A fountain of knowledge

No bookshelf is complete without a couple of good encyclopedias and reference books. This one I found at a flea market a few years ago and this is basically the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook, but in real life! (I actually bought a "Junior Woodchucks Guidebook" when I was a kid, but it was a huge disappointment. It was full of games and a few scout tips, like how to make knots and recognize animal tracks, but nothing like the wealth of information I imagined... I`m sure Douglas Adams read Donald Duck a lot as a kid.)

This, however, is a swedish translation of Reader´s Digest´s "How to do just about anything" from 1988. It starts with How to count with an abacus and How to adopt, goes through How to play Canasta, How to clean and repair eye glasses, How to make soups, and ends with How to deal with earache and How to avoid an OD of medication. I laughed when I found it and just had to have it. Can´t remember what I paid for it, but nowhere near what it´s worth, that´s for sure.

Reading maps

It´s two days away: our vacation trip to England! And this is what I´m "reading" at the moment. It`s a heavy thing, covers the entire country and not something I carry with me, but a great inspirational "book", splendidly suitable for armchair travelling. I can spend hours with it, fantasizing about fantastic trips to magic places like Tintagel, Salisbury, or Askrigg. I want to see it all! I really see no reason to travel anywhere else until I have...

In fact, maps are fascinating and one of the interests I share with my husband. If we find maps from some interesting place, like a boxful of historical maps of Berlin, with and without the wall, it is a obvious souvenir. Our guestroom is furnished with some of our favourites, like an old map of Prague, one of London (yes!), and one of Africa (with a big piece of land named "unexplored territory").

We will be traveling to places of literary interest like Coventry, Oxford, Cambridge and Milton Keynes. More on that later on.

Choosing the perfect vacation read, part III

A decision has been reached. I shall take Rosamunde Pilcher and her collection of short stories with me on vacation. A friend said "You won´t like it." and I suspect she could be right. At least I will have no problems giving it away.

But who knows? I might surprise myself.

"Storsien - 100 år i en norrbottnisk by", by Anne-Christine Liinanki

It´s taken me a while to get to this book. The author is local, she´s a friend of a friend, and she and I were both students at a creative writing course at the university. She has been clever and ambitious enough to get her first book published and it´s been available for two years now.

It´s a pretty short read, it only took me a couple of hours, and I like that because there is no interruption. It´s like a long short story, the format is comfortable. It´s about a family in four generations, from the late 19th Century to present day, about a village in the north of Sweden (in the middle of nowhere, some might say), it´s about a World War II labour camp for "traitors", i e people of dissentient views (marxist, mostly). It´s also about love for the forrest lands, about the conflict between the colonizing swedes and the indigenous people, the Sami, and the plight of women in the socially unequal society that pre-industrial Sweden was.

The author uses a language rich in imagery, which is usually not to my taste, but in a shorter novel like this, I have to say I didn´t really grow tired of it until perhaps the very last pages. The metaphores used are usually refering to the forrest, farming, animals and it really enhances the world view of these people. A girl tries to imagine a city, for example, and she sees a meadow. Or she gets the same feeling as a meadow. This is all really clever and very effective.

The psychology is also very convincing, until the last character enters the story. I can´t feel that this woman is real, even though I really, really like her. It´s like all the lack of power in the generations before her is realized in her. She is a piece of wishful thinking, perhaps. And that´s ok, this is fiction after all and an author should push the boundaries for her characters, I think. Set new examples for women to be inspired by.

I can really recommend this book, if you read swedish. It won´t take to much of your time, and you won´t forget it anytime soon.

Bread and circuses

Actually, I started reading one of those books in my might-take-on-vacation-pile. Just finished it. Pretty quick read, as all detective stories are. Usually with these books, I feel a bit hurried. I´m not exactly enjoying it, but like anyone, I want to know how it ends, how the author manages to stitch the whole thing up. Kerr has not done a bad job of it, I have to say.

What I object to in this novel is all the hostility, the hard-boiled american-type dialogues that seem so un-british, somehow. Philip Kerr´s hero is a female Scotland Yard Chief Inspector, ridiculously beautiful, young, clever, glamorous, and viciously man-hating (she actually regularly sees a therapist about this. Ironically, she is named Jake. The only genuine affection she shows to anyone is directed towards her target, a "multiple" (which refers to serial killing, not a personality disorder), an introverted (of course!) maniac who kills twelve men, execution-style. They seem to have something in common, somehow.

And, as the title, "A Philosophical Investigation", suggests, there is a lot of philosophy about the nature of crime and killing. Some of these parts I actually skipped. I suppose I´m not sufficiently interested in either philosophy or crime. It was this particular fictional crime I was interested in and I was eager to get to the end.

Another thing that irritated me a bit was that this story was set in the future. Being 2013. The book was published in 1992. And while Kerr has imagined a bit about future information technology, he has not been imaginative enough. He didn´t envision the mobile phone, or just how tiny gadgets were going to get, and he thought we would start calling our tv or our recorders something else because the technology behind the screen changed. Names stick better than he thought. Or we name things after the way we use it or the brand that supplies us with it, not after the technology inside it.

Not a classic, and a bit of a waste of time, really. But it happens. Sometimes I just pick something up and must finish it. A bit like a bad soap on telly, it draws you in by cheap, but effective tricks. Numbs you. But as far as detective novels go, it´s ok. Far better than that da Vinci-code crap.... After a read like this I kind of feel like I have been eating cream gateau for both lunch and dinner! I crave something a bit more nutritious now.

Choosing the perfect vacation read, part II

I have raided my shelves for candidates. There are six of them, all rather different. (That´s the crown princess´s wedding on tv.) I imagine you can see the titles.

First, there is Kurt Vonnegut´s "Cat´s cradle". An "apocalyptic tale... blackly fatalistic and hilarously funny". I really liked his essays in "Palm Sunday" but I haven´t read "Slaughterhouse-Five" or any fiction at all by him. A bit of a gamble.

Then, Rosamunde Pilcher´s "Flowers in the rain and other stories". I may have read her sometime in the 80´s, but I can´t remember anything about her. I have friends who love her, and it´s all very english, which fits with the general mood of the trip, I think. But will I really like it?

Then, two detective stories. Philip Kerr´s "A philosophical investigation" and Ken Follett´s "Night over water". Actually, the last one is described as a "romantic thriller" so it might not exactly be a whodunit.

I also have Joseph Conrad´s "Victory" with an anti-hero somewhere in the colonies and George Eliot´s "The Mill on the Floss". Eliot´s might turn out to be one I will like to keep, so I´m not sure I dare bring it along. And Conrad might be a bit too heavy for planes and trains.

I suppose Follett and Kerr are the sure ones. Perhaps. But I will need to sleep on it. I have a week to decide.

Choosing the perfect vacation read

I have a problem. What shall I bring on vacation? I want it to be something I can leave behind when I have read it, so it needs to be in english (we are traveling to Oxford, Cambridge, Coventry and London this year), it needs to be light (paperback), it needs to be something exciting and amusing but not something I will want to keep and read a second time. It must be clever, too.

I am hugely fussy with my reading under normal circumstances, I rarely read through more than one of three books I take home from the library. So to limit myself to one choice only, I can easily go totally wrong!

I will have to dive into my bookshelves this week and see what I come up with.