LH Franz As is my wont, I begin by looking for novels written by the country’s authors.
Like Iceland, most of the books I found were detective stories. The best known in the USA is the Stieg Larsson series beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I had already read those three books, and had also read a couple of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander book series. I did manage to find books that were not detective stories that turned out to be lots of fun: The 100-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson, and The Little Old Lady Who Broke all the Rules by Catherine Ingelman-Sundberg Both are about feisty senior citizens. One is indeed a 100 year old man who climbs out a window to escape the old age home where he’s been living and goes on to have fun and quirky adventures. The other is about a little old lady who, along with some friends, likewise escapes an old age home and becomes the mastermind behind a series of lucrative crimes executed by the oldsters, always managing to elude the police.
It was not only fun to read these books, but it said something to 73-year-old me about a country where old people are depicted as such vibrant characters. Does this reflect the Swedish concept of age and aging? I love these people already!
As for non-fiction, not surprisingly, most history books about Swedish history are written in Swedish, which I do not know. At the nearby Barnes & Noble bookstore, there wasn’t anything specifically about Swedish history. There were, however, books about Viking history which includes the history of Sweden along with the other Scandinavian countries. The three I bought: Children of the Axe and Elm – A History of the Vikings by Neil Price, The Viking Heart – How Scandinavians Conquered the World by Arthur Herman, and The Vikings – A New History by Neil Oliver
In the travel section, there were Rick Steves and Lonely Planet books devoted to Stockholm. There was also a Dorling Kindersley book called Sweden, which I got mainly because after an hour looking for books on Sweden, it was the only one there that actually had the name of the country in the title.
Reading them provided a real education and put Sweden, indeed all of Scandinavia, in a new light.
