Reddit mentions: The best scandinavian literature books

City of my dreams (the Stockholm series). A pretty unknown book-series abroad. But one of the classic novels of swedish litterature (first book set in Stockholm 1860-1880). A total of 5 novels that follow a family in Stockholm from 1860 - 1968. Especially interesting if you have been to (or living in) Stockholm.

(https://www.amazon.com/City-My-Dreams-Stockholm-Vol/dp/1572160888/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549447787&sr=8-1&keywords=City+of+My+Dreams)

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I don´t know exactly what kind of fiction you are asking about, crime, romance, ect. But a few links might help

http://www.amazon.com/Hitmans-Guide-Housecleaning-Hallgrimur-Helgason-ebook/dp/B005OBS0MU/ref=zg_bs_157106011_13


http://www.amazon.com/Season-Witch-Arni-Thorarinsson-ebook/dp/B006ZNA0EW/ref=zg_bs_157106011_3


http://www.amazon.com/Flatey-Enigma-Viktor-Arnar-Ingolfsson-ebook/dp/B005O3CL50/ref=zg_bs_157106011_15


But my personal choice wolud be something like this;


http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6104721-a-traveler-s-guide-to-icelandic-folk-tales


http://books.google.is/books/about/Icelandic_Folktales_and_Legends.html?id=HY-DCKd6UgUC&redir_esc=y


Hope this helps.

I'm currently reading House of Evidence! It's slightly Dragon Tattoo-ish. Murder, mystery, and history, all rolled into one! Here's the amazon link

Is there a physical book up to $3.00?? Even penny books all have $3.99 shipping, making them $4.00. I don't have an e-reader, so if I win, could I possibly have a $3.00 gift card so I could get one of my used Fearless books? Thanks!

This book

Thanks for the contest!

Watermelon is a tasty treat on a hot day.

"The hitmans guide to housecleaning"...a bit funny ...yet still makes some interesting points

http://www.amazon.com/Hitmans-Guide-Housecleaning-Hallgrimur-Helgason/dp/161109139X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396753253&sr=8-1&keywords=hitmans+guide+to+housecleaning

Isaac Asimov wrote a review of the book in 1980 and pretty much he says this:

....Orwell became sufficiently prosperous to retire and devote himself to his masterpiece, 1984.
That book described society as a vast world-wide extension of Stalinist Russia in the 1930s, pictured with the venom of a rival left-wing sectarian.
Other forms of totalitarianism play a small role. There are one or two mentions of the Nazis and of the Inquisition. At the very start, there is a reference or two to Jews, almost as though they were going to prove the objects of persecution, but that vanishes almost at once, as though Orwell didn't want readers to mistake the villains for Nazis.
The picture is of Stalinism, and Stalinism only....

....Orwell lacks the capacity to see (or invent) small changes. His hero finds it difficult in his world of 1984 to get shoelaces or razor blades. So would I in the real world of the 1980s, for so many people use slip-on shoes and electric razors.
Then, too, Orwell had the technophobic fixation that every technological advance is a slide downhill. Thus, when his hero writes, he 'fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. He does so 'because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil'.
Presumably, the 'ink-pencil' is the ball-point pen that was coming into use at the time that 1984 was being written. This means that Orwell describes something as being written' with a real nib but being 'scratched' with a ball-point. This is, however, precisely the reverse of the truth. If you are old enough to remember steel pens, you will remember that they scratched fearsomely, and you know ball-points don't.
This is not science fiction, but a distorted nostalgia for a past that
never was. I am surprised that Orwell stopped with the steel pen and that he didn't have Winston writing with a neat goose quill.
Nor was Orwell particularly prescient in the strictly social aspects of the future he was presenting, with the result that the Orwellian world of 1984 is incredibly old-fashioned when compared with the real world of the 1980s.
Orwell imagines no new vices, for instance. His characters are all gin hounds and tobacco addicts, and part of the horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco.
He foresees no new drugs, no marijuana, no synthetic hallucinogens. No one expects an s.f. writer to be precise and exact in his forecasts, but surely one would expect him to invent some differences.....

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I read the novel more than once - I could see that Orwell had a real hate boner for Stalin thanks to his time in the Spanish Civil War (yes I read Homage to Catalonia), and that his description of Airstrip One (IngSoc Britain) was a jab at what postwar/post nukewar Britain could look like on top of the rationing that went on after WWII ended. I could see that he saw the possibility of a form of fascism within a state capitalist regime. The problem is that according to Goldstein's book (an untrustworthy source, but our only view outside of IngSoc London), the other two governments in the world are mirrors of English Socialism, with the same sort of Inner Party, Outer Party, Prole power pyramid. That's pretty improbable, which is probably why when a true sequel was written, 1985 by Gyorgy Dalos, it turns out that Airstrip One is a rump government of a fake Oceanian empire with no contacts with North or South America, and easily taken over by the European power (referencing the USSR invading Dalos' home country of Hungary in the 1950s, though it's more like the start of Prague Spring because the invaders do everything better.)

• Anthony Burgess' 1985 is more of a jab at unions becoming all-powerful in Britain in the late 1970s (it was written in 1978) and rise of Islamic immigrants into the country. The book is half an essay about 1984 and the actual story is just a novella - I didn't think the story was that great.

And here is a book - https://www.amazon.com/Bock-Saga-introduction-Carl-Borgen/dp/1091309248?fbclid=IwAR24pKdgKWz-tlq3fkDTKDeWN7Nf33ZtIDGHj4Rv77-sX2y8QCctAs0zetE

For something contemporary, The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning was published recently.