Scandinavia & Nordic Literature
Q1 / 2022 Reading Recap
Well, as it turned out 2022 began as 2021 had ended — all work and no play, albeit with the addition of a hospital detour to boot. (Nothing serious, just way more painful and, all told, protracted, than it had any right to be.) So I’m back to posting one summary post for the first […]
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Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö: Roseanna
Blurb: On a July afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from Sweden’s beautiful Lake Vättern. Three months later, all that Police Inspector Martin Beck knows is that her name is Roseanna, that she came from Lincoln, Nebraska, and that she could have been strangled by any one of 85 people. As the […]
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Festive Tasks: Door 12, Task 2 – Snow Covers
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Task 2: Make us a collage or display of your favorite snowy book covers. Prepare to be snowed in …
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Akashic Noir Series: Helsinki Noir
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 6 – Color(s), Book: Read a book with a cover that is more than 50% red or green. Ugh. I thought I’d seen the most cynically sordid that Scandi-noir is able to produce after I’d read Jo Nesbø and Arnaldur Indriðason, but some of the […]
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June 2021 and Mid-Year Reading Recap
Sigh. Well, I think posting a monthly (and even half-year) reading recap a full three weeks into the next month has to be some sort of record, even for me, but here we are. And I admit that at this point I’d even been contemplating holding off another week so as to combine this with […]
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John Steinbeck: The Moon Is Down
My final venture into John Steinbeck’s oeuvre in the context of the (Dead) Authors in Residence challenge, and once more I found confirmation of everything that made me a fan of Steinbeck’s all the way back in my teens: vision and prescience of judgment, exquisitely fine characterization and, perhaps most of all, infinitely great humanity. […]
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An Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “Y”
This is a post belonging to a new blogging project — the title is pretty much self-explanatory, I think; the project’s introductory post can be found HERE. Credit for the idea: BeetleyPete. As always, the only thing linking the two items mentioned in this post in my mind is that they both start with the […]
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2020 Gävle Goat Guess
24 Festive Tasks: Door 8 – St. Lucia’s Day, Task 2: Guess (and strictly no googling!): Is the Gävle goat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A4vle_goat) going to survive until after Christmas this year? December 26, 2020: I’ve admittedly been pushing this task until the very last moment (for purposes of this game, today counts as part of “Christmas”, as […]
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A.S. Byatt: Ragnarok
I decided to go with Byatt’s take on Ragnarök for the “Doomsday” Halloween Bingo square, because let’s face it, doomsday doesn’t get anymore terrifying than in Norse mythology — and I am glad that Byatt, for one, didn’t try to humanize the Norse deities, as so many other authors do in their attempt to make […]
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Halloween Bingo 2020: The Rest of the Game and Wrap-Up
Sooo, that’s another bingo game behind us already! Many thanks to our game hosts for successfully moving the game from BookLikes to a new venue and organizing one heck of a game despite that venue’s built-in limitations. I had a great time and would only have wished I could have participated more throughout the game […]
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BL-opoly, Pandemic Edition – Fifth Roll
Landed on “Go” and rolled again (after double checking the rules since I couldn’t remember how this works — though what with the abolition of “roll days”, it hardly seems to matter this year). I was only moderately impressed with book 1 of Helene Tursten’s Irene Huss series, but this one is supposed to be […]
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January 2020 Reading
January turned out a bit of a roller coaster in RL, continuing the course things had already taken in December: not quite whiplash-inducing, but with several sickness-prone twists and turns (for however much I’d expected them to materialize) surrounding one major glorious event (which was, however, truly glorious; even if this, too, was something I’d […]
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Yrsa Sigurðardóttir: The Legacy
A pleasant surprise, in terms of the book itself at least, was Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s The Legacy, the first book of a series of mysteries / crime novels focusing on the so-called “Children’s House”, the (real) institution that processes children involved in Icelandic court cases (murder trials, custody suits, prosecutions for child abuse, etc.). I liked […]
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Storytelling
24 Festive Tasks: Door 17 – Winter Solstice, Task 4 (Soyal – Zuñi & Hopi / Native American): While systems of written symbols and communication already existed with the Pre-Columbian Native American cultures, to many tribes even today (including the Zuñi and Hopi) the oral tradition is still important. Have you ever had stories told […]
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Katrine Engberg: Krokodilwächter (The Tenant)
24 Festive Tasks: Door 16 – St. Lucia’s Day, Book: Task: Read a book set in Scandinavia / Northern Europe, by a Northern European / Nordic author, with a predominantly white cover (or white with red lettering), newly released in November or December of this year, or set in the candle-lit world (i.e., before the […]
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Books Published Under Two or More Different Titles
24 Festive Tasks: Door 14 – St. Nicholas’ Day / Sinterklaas, Task 3 St. Nicholas is a man of many names in English alone – Santa Claus, Saint Nick, Father Christmas … although in the English speaking world he only comes once (at Christmas, not also on December 6 – whereas in Germany and the […]
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Festivus Feat of Strength: Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina vs. Astrid Lindgren: Pippi Longstocking
24 Festive Tasks: Door 19 – Festivus, Task 2: Battle of the Books: pick two books off your shelf (randomly or with purpose); in a fair fight, which book would come out on top? The fight can be based on the merits of the book itself, its writing, or full-on mano a mano between two […]
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Sleigh Rides
24 Festive Tasks: Door 16 – St. Lucia’s Day, Task 2: Compile a list of five or more carols, poems, short stories, novels or other pieces of writing that feature sleigh rides. On the minus-twentieth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me … Two Christmas carols, one orchestral dance, one fairy tale, […]
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Books With Antonyms in Their Titles
24 Festive Tasks: Door 5 – Bon Om Touk, Task 4: The South Korean flag features images of ying / yang (the blue and red circle in the center) and four sets of three black lines each representing heaven, sun, moon and earth and, in turn, the virtues humanity, justice, intelligence and courtesy. Compile a […]
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My Favorite Children’s Books
24 Festive Tasks: Door 8 – International Children’s Day, Task 1: What was your favorite children’s book growing up? Your favorite middle grade book? The first books I really loved, even before I had learned to read myself, were a number of recorded fairy tales that I owned (in actual record format) — a little […]
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