Bookmarks

I started thinking about bookmarks last night, having found a rather beautiful promotional one in the shape of a feather inside my new book (The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton). I have a bit of a strange relationship with bookmarks. If I don't have one to hand when I start reading, often I don't use one at all, and then get annoyed every time I pick the book up and have to hunt for the page. I like "found" bookmarks - old train tickets and gift tags and shopping lists. I particularly like other people's "found" bookmarks, which they leave in library books by accident. And then I got to thinking about the concept of a bookmark. If you put a book down for 5 minutes, you don't really need one, you can remember the page number. They're handy for a book you only pick up at bedtime (most of the books I read fall into this category), unless you fall asleep with your face in the book and lose the page anyway. (Faces do not make for good bookmarks.) But I have a lot of books with bookmarks in that I haven't picked up for months. Years, even. I lose bookmarks this way, leaving them in books that live in piles of other books, forgotten. The bookmarks say "you were here", but "here", years later, isn't always a place you recognise. Often you have to start again, paradoxically, in order to work out where you were. Maybe the bookmark in that case just acts as a reminder that at one point you thought the book worth reading, or that you changed your mind and decided it wasn't.

I've realised that I bookmark knitting projects too, in a similar way. For the project I pick up every day (this never happens), I don't need a bookmark. Ones I pick up less often, it's good to have a note of where I was in the pattern, otherwise it's tedious to go back and count things and try and work it out. And other projects are like the half-read books on my shelves. I don't know that I will go back and finish them. Maybe I got bored or changed my mind. If I wanted to go back to one of them I'd probably have to start again, not least because in all probability I'd have appropriated the needles for another project and wouldn't remember what size I was supposed to be using. But I did start it, once. So it sits, bookmarked, in a collection of other bookmarked things. Pending.