I love spy and conspiracy thrillers, so this was right up my alley. Plus, it was a Kindle First, so it was free! I can’t remember the main character’s name. Nevermind, I just looked it up, it’s Dan. It starts out with him finding a guy that he’s supposed to recover for his spy job. I think the job was for the CIA, but he doesn’t actually work for the CIA. I guess you could call him an independent contractor. He actually feels sad once he […]
Someone pay me to travel around Europe eating tasty food and kissing cute boys.
Lucy Knisley is a delightful, talented human being, and I will read every book she chooses to publish. This particular book is a record of her travels to Europe over the summer of 2011. She was invited to speak at a Norwegian comics convention in Bergen, and used the opportunity to travel to Sweden to visit a man she’d met several weeks before when he was vacationing in New York City. She also travels to France (Paris, and another city of which I’ve since forgotten […]
Growing up (in the north of Sweden) is hard to do
Matti grows up in a tiny town in the remote north of Sweden in the 1960s and 70s. The chapters in this book are more like little short stories about different aspects of his childhood and adolescence, chronicled with humour and the occasional forays into strange, magical realism-inspired fantasy sequences. The inhabitants of his town and the surrounding areas seem to be either deeply puritanically religious or Communists, not caring for the trappings of religion at all. The gruff and peculiar inhabitants are set in […]
Michael Bay would hate this book
I chose this book because I got a discount code from Kobo. I got to choose this one from ten titles and I have no idea why I picked it; probably because the rest seemed even more unappetising. I have even less of a clue as to why I picked it up except that I wanted to read something easy and I’m saving Outlander for my upcoming beach holidays. I’m glad I picked it up, though. Spring Tide starts with the murder of a pregnant […]
Wallender must find the targets of a vengeful woman before she does
This was my first foray into the world of Swedish detective Kurt Wallender, and while the main character shares the same alienated, depressed profile of so many of his counterparts in the Scandinavian police procedural literary genre, there is something else to Mankell’s protagonist that makes for a different and interesting reading experience. Wallender’s angst as he goes about his duties does not stem from some personality or mental disorder, but rather from the social and cultural decline he feels is swirling around him, day […]
Miserable Weather + Terrible Taxes = Happy People?
If I’d just seen Michael Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, I never would have read it. First of all, the cover of the Finnish edition is hokey as hell. Bad publisher. Go to your room and think of what you’ve done. Second of all, what would you think, if you saw a book that’s just 300 odd pages about Scandinavia and Scandinavian people? Boring, right? Booth mentions very early on that many people to whom he talked about his book project […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- Next Page »