Issue 97: 7 books, 2 audiobooks, 4 newsletter posts, 6 TV shows, 1 podcast & various other reads and recs
Lördagsgodis #2 - August roundup 📚📰📺🎦🎙️🔖
Welcome to Lördagsgodis* - a monthly roundup of books, newsletters, articles, shows, films, podcasts and other things from the internet I have enjoyed recently. Just like in a good bowl or bag of lördagsgodis, this newsletter hopefully contains something sweet, something salty, something sour, something rich, something chewy and something crunchy. Some of it is Swedish, most of it is not.
*Lördagsgodis = “Saturday sweets” or “Saturday candy”, the Swedish weekly tradition of having (usually) pick and mix candy on Saturdays. Especially children look forward to their lördagsgodis, but lots of adults in Sweden stock up on godis for the weekend too.
Hej!
Let’s dive right into the reads and recs of last month!
Books
🇬🇧 London’s Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir by Kate MacDougall (2021)
Charming, funny, insightful and centered around dogs - of course I loved this! If you love dogs, you probably will love it too. People are weird (sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a not so good way), dogs are amazing.
🇸🇪 Fuskarna: Om Macchiarini och andras svek mot vetenskapen by Kjell Asplund (2021)
Translated title: Only available in Swedish, as far as I can tell.
A deep dive into some of our time's most flagrant fraudsters in medical science, among them the surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, the psychologist Diederik Stapel and the entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes. What are the driving forces behind research misconduct and research fraud, why it is so hard to detect early on, and why is cheating/fraud often associated with a charismatic personality? Super interesting!
🇭🇰 The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung (2022)
I am so glad that I found this book in Rest of World’s 2022 reading guide! A blend of memoir and reportage, it took me back to Hong Kong and gave me new and updated insights into the politics and culture of this remarkable city where political freedom is diminishing rapidly.
🇸🇪 Köttets tid by Lina Wolff (2019)
Translated title: Carnality (2022)
Awarded a three-month stipend to travel and work, a Swedish writer flies to Madrid, where in a bar she meets a man with an extraordinary story to tell. In exchange for somewhere to sleep and to hide out for a few days, he is willing to tell her the whole astonishing tale. What follows is an account of fantastic proportions and ingredients: the existence of a shadowy Internet TV show with a certain morality clause, a threat to the storyteller's life, a diabolical nun, and the story of a girl with a missing left thumb. I started reading this novel and read 100 pages straight away, even though I was supposed to be somewhere else. Such a strange and fascinating story!
🇬🇧 We Begin At The End by Chris Whitaker (2020)
This novel has had tremendous success, so I had high expectations. It took me a while to get into it, and I did not quite take to this story of crime, punishment, love and redemption in coastal California.
🇩🇪 Love in Five Acts/Live in Case of Emergency by Daniela Krien (2019)
The novel tells the stories of five women connected in some way: Bookseller Paula has lost a child, and a husband. Where will she find her happiness? Fiercely independent Judith thinks more of horses than men, but that doesn't stop her looking for love online. Brida is a writer with no time to write, until she faces a choice between her work and her family. Abandoned by the "perfect" man, Malika struggles for recognition from her parents. Her sister Jorinde, an actor, is pregnant for a third time, but how can she provide for her family alone? I didn’t want this book to end, but unfortunately it did. I will look for other books by the author.
(As you can see I read the Swedish translation.)
🇸🇪 Nordisk fauna by Andrea Lundgren (2018)
Translated title: Nordic Fauna (2021)
You might remember this collection of short stories from the list of 10 must-read books from Sweden I shared a couple of months ago. I expected to love it and I did!
Audiobooks
🇸🇪 Polcirkeln (2021) & Kallmyren (2022) by Liza Marklund
Translated titles: The Polar Circle & The Mire, but from what I can tell the series has been sold to lots of countries but none of them English speaking?
The first two novels in the The Polar Circle Trilogy, set in a small town in the very north of Sweden. In my opinion these are very good thrillers, and I was pleasantly surprised by the plots and twists. To me, this is Liza Marklund's best work so far. I will definitely listen to the third book as soon as it is released.