I loved fairy tales as a small child, and I continued to read and love them long after my friend outgrew them. My parents had a book on Vietnamese tales, and one with Swedish ones, and later I found Andrew Lang’s Fairy books with tales collected all over the world. I was fascinated that tales like the Cinderella story had many different versions. In the Swedish one, for example, Cinderella went to three balls, dressed first in silver, then gold, then in a bejewelled gown, and though she dropped the shoes, it wasn’t made of glass. She also only had one stepsister, and the story didn’t end with the wedding. No, the stepsister pushed Cinderella into the sea, where she was going to be forced to marry a sea monster, while the stepsister made herself look like Cinderella. Luckily the prince noticed, and managed to save his bride, though not before she was turned into a serpent that he had to dip into three baths, winter, milk and water, to save.

When I was around 10, my mother took a university course on children’s books, and read Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, which I picked up and which had a profound impact on my ability to comprehend and analyze my reading. I’se been a long time since I read it, so I’m quoting Wikipedia on it.

Bettelheim analyzed fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychology in “The Uses of Enchantment” (1976). He discussed the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including traditional tales once considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm. Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose.

I’ve also realized I missed a book in my list on books which impacted me, namely One Thousand and One Nights. My father’s parents has a lovely edition in a set of 6 books, which I used to read every time I visited. I was very happy when they gifted the set to me when I turned 16. It’s a 1920s edition with gorgeous illustration by Gudmund Hentze. Also abridged- too racy sequences are edited out, though the book helpful points out that even if the edited text is “very amusing,it doesn’t conform to our time’s view on morality”. It’s also not all of the stories, though I’m unsure how many there should be.

( Read more... )

I was a little surprised that four books on my influential book list are books with a horse focus. The Horse and His Boy by C. S Lewin, Melka by Joan Penney, Dick och Dalli, which i now realize has been translated to English, it’s called The Snow Ponies by Ursula Bruns, and Flambards by K. M. Peyton. And they weren’t the only horse books I loved as a child, I was also an avid fan of Walter Farley’s Black Stallion-books, and My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara. I’m surprised because I never was horse-mad as a girl. In fact I am afraid of them, and though I find them beautiful to look at, being near one makes my heart beat very fast, and my mouth runs dry.

The Horse and His Boy is of course part of the Narnia Chronicles, though it’s quite different from the others as it’s completely set in the world of Narnia, though actually not in that particular country. I really loved Bree teaching Shasta to ride, and I also like Aravis a lot, and her journey. Their adventures in Tashban and the ride through the desert was something I read with the same excitement, every time I reread it- and I’ve probably reread this Narnia-book the most. Also, Bree is a great flawed character and drama queen.

Melka and The Snow Ponies were books my father had as a child, and I first came to them because he read them for me. Melka was written in the 1930s, and is about a horse, Melka, born in a Sudanese village, where she has some foalhood adventures before she is sold to an English family and is brought to a city. She gets a close friend in a donkey called telephone, and grows close to the boy who rides her. As she is found to be very good at jumping, she is stolen and dyed brown (she’s a white horse), but is eventually reunited with her huma. In the end the family goes back to England, and Melka ends up living in a manor stable in the countryside. I haven’t read this book since I was a child, and I’m not sure I dare to read it again. I’m not sure how well the depiction of Sudanese natives has stood the test of time…

It's been a very long time since I read The Snow Ponies as well, but I remember it as a very funny book. It's about two teenage girls who live with their grandmother and aunt on a stud farm where they raise Icelandic horses and Shetland ponies. They are mad about Vikings and get very excited when their cousin Ethelbert is coming for an extended stay, as they think having a Viking name must make him like one. But Ethelbert is a spoiled hypochondriac and his presence a nuisance more than anything else. I guess it comes as no surprise that Ethelbert, who is pretty much a soulmate to Eustace in the Narnia books, will be forced to do a hard look at his own actions, and change. But with horses, instead of dragons.

Flambards is really the first part of what I read as a trilogy as a child, because those were the only ones translated to Swedish but it’s actually a series of four books. I read the last one as an adult, and didn’t care for it much. Anyway, it’s set before, during and after WWI, and is about rich orphan Christina who is sent to her uncle in the British countryside. He is very posh, and also impoverished, and Christina eventually realizes the hope is that she will marry her cousin Mark, to get the manor house Flambards back to its glory days. Everyone there is horsemad, except her cousin Will, and Christina soon grows to love horses and Flambards as much as Mark does. Pity Mark is such a bastard. I regularly return to the three first books in this series, and there was also a television series I remember liking.

It says something about my stress levels that I can’t finish the books I start. My usual pace are one or two books finished weekly. This month I have finished three… Agatha Christie's The Hollow that will get its own post.


The Tomb of Dragons by Katerina Addison. I liked it, but I’m glad I re-read the previous books in the series, as there are a lot of references to the previous books. Actually, all the books in The Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy follow so closely to each other that they could be read as one book in three parts. It feels like it came to a natural conclusion, but I still want more. I like Tara and would love to read more about him, but I also feel that the stories of his friend the opera director and his colleagues still have stories that need to be told.


Dorothy Gilman The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax. I read one Mrs. Pollifax book in my early teens, but had no idea it was a series until someone here on DJ mentioned it. They are Cold War thrillers, with this the first book published in the late 1960s. Mrs. Pollifax is a widow who is rather bored, and decides to do something about her childhood dream of becoming a spy. And so she finds herself in Mexico to pick up a secret package for the CIA. And everything promptly goes wrong. This was not the Polifax book I have read, and I enjoyed it, though it’s very much a product of its time. Americans are heroes and Communists are baddies. But Mrs. Pplifax is a charming and resourceful character and I enjoyed the book..


I’m currently reading, on and off in all too short snatches; France Hardinge’s Fly By Night, Ben Aaronovitch The masquerades of Spring, Dorothy Gilman The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax, Louise Penny’s The Kingdom of the Blind, Jenny Kiefer’s This Wretched Valley and Donyae Coles’ Midnight Rooms.

A bit belated as a good chunk of March has gone by. I don’t seem to be able to concentrate when reading right now, so I have jumped around between books more than usual, and finished fewer.


New books
The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths. This is the first book in a new series. Ali is a police officer in her 50s who works for a cold case unit in London. Only they actually go back in time to solve the crimes. A high-ranking politician pulls strings for the unit to look into his great-great-grandfather who was rumored to have killed several women in the 1850s But instead of an hour in the past, Ali gets stuck in time, and while she is, the politician is murdered and her son gets accused of the crime. I always enjoy Griffiths books, and I liked this one too. Historical mysteries are always my cup of tea, and despite the fantastical premise, the book still felt grounded. Ali is a likeable character, and I always like it when middle-aged women get to be the hero. I also appreciate that Griffith clearly does her research. The description of 1850s clothes was very accurate, which pleased me. I look forward to continuing the series.


Open Season by Jonathan Kellerman. It’s been a long time since Kellerman’s Alex Delaware-books have been anything formulaic, so sometimes I wonder why I still read them. Perhaps because it’s nice to read things that don't surprise you at all. This one was entirely as expected. An oddish kind of murder that makes Alex's police friend Milo call him in. Interviews with surrounding people, broken up with eating. Alex spending time with girlfriend and adorable dog. The murder being a psychopath serial killer, though no one, before Alex, realized there was serial killing going on.


Rereads
The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine. I never liked any of Ruth Rendell’s novels written under her name, but even if I don’t like all of her Barabara Vine novels, those I like I really like. The Brimstone Wedding is one of those I like, but I haven’t reread it for many years. Last time I was the same age as Jenny, in my early 30s, and now I’m a generation older. Makes my perspective a bit different. Anyway, the Vne-books aren’t typical crime novels, even if many of them contain a murder. This book certainly has a mýstery, but it’s also a book about friendship. Jenny works as a nursing assistant at a home for old people, where she befriends Stella, who is 70 and dying from cancer. Initially Stella is very reserved, but eventually she starts talking about her life, and Jenny gets the feeling there is something she really wants to tell her. One says Stella asks Jenny to check out a house she owns. A house, Jenny soon realizes, has stood empty for many years, showing signs of having been abandoned very quickly.


The House of Lost Shadow by F. G. Cottam. As a young man in the 80s, Paul offers to help his girlfriend out with a paper. While researching Pandora, a socialite and photographer active in the 1920s, Paul gets a number of spooky encounters, culminating in a horrific visit to an abandoned house, which shatters his life completely. Fifteen years later he learns that a group of students have visited the same house, leaving one of them dead, and the rest psychotic. And, of course, Paul is the only one who can help.


Cottam is a good horror writer, very atmospheric, and he is often even good at endings, which is often the weakest point in horrors. He also makes heavy use of one of my favourite plot devices where an old mystery is slowly revealed through archive materials. I’m a sucker for that. I don’t think The House of Lost Shadow one of his better books though, possibly because it’s one of his earlier works. The 1980s sequence works well with Paul researching and obsessing over Pandora, but the present day parts feel a bit disjointed. And the ending is rather Deus Ex Machina. I also feel weirded out by Cottam using real life persons as the bad guy. I guess Alisatir Crowley is pretty mythologized by now, but he also elevates an author, Dennis Wheatley into a supernatural villain. Wheatley, who wrote many books with occult themes isn’t very well-known today, and Cottam might as easily have made up a fictive character. In later books Cottam makes up a fictitious occult cult, The Jericho Society, which works much better as villains, and The House of Lost Shadow is part of that canon, even if the cult isn’t mentioned in it. Which is why I re-read it, as I recently read Dark Echo which partly ties in to this one.

I’m desperately trying to remember which book this is, and I thought I would ask you if you recognize it. It annoys me no end that I can't come up with the title! I’m sorry for being fuzzy on the details. It's been more than 10 years since I read it. It’s definitely a crime novel.

The male protagonist comes into contact with a young woman and her small son. I’m pretty sure it’s through his work. The father of the child is no longer around, it’s possible that he is dead. The woman is murdered and the child disappears. The protagonist finds out that the paternal grandfather is famous. Either he used to be a movie star, or he is a cult leader. (Or he might have been both). He and his family live on some sort of compound that the protagonist sneaks into. He finds the little boy, who sleeps in a vintage bed shaped like a car, likely the bed his father once used. He is not, however, treated well. The protagonist hears a woman (the child’s grandmother?) berate him for crying. The protagonist is captured, but before he is killed the police arrive. In the aftermath they find at least one murder victim buried in the grounds.

I was sure this book was actually one of the Alex Delawere books by Jonathan Kellerman. But I have re-read them now, and this book never came up. Granted, there are so many of them, so it may be a Kellerman book that I have somehow missed. I’d be so grateful if anyone knows which book this is!

8. A book that feels like it was written just for you

Faunen (The Faun) by Anna-Karin Palm. This book found me when I was 21, and it really felt like the author had been thinking of me when she wrote it.

It’s really three stories in this book, each written in different styles. First, there is the story about Amelia, author of romance novels in 1880s London. One day she finds a faun in her writing room who announces he is very vexed with her. It turns out he is not pleased with the book she is writing about Medieval Eleanor, because she is not describing what really happened. This is the start of a series of events that turns Amelia’s life upside down.

There is the diary of a young Swedish woman in contemporary London. She becomes obsessed with a painting of a faun and woman at the National Gallery, and throughout the diary she returns to it several times, interpreting it differently. She’s haunted by something she did to her best friend, and she also writes about the man who she can’t keep from running to as soon as he wriggles a finger.

And there is the story the faun tells Amelia, about Eleanor and the unicorn. This is the shortest story, written in a very stylized language. It’s more like a fairy tale, and you don’t get as close to Eleanor as you do to Amelia and the diary writer.

There are several themes in this book; friendship, betrayal, and creativity. Both Amelia and the diary-writer allow a man to shape their narratives, and the faun also shapes Eleanor’s life in the story he narrates to Amelia. And as a direct result of the faun intruding on Amelia’s life the most important relationship in her life, that to her best friend, gets into jeopardy.

It’s also about responsibility. When amelia takes back the control of her life, her narrative, she not only empowers herself, she also mends it, and she also saves Eleanor. And when the diary-writer realizes that his betrayal isn’t a betrayal; that she has to allow her friend to take responsibility for her own life, she can also break free from the hold of her lover and shape her life in a way that úits her.

When I read this book I had just broken up a very toxic relationship with a man who was very jealous and controlling. And I was also struggling with a friendship. Faunen came to me just when I needed them most, and it was very helpful. It’s also written in a style that suited me, and it’s very visual, which I am as well. And the bits about Stockholm was so very familiar; the same Stockholm I love din, visiting the same places and bars I went to.

I also loved her next novel Målarens döttrar (The Painter’s Daughters) which also is a novel with more than one timeline. One contemporary where Swedish Maria travels with her brother to England in search of their father, an artist. And then there is English Laura 100 years earlier who lives with her artist father. As with Faunen it centres around women and female identity. Palm’s books are translated to German, Dutch, French, Norwegian, Danish, Spanish, Polish, and Icelandish, but unfortunately not English.



All the questions:

( Read more... )

3. A book where you really wanted to be reading the "shadow" version of the book (as in, there are traces of a different book in the work and you would have much preferred to read that one)

The concept: a family saga taking place between the late 16th century to late 20th century, in Scandinavia (mainly) with magic.

The family, the Ice People have an evil forefather, who, according to the family legend, sold not only his soul to the devil but also the soul of one descendant in every generation so they would be cursed to become witches and warlocks and perform evil deeds. The real story is more complicated than that, but in short, the arc of the whole saga is the descendants' fight to break this curse. In the first book, the current warlock is, for the first time, not evil, and he manages to change the curse somewhat so that his descendants are not automatically born bad.

During the course of the series which ended up being 47 books, the individual books have a broad thematic scope. There are the ones that are close to social realism like the life in a small mining community in the early 19th century, of the hardship of a little boy who is kidnapped and forced to work in a mine in the 17th century. Some are crime novels or thrillers, several women found murdered and buried; the rumors say it’s a werewolf, but the solution is not supernatural at all, or the frantic search of patient zero when smallpox takes hold of a Norwegian town in the early 20th century. Some of them read more like adventure novels like when the willful heroine dresses up like a man to find her love, and some books are pretty much fantasy. There are also pure horror stories, like the vampire-like ghost who used her long hair to strangle the men she seduces or the absolutely horrifying story about a ferryman with a half face who drowns the people he ferries.

Romance is big too, and on the whole, the heroines are beautiful, but there are some notable exceptions with heroine’s who are plain, or even ugly, and it’s still made clear that they deserve- and get- happiness and love. There is also a lot of interesting history- you learn a lot about Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and historical events are often woven into the plots.

The stories and plots in this series are actually pretty amazing, and many of the characters are really interesting. But, and this is a big but, the author, Margit Sandemo, just couldn’t write. A story that could have been epic is marred a stilted language, awkward conversation, and stereotypical descriptions. For example; every single man described as having sensuous lips, are villains. Every. Single. One. The sex scenes are very embarrassing. Oh, and at the end of the series, there is a super-cringe author insert. The author, who was Swedish-Norwegian wrote in Swedish but mixed in a lot of Norwegian words, and obviously, the books were never edited, making the language even poorer. They were obviously written very quickly- as the series were ongoing six books were published every year.


I really loved these books when I was in my early teens, but very quickly grew annoyed with everything I mentioned above. It’s so imaginative and interesting on the plot level, and then it all falls flat because it’s so poorly written. I would have loved to read it by someone who would write, who could construct dialogue, and who could steer away from the character cliches. As it is I think it could be a really good tv series.


It’s been translated into a number of languages, including English. I can only assume the translations are better as they are, presumably, only written in one language. The whole series is called the Legend of the Ice People. Not surprisingly the first books are the best, with more numánced character descriptions, and the magic kept on a more subtle level. I still have a very soft spot for the three first books, Spellbound and Witch-Hunt where the protagonist is a young woman, Silje, who meet and fall in love with a man from the Ice People. She is sweet, naive, and has a passion for painting, and there is also a parallel plotline about a young noblewoman who has a child born out of wedlock. The third book, Daughter of Darkness is about a young witch who the author actually dares to make completely amoral, which makes for a pretty interesting character study.

Cut for mention of rape. ( Read more... )

If you feel curious, you can read a few chapters of Spellbound on Google Docs here.

All the questions:

( Read more... )

1. A book that haunts you

Haunted is more accurate, though- I’m over it now.

Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson.

When I was a child, the general view in Sweden was that Fantasy was a genre for children. It was definitely the view of the librarians at my local library, who placed everything fantasy-related in the children’s section. (S.F, on the other hand, was placed in the adult section and you had to be fifteen to take out anything from that section.) Anyhow, when I was 12, Lord Foul’s Bane was translated to Swedish, and, of course, but among the children’s books. It is, in case you haven’t read it, not a book for kids, not by a long shot. Many years later I saw someone summing up the plot along those lines:

Leprosy. Trauma. Being moved to another world. Trauma. Trauma. Evil entities. Trauma. Rape. Trauma. Trauma. Trauma. Trauma. Being moved back to our world. Trauma. Leprosy. Trauma.

Now, I have never read this book since that first time, and I certainly don’t think Fantasy should never be dark, or a protagonist always heroic, so this book (and series) may be very good. But I was completely unprepared for it at 12, and definitely way too young for it. I remembered it with a queasy feeling for years, and though it doesn’t shunt me anymore, I doubt I will ever want to re-read it.

All the questions:

( Read more... )

This is cropping up all over my f-list right now. And as I love to talk books, so… Reading through the questions I find a lot of them quite tricky, so I don’t plan to do it in chronological order, and blithely skip those I can't figure out. :)

12. A book that came to you at the wrong time

Cut for mention of rape.

( Read more... )

All the questions:

( Read more... )

When I was in my preteens and early teens, THE most influential author and illustrator for me was Inger Edelfeldt, a Swedish author and illustrator. She had an enormous impact on me. She was young; only about 15 years older than me and looked incredibly cool. In fact the one and only fan letter I ever wrote, I wrote to her. And she answered! A very nice long letter too. And yesterday she commented one of my photos on Facebook. I know, super silly of me to get excited about, and no real mystery either. It was a photo of Myra and S, and a quick check confirmed she and S are friends. Still. It reminded me of how much I loved her art, and I thought it would be much nicer to talk about her instead.

If you are a Tolkien fan you may have encountered her art; in 1985 she illustrated the Tolkien calendar. She also made the covers not only for Tolkien but for a lot of other books as well. My first encounter with her was the cover of the books in the original Earthsea-trilogy, and it was those cover which made me want to read them.

( Artwork )

Born in 1957 she debuted in 1977, but I didn’t read her until I was eleven so I will talk about the three books which meant the most to me in the order I read them. This was in the early ’80s, and the word “queer” didn’t exist. I knew what homosexual meant, but that there were any other flavours of sexuality or lack thereof or transsexuality, simply didn’t exist in media. In the books, I read het was the norm, and so it was in the show I watched. If a gay character was ever introduced it was only for an episode, and never as an important character in his or her own right. Edelfeldt changed my world by introducing other ways to be than the norm.

( The books )

( Comics )