Henrik Madsen's ROOTs are piling up

2023 was a bit disappointing, rooting-wise. I managed just 39, and I bought a looooot of books, so I definitely have to pick up steam this year.

My goal in 2024 will once again be 50 ROOTs. As I have done in previous years I will count everything owned as ROOTs. The really tough ones (acquired before 2014) will be labelled DROOTs (Deep roots).

This year my goal will be 50 books. Happy ROOTing everyone!



ROOTs
1. Anne Weber: Annette, ein Heldinnenepos
2. Chris Claremont og John Byrne: X-Men: Fra asken i ilden
3. Caroline Albertine Minor: Hummerens skjold
4. Chris Claremont og John Byrne: X-Men: Fortiden af i går
5. Elizabeth Strout: Olive Kitteridge
6. Asta Olivia Nordenhof: Djævlebogen
7. Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved
8. Eilis Dillon: The Bitter Glass
9. Svetlana Aleksijevitj: Bøn for Tjernobyl
10. Villy Sørensen: Sære historier
11. Sean Howe: Marvel Comics - The Untold Story
12. Chris Claremont og Frank Miller: Wolverine
13. Alistair MacLean: Drama på indlandsisen
14. Ronen Steinke: Fritz Bauer - oder Auschwitz vor Gericht
15. Helga Schubert: Vom Aufstehen
16. Alexandre Dumas: De tre musketerer
17. Delphine de Vigan: Baseret på en sand historie
18. Jim Shooter, Mike Zeck og Bob Layton: Secret Wars - den skjulte strid
19. Knud E. Rasmussen: Det trykte bogstav
20. Jim Shooter og Frank Springer: Dazzler - The Movie
21. Marie Bregendahl: Birgitte Borg
22. Nadezjda Mandelstam: Med håb imod håb
23. Thomas Boberg: Insula
24. Maren Uthaug: 11%
25. Lars Kramhøft: Husvild
26. Ursula K. Le Guin: Troldmanden fra Jordhavet
27. Han Kang: Lektioner i græsk
28. Isaac Asimon: Foundation and Empire
29. Karin Michaëlis: Krigens ofre
30. Todd McFarlane: Spider-Man 1
31. Anne Brontë: Agnes Grey
32. Kim W. Andersson: Alena

DROOTs
1. Peer Hultberg: Byen og verden
2. Markus Wolf: Manden uden ansigt

Non-ROOTs
Ryu Murakami: I misosuppen
Fatma Aydemir: Ånder (Dschinns)
Wolfgang Koeppen: Der Tod in Rom
Walter Scott: Quentin Durward
Victor Pelevin: The Life of Insects
Nikolaj Leskov: Den fortryllede vandringsmand
Sara Stridsberg: Hunter i Huskvarna
Lisa Weeda: Alexandra
Zaharia Stancu: Djævelens plovfure
Jens Christian Grøndahl: Fra i nat sover jeg på taget
Osip Mandelstam: Kun min fælle kan slå mig ihjel
Erica Jong: Luft under vingerne
Ian McEwan: Lektioner
Serge og Loisel: Ramors konkylie

My main goal this year is of course 50 ROOTs but I also have a secondary goal. Not reading the books I buy myself is one thing, but not having read the ones people have given me as gifts is embarrassing.

Last year I managed to read five of those - and I made enough recepies from the cook book on the list to strike that one. Unfortunately, at least from this perspective, I also got seven new ones....

So, this year I will continue focusing on finally getting through all those nice gifts:

Pre-2014
Michel de Montaigne: Essays
Henning Grelle: Thorvald Stauning
Karl Popper: Det åbne samfund og dets fjender
Søren Mørch: Store forandringer
Pia Friis Laneth: Lillys Danmarkshistorie

2018
Gunnar Svendsen mfl.: Vækst og vilkår på landet
Niels Boje Groth: Stationsbyer i dag
Søren Marquardt Frederiksen: Pestlægen
Bo Tao Michaelis og Bente Scavenius: Danmarksbilleder

2019
Tove Ditlevsen: Små hverdagsproblemer
Andrea Wulff: Opfindelsen af naturen
Thomas Mann: Et upolitisk menneskes betragtninger

2020
William Shakespeare: Samlede skuespil i ny oversættelse bind III

2021
Morten Pape: Guds bedste børn
Anne-Lise Marstrand Jørgensen: Margrethe I
Colson Whitehead: Drengene fra Nickel
Elizabeth Strout: Olive Kitteridge
Jesper Clemmensen: Skibet fra helvede

2022
J.D. Salinger: Griberen i rugen
Jeanette Varberg: Vikinger
Thorkild Bjørnvig: Pagten
Nadezja Mandelstam: Med håb mod håb
Mark Millar: Kick-Ass
Aline og Robert Crumb: Tegn på kærlighed

2023
Maren Uthaug: 11%
Charles Dickes: A Tale of Two Cities
Anne Brontë: Agnes Grey
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
William Shakespeare: Samlede skuespil i ny oversættelse bind 4
Niels Brunse: Hvorfor Shakespeare?
Alex Shulman: Brænd alle mine breve

2024
Giuliano da Empoli: Troldmanden fra Kreml
Anne-Marie Mai: Litteraturland - en GPS
Greg Pak: Planet Hulk - Bog 1
Asta Olivia Nordenhof: Djævlebogen
Frank Miller: Daredevil bind 1
Lilian Munk Rösing: Friedrichs farver

Welcome back, Henrik! Great idea to focus on gift books. I have a book from Christmas 2012 that I haven't read yet...yikes!

Hi Henrik. Good to see you again with the ROOTers. Go get them!

Welcome back!

Welcome back. I'm embarrassed by the number of gift books I've still not read too (so embarrassed that I haven't dared count them!).

Good luck with reading those gift books. I've been pretty good at reading mine in recent years, but know I also have some that have been hanging around an inexplicably long time.

ETA: Now I've checked, not so inexplicably for some of them - big, fat history books, given to me back at a time of life when I had more free time and concentration, but apparently still not enough to tackle them straight away!

Good luck with those gift books, Henrik. Some of them are on my TBR, too, so I'll be looking out for your comments.

Thanks all. I'm looking forward to a better reading year - and hopefully also a year with a bit more activity on the boards.

>7 Rebeki: I know the feeling about some gift books being hard to handle. Most of my really old ones are chunksters as well.

1. Anne Weber: Annette, ein Heldinnenepos

Acquired: I read an article about the book after it received the German Bookprize in 2020 and bought a copy a couple of years later at a trip to Braunlage in Harz

Anne Beaumanoir was a French woman born in Bretagne in 1923. During occupation she joined the communist resistance, left it when it betrayed her ideals only to get caught up in another conflict as she helped FLN during the Algerian war of independence. Her motifs were largely the same, fighting for freedom from foreign oppressors. Most French obviously saw things differently.

Anne is an interesting person, and I enjoyed reading about her life. I also enjoyed how the book was told as an "epos" of ancient times, that is it is written in verse though the text can also be read as prose.

Anyway, good to finally get a ROOT done

4 stars

Last thursday was my birthday - and naturally I had some books on my wishlist. Three wonderful new books revealed themselves from the wrapping paper, which was great but also added three more books to list of gift-books to be read.

Oh well, it's back to the drawing board, or, more accurately, back to the my reading corner on the sofa.

Congrats, Henrik.

I had to smile at what you said about books as presents. If you don't want more books on the TBR, you better not put them on your wish list. ;-))

>12 connie53: Thanks Connie

And you are right of course, I really don't "need" any, but I just like new books so much!

Happy belated birthday, Henrik. Enjoy your new books! There are no better presents, aren't there?

>14 MissWatson: Often it's all I really want, but I feel like I have to make up some other wishes as well.

(BTW I also got tickets for the Caspar David Friedrich exposition in Hamburg, which I'm really looking forward to. So I do enjoy other gifts as well.)

>15 Henrik_Madsen: Oh, wow! I want to go there, too, just haven't gotten round to organising tickets yet. I really need to get my skates on for this.

2. Chris Claremont og John Byrne: X-Men: Fra asken i ilden

Acquired: Chris Claremont visited the Copenhagen bookfair in the fall, and it was a huge experience hearing him talk about his work on the X-Men. And of course I bought some of his books.

This book contains X-Men #129-137 which is generally known as the Dark Phoenix Saga. Jean Grey is Phoenix, a young woman who has the power of a god but is unable to handle all that power. She is pushed over the edge by evil men, and in the end she has to make a radical choice to end the story as a human being.

Obviously you have to like comics and the super hero genre to really appreciate the book, but if you do the storybuilding by Claremont and the art work by Byrne is pretty much the best you can get. I read for the first time in the late 1980s and it hasn't lost a bit of its power.

5 stars

>11 Henrik_Madsen: Happy belated birthday Henrik!

>18 Jackie_K: Thanks, Jackie.

Happy belated birthday! Enjoy your new gift books!

>20 rabbitprincess: Thanks! I got another this weekend when I finally had time to celebrate my birthday with my mother and sister.

3. Caroline Albertine Minor: Hummerens skjold

Acquired: I'm still making my way through books acquired through my book club even though it closed down more than a year ago. This one I got in 2020.

The novel focuses on the three sieblings Ea, Sidsel and Niels. They have lost their parents when they were young - Niels was still a kid - and they are haunted by it. Now they are grown up, but they are still plagued by it, and during a few days they have to face their current lives. Intertwined with the main story is the clairvoyant Belle and her daughter, another broken family.

Minor is a very talented author. The writing is good and especially her female characters are great, but this novel is not a coherent whole. There are too many detours and the characters doesn't really interact.

3 stars

4. Chris Claremont og John Byrne: X-Men: Fremtiden af i går

Acquired: After reading the Phoenix Saga I absolutely had to read this volume as well, so I bought it the local bookshop in February.

The volume contains six issues and an annual from the original X-Men series. They were published 1980-81 and the story picks up right after the end of the Phoenix saga. The best story - and the one for which the volume is named - tells the parallel story of a dystopian future, where robots (the Sentinels) have taken over control of North America to protect humans from the mutant threat, and the present where the X-Men fight to stop the events which will eventually lead to the disaster.

That story is a brilliant piece of science fiction, and the rest of the book is pretty good as well.

4 stars

5. Elizabeth Strout: Olive Kitteridge

Acquired: I always hope to get books for my birthday, and I usually do, but in February 2021 during the second lockdown, I hardly got anything else. It suited me just fine, and this novel was one of them.

Olive Kitteridge and her husband Henry live in a small town in Maine. They are going into retirement and as they try to figure out their new place in life, we learn about them, their family, their friends and some passions that were never realized. Olive is a complicated character: she always speaks her mind, and she doesn't much care, what other people think about her. She is hardly always right, but things always matter to her, and she has a profound influence on many people in the small community where she used to teach at the local school.

The book is a well-written novel about growing old and it is also a nice portrait of a small town where many characters are allowed to have their day in the sun - or at least their own chapter. Olive is usually there in all of them, but sometimes just a little at the edge of the picture. Its reputation is well deserved.

4 stars

6. Asta Olivia Nordenhof: Djævlebogen (The Devil's Book)

Acquired: Another birthday gift - this one form just a month ago.

This is the second novel in Nordenhof's series about the Scandinavian Star catastrophy in the early 1990s. The author wanted to write about the business man behind the shipping company, but she found out, she couldn't do it. Instead she writes a story about an author who once had a troubling experiens as a sex worker and now stays with a man in London during lockdown. There are also some parts on verse, which didn't really stick with me.

Nordenhof writes a brilliant prose and has a great understanding of people on the fringe of society, but I'm much less impressed with her political analysis, and this book wasn't very coherent.

3½ stars

7. Primo Levi: De druknede og de frelste

Acquired: I bought a volume with Levi's three books on Auschwitz last year - this is the last part.

This book is Levi's final reflection on his experience in Auschwitz. It is not just about his own experience but also an attempt to understand the whole system surrounding Auschwitz and the holocaust. As such it is an extremely interesting book, because Levi is able to fuse his own firsthand experience with materiale from other sources and his analytical skills. Furthermore his writing is both lucid and deeply personal.

The Drowned and the Saved is a brilliant but also deeply troubling book. Levi has looked into the abyss that is the human soul in extreme conditions, and it is not a pretty sight.

4½ stars

>26 Henrik_Madsen: I can imagine that must be an overwhelming book to read, Henrik.

>27 connie53: It is, but it also very interesting, because he tries to analyze what happens more than "just" telling about the atrocities he saw.

8. Peer Hultberg: Byen og verden

Acquired: I bought this at a library sale, when I lived in Odense. Probably twenty years ago.

Byen og verden is a portrait of a Danish provinsial town in the 20th century. It is written in 100 separate texts, and each text focus on an individual or a family - but many characters are mentioned several times as the book details the interconnections, the affairs and the feuds among the upper middle class of judges, officers, teachers and priests.

I enjoyed the book at first, but in the end I lost interest in the constant flow of new characters and the peculiar writing style.

3½ stars

9. Eilis Dillon: The Bitter Glass

Acquired: It was the group read with the 1001-group in march. I couldn't get hold of a copy from the library, so I bought it online.

Four sieblings, a friend, a fiancee, a nurse and two babies travel to the countryside outside Galway during the Irish Civil War. They try to get away, but they are cut off when a bridge i bombarde. Shortly after the babies become sick, a column of soldiers settles down at the the estate and thing start going downhill.

It is an interesting book about Irish history and what happens to a group of young people under pressure. I enjoyed reading the novel, but it is not particularly memorable.

3 stars

Hi Henrik, >28 Henrik_Madsen:. Thanks for the further info.

10. Svetlana Aleksijevitj: Bøn for Tjernobyl

Acquired: I bought it on a sale in one of my favorite bookstores in Copenhagen a couple of years ago.

Aleksivitj was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for her books on the world that fell apart, when the Soviet Union collapsed. They feel like non-fiction, because she collects the oral history and memories from ordinary people, but she herself insists that they are literature. That is undoubtedly true, because the art is in the composition of the voices into a whole.

The focus of this book is the Chernobyl nuclear disaster which shook the belief in nuclear power as a secure technoly, undermined the faith in the abilities of the Soviet Union and caused huged destruction and suffering in the nearby areas and in vast areas of Belarus, which received most of the radioactive polution.

It is a grueling but also very good book, even though it didn't feel quite as complete as Krigen har ikke et kvindeligt ansigt Still, definitely worth reading.

4 stars

11. Villy Sørensen: Sære historier

Acquired: I picked this one up in a local secondhand store last year. It had been on my wishlist forever - and now it was time to read it.

This is the author's debut from 1953. It contains a number of "weird" stories, some of them very allegorical, others just absurd in a modernistic way. It is also very Danish, because the absurd parts never feels really dangerous. Even a story openly inspired by Kafka is more comedy that tragedy, so even though Sørensen's talent and wit is full display, I just wasn't very moved by the the stories.

3 stars

Doing great on your ROOTS! I was in Copenhagen for a few days earlier this month and really enjoyed my visit :)

>34 rabbitprincess: Thanks - and I'm glad you enjoyed Copenhagen. It is a really nice city. I never lived there myself, but my daughter moved there last year and go regularly for the things that are not available in our cozy provincial town.

12. Sean Howe: Marvel Comics - The Untold Story

Acquired: Most people have probably noticed that I have really started reading (super hero) comics again, and last year I bought this book to learn more about how it all started.

Sean Howe has read lots of comics, lots of source material, and interviewed more or less everybody to tell the story of Marvel from the beginning to the 2000s. A small group lead by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko created a huge amount of original characters in the early 1960s, which still dominate the huge and always expanding Marvel Universe.

The book is obviously mostly interesting for people already interested in comics, but it is also very well done. You get the feeling that you are right there when the editorial staff plans new stories, and Howe mixes anecdotes with analys and retelling of the most well-known story lines. It works especially well for the first three decades but get a little repetitive as speculation and financial power struggles take center stage in the 1990s.

4 stars

13. Chris Claremont og Frank Miller: Wolverine

Acquired: Claremont was a guest at the Copenhagen Book Fair last year. It was very cool seeing him interviewed, and of course I bought some of his comics for signing as well.

Wolverine is going to Japan to find out why his beloved Mariko has vanished. Things turn out terrible as it is revealed, that her father Shingen has returned, forced her to marry a suspect character, and is now trying to disgrace Wolverine and take over the Japanese underworld. Wolverine is dumped in Tokyo and saved, sought of, by Yukio. She is an accomplished assasin and pretty insane but useful when the Hand shows up.

I enjoyed the story a lot. Claremont is holding back a bit with the number of words, and the story is both good and well told. That goes double for the drawings. Miller is made for a series like this where he can let lose with his fascination with Japan, martial arts and ninjas.

4½ stars

14. Alistair MacLean: Drama på indlandsisen

Acquired: There is a large flea market in Maribo where I work. I usually go there at least once a year, and I never really buy anything except books. This one I picked up two years ago - I'm revisiting some books from my youth, at there was a time when I read a LOT of MacLean novels.

The scene is set on the ice of the interior of Greenland where a plane crashes near a research station. Paul Mason and his collegues rescue the survivors only to find out there is foul play. The crash was not an accident and there are murders among the living. Also, supplies are dwindling so they have to travel to the coast for survival. Obviously many, many things go wrong.

MacLean was never subtle or a great writer of characters, but when his plots work out, he throws so much action at you, that it's hard not to be gripped by the action. Sometimes the characters are too flat or the plot too implausible, but it worked out really well here. Also: Thrille + who-dunnit-mystery is a pretty strong mixture.

4 stars

>38 Henrik_Madsen: Oh, that takes me back! I must have read most of them in my impressionable youth and I always loved the casual banter.

>38 Henrik_Madsen: Agreed, this was a good one!

>39 MissWatson: >40 rabbitprincess: I would definitely recommend this one, other of his books not much.

15. Ronen Steinke: Fritz Bauer - oder Auschwitz vor Gericht

Acquired: I bought this one in Berlin three years ago after visiting the excellent Topographie des Terrors exibition.

Fritz Bauer was born in Stuttgart - where we went on vacation for a week this July - in a Jewish and very national family. That didn't shield him from abuse, especially not af after WWI where antisemitism was very strong at German universities. His response was politics, law and organization, and even though resistance didn't succeed, it left deep traces in him. After surviving the war in exile in Denmark and Sweden, her returned to help build the new judicial system, reform German laws an prosecute guilty nazis. His most important feat was orchestrating the large Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the 1960s.

It is a good biography which never really gets under the very private Bauer's skin, but it is very good with his public persona. My only quibble is with the handling of the Auschwitz trial, that is somehow superficial. Maybe Steinke thinks it's covered elsewhere, maybe the theme is too big to handle in a biography, but it is a bit frustrating that the something announced in the title isn't really treated in depth in the book.

4 stars

16. Helga Schubert: Vom Aufstehen

Acquired: We went to Lübeck a couple of years ago, where I looked for some popular contemporary literature. This one looked interesting.

Helga Schubert was born in 1940, grew up in East Germany, and grew old in the reunited Germany. This book is her biography, not told as one continuing story but through 29 stories. Schuberts story is also a story of Germany, and the small and Schubert very skilfully combines the small and the big story. The relationship to her mother is a focus point, so is life in the the East German dictatorship, and the universal experience of getting old.

It is a very good book - the stories are interesting and so is the writing style.

4 stars

17. Alexandre Dumas: De tre musketerer

Acquired: I found this one in a community-run secondhand shop on vacation in Kalundborg in 2021. It was during the pandemic where we didn't want to go abroad.

Everybody knows the story, so there is no sense in telling what the novel is about. But it is one of the classic adventure novels for a reason. Dumas writes great characters, there is both comedy and tragedy, and he manages to do a consistent plot over 800 pages.

I think I read it when I was a kid - maybe in an abreviated version, and obviously I have seen film versions numerous times. Nevertheless, reading it again was a great idea. It is wonderful.

5 stars

Hi Henrik, here I am again, visiting threads and now I got to yours. How are you doing? I hope everything is going well with you and yours. Happy ROOTing.

>45 connie53: Hi Connie - thanks for stopping by. I'm doing well, but a lot is going on. We just helped my son move out because he is starting at university. It is all as it should be, but after 20+ years with children in our house, it is something else just to be the two of us.

Despite the best of intentions, I'm not here at much as I would like. Hope you are doing good as well.

18. Delphine de Vigan: Baseret på en sand historie

Acquired: This was book of the month shortly after being published in Danish in 2016 - and it's been patiently waiting for my attention ever since.

De Vigan had her great breakthrough with a novel about the life and death of her mother. Afterwards she was confronted with questions about how "true" the novel was, at and the intertwined relationship between fiction and reality is one of the thems of this book. The narrator is a succesful author who has just published a book about the life and death of her mother. Now she is heading for a writing crisis, and she has met the mysterious L. She becomes a close friend, but she also starts taking over the narrators life in subtle ways.

De Vigan cites Misery by Stephen King for good reason. This is a brilliant thriller and an interesting study in the relationship between reality and author and reader, between fiction and reality. It keeps you on your toes until the very end. Definitely one of the best books I have read this year.

5 stars

20. Jim Shooter mfl: Den skjulte strid

Acquired: I bought this book at Copenhagen Comics in May.

To most Marvel nerds this is a well-known story. Originally published 1984-85 it gathers the greatest heroes and some of the greatest villains in world far, far way where the Beyonder has arranged a sort gladiatorial battle. The bad guys fight among eachother, so do the good guys to a degree. The mistrust between the mutants and the rest is also prevalent in space. The story is obviously bigger than big, but I did enjoy the plot. Shooter is not a good writer, but it was interesting re-reading the story because it is so important for the rest of the universe.

3 stars

21. Jim Shooter og Frank Springer: Dazzler - The Movie

This is not a good comic book, and it's definitely not as good as the story deserves. Alison Blair, the Dazzler, is trying to make her way as a singer and actress, but also working overtime as a superhero. She is a mutant and in this story it is revealed to the world, which is obviously a pretty big thing for her.

Sadly Frank Springer is not having his best time with the pencils, and Jim Shooter's storytelling is terrible. Worst of all, he totally misunderstands Alison Blair as a character. What she does in one scene doesn't mean anything for her behavior in the next.

2 stars

22. Marie Bregendahl: Birgitte Borg

Acquired: Bregendahl is a female author who has been forgotten by critics but rediscovered in recent years. When I found this in a local recycle shop for 1½ euro I had to take it home.

Birgitte Borg is the oldes daughter of a wealthy farmer couple in the late 19th Century. It is a time of political turmoil in Denmark, but it is not much felt in the small world of the farm. Here her father is the ruler of the stables and the fields and her mother runs the household. It is a prosperous and happy family until disaster strikes and the mother dies. Birgtte is only 12 years old - and the rest of the book tells her story of growing up and finding her place in life without the mother to guide her. It is not easy.

I enjoyed the book. The writing is beautiful and Bregendahl's understanding of rural life is deep and nuanced. Last but not least: Seeing farming life from a female perspective is very rewarding.

3½ stars

Hi Henrik! I can understand that your son moving out is a big thing. I did go through the same thing 20 or so years ago and it took some time to get used to that for Peet and me too. I hope you get there sometime soon and find a new ritme for the two of you.

I've been away from LT too for a few weeks. The weather was finally good enough to spend more time reading books in the garden then talking about books here.

23. Nadezjda Mandelstam: Med håb imod håb

Acquired: This was a generous Christmas gift from my son a couple of years ago. As stated earlier I'm trying to focus on gifts this year and though it's not going great I do make a bit progress.

Nadezjda is the wife of author Osip Mandelstam, and this memoir is both the story of their lives, centered around his first arrest in Moscow 1934, their banishment to Vorosnej for three years and his second arrest and death in camp in 1938. But it is also the story of his work. Nadezjda fought hard to preserve his poetry, learning many poems by heart and producing copies by hand to keep them in existence. She succeeded and he is now recognized as one of the most important Russian poets of the 20th Century.

This book has also become a classic since its publication in the west in 1970. It is a heartbreaking and personal story of stalinist repression, but it is also an insightful analysis of the working of the system written with energy, feeling and understanding. I enjoyed it a lot.

4 stars

24. Thomas Boberg: Insula

Acquired: The novel was published in August, and since it takes place on a small island close to me, and since it spurned considerable debate, because some locals believed they had been misrepresented in the book, I had to get my hands on it and read it.

A couple - the author Thomas, his wife Rebekka, and their son Hugo - moves to a small Danish island. It can only be reached by ferry, but the houses are cheap and a community of little less than 500 seems like a dream come true. They want their own place, they want nature and they want to be part of a small and tightly knit community. Not surprisingly, reality turns out to be different. There is a lot of work to be done on the house, there is nature, but there is also intensive farming, and the community is tight but also split along old lines of power. Worst of all, the school turns out to be unsatisfying. The novel is harsh on the grown-ups in the school but also describes how trapped parents feel, when their children are not happy, and there seems to be nowhere to go.

I liked the story a lot, and once the debates die down, it will remain an important novel on modern Danish society and the eternal questions of happiness, freedom and community.

4 stars

25. Maren Uthaug: 11 %

Acquired: A birthday gift from last year.

In a possible future the world is ruled by women. The number of men is kept at a minimum, and they are kept in secluded centers for breeding. In the novel we follow four women who represent different aspects of this dystopian future - and there attempts to deal with the fact, that there is suddenly a boy loose among them.

I enjoyed the book - the worldbuilding isn't all that great, but the characters are interesting and the plot keeps you on your toes. The ending was a bit disappointing, but at some point I will also read the follow up which has just been released.

4 stars

26. Lars Kramhøft: Husvild

Acquired: This was another purchase from the comic convention i visited in May.

Houses and apartments have become insanely expensive in Copenhagen, as they have in many modern cities. People still want to move there, and when you want to get a place - the main character in Husvild wants to feel the pulse of the city and become a writer - you have to put up with small rooms and bad landlords. These are real problems, but they also a great source of drama and comedy.

Kramhøft now has his own daily stripe in a Danish newspaper, and the style is also prevalent here, as with many small punchlines and an overarching storyline. The narrator never really get the fabled, affordable apartment, but he does become a citizen and experience various adventures in his quest to finally break through. The drawings are easy decipher, but they are also telling and enjoyable.

3½ stars

27. Ursula K. Le Guin: Troldmanden fra Jordhavet

Acquired: I bought this last year at the large book fair in Copenhagen. Le Guin has become quite hyped as an author and an expert in literary theory, and now one of the minor publishers had started publishing her books.

Duni is young boy living on one of the out islands in Earth Sea. He proves to have talent for magic, and after helping his village during a pirate attack, he starts his formal training. He is a boy of great talent but also of great temper, so after a provocation he try to summon a dead person. The result is catastrophic. He survives but a strange shadow is released into the world. Duni, whose real name is Guess, can never become free until he defeats the shadow.

I enjoyed the book a lot. The world is fresh and interesting, and I liked how magic was done here. It is mostly about language and about knowing the true names of things. I also like the characters and the story, and I¨m looking forward to the next volumes in the series.

4 stars

28. Han Kang: Lektioner i græsk

Acquired: Han Kang won the Nobel Prize this year, so I decided buy one of her bookes at the Copenhagen Book Fair at the start of november.

Two lost souls meet in a class room in Seoul. One is a woman, who can no longer speak after losing her mother, going through a divorce an losing custody over her son. She is fascinated with language and grammar, and has decided to learn ancient Greek. The other is the teacher, who has returnet to Korea after many years in Europe. He is rapidly going blind, and somehow they find common ground.

I enjoyed this small novel, but it is not compelling like Vegetaren which I read some years ago.

3 stars

29. Isaac Asimov: Foundation and Empire

Acquired: I have wanted to read the Foundation-trilogy forever and bought all three volumes last year.

This second novel picks up where the first one left off. The Foundation is developing into an innovative an liberal trading state as the Empire is slowly falling apart. The first half focuses on Bel Riose, an ambitious general who want to reestablish imperial rule, but according the laws of psycho-history he is destined to fail. The second part is much better as an unpredicted joker is introduced. The Mule, a mysterious character conquers one world after the other - so will the Foundation be able to fight this new threat?

Introducing a new element made this volume much more interesting - but the whole galaxy is still inhabited by middleclass Americans which is a bit annoying.

3½ stars

30. Karin Michaëlis: Krigens ofre

Acquired: Another book bought at the annual Copenhagen book fair - this one in 2019.

Michaëlis was once one of the most read and famous Danish authors, but after her death she was largely forgotten. Academia was dominated by men, and they were very good at establishing as truth, that the real classics of Danish literature were written by men. This has started to change and female authors are being rediscovered and their works republished.

Michaëlis wrote in all genres. This is a collection of articles written in 1916 for newspapers and published as a book afterwords. She knew Austria-Hungary well, and this collection shows different aspects of life on the home front during the first world war. She is very much interested in the treatment of prisoners and fugitives, she is aware of the difficult role of women as providers of food for the family but she doesn't shy away from the horrors of hospitals and centers where invalids learn to live without limbs lost in the war.

Some may accuse Michaëlis of sympathizing too much with the central powers, but I mostly found her writings interesting. She uses naivity as a style of writing and this makes her writing from the Skoda armaments factories quite touching - because the reader knows full well what the beautiful and carefully constructed weapons are used for.

3 stars

31. Todd McFarlane: Spider-Man bind 1

Acquired: I have started reading superhero comics again - and simultaneously local publishers have started to reintroduce them to the Danish market in crisp editions. They publish a lot, so I can't keep up. I bought this in a comic book shop i Odense, when I was there for a conference a month ago.

In the 1990s every superhero had to get a dark twist to make it more "realistic" and that was also the aim of Todd McFarlane when he introduced a fourth Spider-Man series in 1990. For the first time he had full control over both story, dialogue and artwork, and his stories were both longer and more disturbing than usual Spider-Man books. Lots of people were murdered, and his detailed artwork made sure every explosion, every flying drop of blood and every piece of dirt was presented to the reader.

I'm not at great fan of McFarlane's style, but I have to aknowledge its dynamic quality and the artist's total command of his technique. The story took a backseat to fighting af splash-pages, so overall it was just an average read.

3 stars