What I've read lately:

Lydia Davis - The end of the story
Siri Hustvedt - The summer without men
Louise Doughty - An English murder (so bad, don't read it)
Lorrie Moore - Bark

Currently reading The sea lady by Margaret Drabble. If you want to know what I've read in Swedish lately, feel free to check that out here.

SATURDAY

Just finished reading Saturday by Ian McEwan. While I thought it was OK, this review someone posted on goodreads is so funny and on point:

Shovelmonkey1 

"Hello everybody,

I'm Henry Perowne and welcome to a day in my life... a Saturday to be precise. I'm a good natured sort of chap, if I were famous I'd probably be saddled with the tag of "thinking women's crumpet", but personally I take myself much to seriously to acknowledge that kind of thing. I'm a successful neurosurgeon who enjoys long, descriptive and adjective laden games of squash with my erudite and debonair colleagues. Today, for once in my incredibly lucky and wealthy life, I had a spot of bad luck and pranged my top of the range Merc. This led to an encounter which can, at best, be described as unpleasant. The thugs in the red BMW gave me a bit of a pasting which left me with a cracking haematoma over my sternum. However, my extensive medical knowledge allowed me to diagnose one of my attackers with a genetically inherited degenerative disease on the spot. This allowed me to escape, quick-smart, while they brooded over their own mortality.

Later, after welcoming home my improbably talented and successful 16 year old Blues Musician son and my improbably talented and successful published poet daughter there was another small altercation. This time however the ebb and flow of violent modern day life breached the walls of this englishman's pricey Georgian Castle and things took a turn for the worse.

Needless to say, my calculating surgeons mind and spirited, courageous family pulled together to best the simian-like thugs. Ironically it then fell to me to save said thug with an emergency neurosurgical procedure. Life's funny that way. I wrapped up the whole day the way it began; by making love to my improbably talented and successful wife and then having a little bit of a wistful ponder about my own mortality while considering it in perspective against a backdrop of modern foreign policy."

Saturday reviews on goodreads.com

What I've read lately:

A.M. Homes - This book will save your life
Anne Enright - The forgotten waltz
Lionel Shriver - A perfectly good family
Markus Zusak - The book thief

You can check out the Swedish blog here.

"Here's a trick I found for how to finally get some sleep. I sleep in my husband's bed. That way the empty bed I look at is my own."
- The collected stories, Amy Hempel

2014: READING LIST

What I've read and re-read in 2014 (the ones in bold are the ones that I loved, loved, loved):

Doris Lessing - A proper marriage
Margaret Drabble - The pure gold baby
Ian McEwan - The child in time
Ian McEwan - Atonement
Muriel Spark - The prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah
Zoê Heller - Notes on a scandal
Lydia Davis - Can't and won't
Lisa Alther - Kinflicks
Elsa Morante - History
J.D. Salinger - Raise high the roof beam, carpenters
Aravind Adiga - The white tiger
Curtis Sittenfeld - The man of my dreams
Curtis Sittenfeld - American wife
Anne Brontë - The tenant of Wildfell Hall
Sue Miller - While I was gone
Suzanne Rindell - The other typist
Denise Mina - The end of the wasp season
Caitlin Moran - How to be a woman
Maggie O´Farell - After you'd gone
Maggie O'Farell - The hand that first held mine
Jung Chang - Wild swans: three daughters of China
Iris Murdoch - The unicorn
Sophie Hannah - The point of rescue
Sophie Hannah - The carrier
Samantha Hayes - Until you're mine
Louise Doughty - Whatever you love
Alan Hollinghurst - The stranger's child
Siri Hustvedt - The blazing world
Lauren Beukes - The shining girls
Melissa Bank - The wonder spot
Sidney Sheldon - The best laid plans
Sidney Sheldon - Tell me your dreams
A.M. Homes - May we be forgiven
Douglas Kennedy - The moment
Barbara Demick - Nothing to envy: Ordinary lives in North Korea

Long time since I updated this blog. I've mostly been reading books in Swedish these past few months, so please check out them out here (and if they don't look like many, please remember that one of them was over 1000 pages long. I think you can guess which one). Anyway, did read How to be a woman by Caitlin Moran which I found really rather boring. I don't see that this book has anything to do with feminism. Also read The moment by Douglas Kennedy which was very bad, but I already knew it would be - I just wanted to read something that was easy and that was set in Berlin. Mission accomplished.

MAY WE BE FORGIVEN

What I've read lately:

Alan Hollinghurst - The stranger's child (Very, very English which obviously I loved).
A.M. Homes - May we be forgiven (So, so good. She is so darkly funny, truly unique.)
Barbara Demick - Nothing to envy: Ordinary lives in North Korea (Very interesting and written in the same style as Anna Funder's Stasiland which can only be a good thing.)

Currently reading Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary in Lydia Davis' translation. Figured, why not read a translation by somebody I love and have great respect for? Seems like a good one so far.

Here's a picture of the lovely A.M. Homes:

Photograph by Juergen Frank