And the next stop is *drumroll* Sweden!
Sweden is Norway’s neighbor country and sometimes referred to as their bigger brother. Norwegians go to Sweden to shop cheap meat, liquor, tobacco, and buckets of candy. When at home they bitch about having to go to Ikea. In between trips and bitching about Ikea trips they are in constant competition with Sweden though for most parts the Swedes don’t really seem to care. With one exception, the winter Olympics.
There the competition goes both ways and especially in cross country skiing. The Swedes get all proud when they win over Norway and for the Norwegians a silver metal in cross country seems to become worth nothing if it was a Swede that won the gold… Grown-up huh?
Some other random things that pop to my mind when I think of Sweden:
* The embarrassingly stupid Carola that finds it appropriate to go out in media and state that the Haiti earthquake was God’s will and then thinks a well suited gift to her probably starving sponsor child there is a bottle of perfume.
* And if that wasn’t bad enough, they have Anna Anka too… but to tell the truth, I think she is hilarious!
* Swedes always seem to wear white in Eurovision and sing an Abba copycat.
* If you see a guy wearing white pans and white sneakers downtown in Oslo, he is probably a Swede.
But this is about books isn’t it? The author I picked this is actually from a town I have been to. The company I work for has an office in Linköping. I have some nice friends in Linköping, the office there is very nice, but to be completely honest I am not a big fan of the town in general. It has committed two of the deadliest sins. Made me go to bed hungry and deprived me of Internet access in the hotel I was staying. Ever after that experience I have been an avid fan of using video conference for all my meetings. I could try to claim it has something to do with being environmentally friendly but to be honest I become hostile if someone/something deprives me of food and Internet…
The author’s name is Carl-Johan Vallgren and the book is called “The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred: Monster Hercules Barefoot, His Wonderful Love and Terrible Hatred” in English. Quite a mouthful that title but so far a very good read. Will post more about that when I finish.
Hm, very odd title. The Swedish title is “Den vidunderliga kärlekens historia”. Google Translate suggests vidunderlig can be translated into magnificient, marvellous, monstrous and so on. Perhaps it was difficiult to find one English word that conveys both the magnificent and monstrous meanings?
In any case, you and Amazon have mistakenly repeated half the title. As far as I can see, the book is called “The horrific sufferings of the mind-reading monster Hercules Barefoot – his wonderful love and his terrible hatred”. A long title, but not quite as long as the one you posted.
Interestingly, the city library of Stockholm lists the book as English/Irish literature because it was translated from Swedish.
And no, I did not wear white pants nor white sneakers the last (only) time I visited Oslo.
Hehe, well you will have to wear those next time you visit so I can stereotype you with the rest of your fellow countrymen
You are right about the repeating of the title. It all blended into one blob of words when I read it so I didn’t notice
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