the 