As is my wont, I begin by looking for novels written by the country\u2019s authors.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>. I had already read those three books, and had also read a couple of Henning Mankell\u2019s Kurt Wallander<\/a> 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<\/a> by Jonas Jonasson, and The Little Old Lady Who Broke all the Rules<\/a> by Catherine Ingelman-Sundberg \u00a0Both 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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!<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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<\/a> by Neil Price, The Viking Heart – How Scandinavians Conquered the World<\/a> by Arthur Herman, and The Vikings – A New History by Neil Oliver<\/a><\/p>\n In the travel section, there were Rick Steves<\/a> and Lonely Planet<\/a> books devoted to Stockholm. There was also a Dorling Kindersley book called Sweden<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n Reading them provided a real education and put Sweden, indeed all of Scandinavia, in a new light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As is my wont, I begin by looking for novels written by the country\u2019s authors. Like Iceland, most of the books I found were detective … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1066,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,108,109],"tags":[116,113,119,118,110,112,114,115,117],"class_list":["post-1092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pandemic","category-stockholm","category-sweden","tag-children-of-the-axe-and-elm-a-history-of-the-vikings","tag-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo","tag-lonely-planet-stockholm","tag-rick-steves-stockholm","tag-stockholm","tag-sweden","tag-the-100-year-old-man-who-climbed-out-the-window-and-disappeared","tag-the-little-old-lady-who-broke-all-the-rules","tag-the-viking-heart-how-scandinavians-conquered-the-world","has-meta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldladytraveler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldladytraveler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldladytraveler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldladytraveler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldladytraveler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1092"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/oldladytraveler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1117,"href":"https:\/\/oldladytraveler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092\/revisions\/1117"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldladytraveler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldladytraveler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldladytraveler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldladytraveler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}