Reading.
Non-exhaustive list of books I've read and am reading, in reverse chronological order.
You can also check out what I want to read next.
| Title | Author | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin | Antony Beevor | Continuing my journey towards being a fully fledged dad. | Reading |
| The Honourable Schoolboy | John le Carré | Dropped | |
| Tinker Tailor Solder Spy | John le Carré | If I had read the book before the movie, I would've been more surprised by the climax than what I was for the film version. I continue to be impressed by le Carré's prose too. He inserts tiny words and sentences which adds character, sarcasm, and "vibe" to the current paragraph. Looking forward to the next one in the "Karla trilogy". | |
| The Spy Who Came In from the Cold | John le Carré | Damn. I should've read this one after "The Legacy of Spies". The latter one — also by le Carré — is a prequel and sequel to "The Spy…", and I would've enjoyed "The Legacy…" more if waiting with reading it. In any case, I loved this one: a classic spy novel with "plots and counter plots", as it says on the back. I like the author's writing in the way that it's very on point. Like the world he's created, the prose is cold and without too many emotions. | |
| Brev från Nollpunkten | Peter Englund | I liked this one very much. The book is a collection of essays spanning from World War I, throughout the 1920s-30s Soviet Union with Stalin's purges, and into the architecture and bombings of Berlin and Nagasaki in World War II. The author's prose is very raw and truth-saying, but yet beautiful and carries a lot of weight. A very chilling account of the evil of man. | |
| The Legacy of Spies | John le Carré | I'm deep into espionage fiction now. Or, I'm deep into John le Carré… This novel was both a prequel and sequel to the author's breakout piece "The Spy Who Came In from the Cold" (which I haven't read yet. Not sure if that's good or bad). I liked the prose and the pacing. His got this way of mentioning information on the fly in sentences which is very well delivered. | |
| The Shards | Bret Easton Ellis | Paused | |
| Lou Reed – The Life | Mick Wall | How many rock bios may be allowed to have something with "life" as suffix?! What I especially liked with this book was that it was… short. I don't mean it's bad! More that all the other bios are so. Damn. Long. But Mick Wall compresses Lou Reed's life and captures the important events into an actually good read. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Kent – Texter om Sveriges största rockband | Several | Collection of reviews and articles about the band Kent, from around 1993 to 2005. I liked the interviews and descriptions of their early career through newspaper texts. The band is no more since a while back, so they obviously don't do these kind of interviews any longer. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| What We Owe the Future | William MacAskill | Philosopher philosophising about the future. | Paused |
| Detaljerna | Ia Genberg | Best book I've read for a long while. So intimate and delicate. Beautiful prose. Good build-ups. The format of describing the interactions with four people during an unspecified (but guessable) timeline from the perspective of the narrator is so cool. | Fjällnäs, Sweden |
| David Bowie — A Life | Dylan Jones | A non-traditional biography of David Bowie. Being a Bowie fan, I loved it. It was constructed as interview format rather than common phrose. It was different than other biographies I've read on Bowie, thanks to the various (well known) voices the author used in the interviews. It felt personal and real. | Fjällnäs, Sweden |
| Grand Union | Zadie Smith | Just didn't like it. The short stories weren't captivating enough, and the prose was elegant but unnecessarily complex. | Dropped |
| Four Thousand Weeks | Oliver Burkeman | Too much "self help book" so far. I constantly feel: "this could've been a blog post" and "why did I buy this". | Dropped |
| Att Uppfinna Världen ("Inventing the World") | Katrine Marçal | Historical account about how women have been pushed aside over the years when it comes to inventions and innovation. | Paused |
| Vargarna från evighetens skog | Karl Ove Knausgård | I loved this even more than "Morgonstjärnan". It's more focused, and showcases Knausgård's ability to tell captivating stories about seemingly mundane characters and scenes. The book treats two characters' everyday life, with varying amounts of trauma and anxieties. The prose is simple: the 700 pages are an easy read. It's really inspiring. | Kalk Bay, South Africa |
| Jack | Ulf Lundell | The generational novel of the Swedish 1970s. Dropped it because it didn't really speak to me. I understand it must've been cool in the 70s, but not so now. | Dropped |
| Häng City | Mikael Yvesand | Lovely rendition of a summer in the lives of three 13 year old boys in northern Sweden in 1999. The language used is so very relatable, and so are the pop culture references. Even though "nothing" really happens, the book does describe (quite accurately) feelings, energies, places, activities, and personal traits of people from the eyes of a teenage boy. | |
| Life | Keith Richards | The autobiography of Keith Richards (guitarist in Rolling Stones). | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Mastering the Art of French Cooking | Julia Child, Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle | I bought the Swedish translation as paperback, and read it all in once – back to back. Quite special for a cooking book. The book includes tips and tricks around techniques, equipment, and ingredients. All the traditional French recipies are in here. What I loved about the recipies was that they were both mechanic but yet very much alive. Meaning, the authors' obsession with details, experimentation, and iteration really shined through. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Morgonstjärnan | Karl Ove Knausgård | I thought Knausgård would be a hard read, but it was not. "Morgonstjärnan" is so lovely. The author has this superb power of making seemingly mundane everyday people and tasks become interesting. His description are rich, and the pace is perfect. I was really captivated and inspired. | Fjällnäs, Sweden |
| Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood | Quentin Tarantino | It's quite rare that a book is written after a film, and by the film's creator too. I loved this one: it's 100% Quentin Tarantino-ness all way through. He has space to go deeper in the conversations between the characters, whose stories he can give justice too. Like the film, it somehow entertains me without having a real plot. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| The Clash | Strummer, Jones, Simonon, Headon | An okay account of the history of the band, told by themselves in interview format. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Ålevangeliet | Patrik Svensson | Dropped | |
| Fight Club | Chuck Palahniuk | I honestly think the movie is better. I'm sure the book would be cool if I'd read that first, but I couldn't stand the fast paced dialogue with random sentences thrown in between lines. | Florence, Italy |
| American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis | The book is a lot more psycho than the movie. More explicit than I thought. The unreliable monologues of the narrator are amazingly written, and there are more layers to the book than just the obvious one. | Florence, Italy |
| What I Talk About When I Talk About Running | Haruki Murakami | I love Murakami's straight forward language. This one made me want to start running. He's very honest about himself in this semi-biography, but never sentimental. Feels very Japanese. | Florence, Italy |
| Samlade Verk | Lydia Sandgren | This is an epic describing the live of a couple of individuals from the 1970s until the 2010s in Gothenburg, Sweden. It really touched me, on several layers. I'm very sentimental about the city Gothenburg, and I was constantly impressed by the cultural references, the plot, and the language of the relatively young author. There's this amazing melancholia hanging over the whole work. | Österlen, Sweden |
| Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind | Shunryu Suzuki | It took me a long time to finish this very thin book. The language is dense, and I wanted to soak every page in. I had to re-read a couple of sentences. But I liked it as a whole, especially the laser focus of the author's message. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Ishmael | Daniel Quinn | A philosophical discourse about the evolution of homo sapiens. Some things are controversial, like population control. The book's dialogue is about biodiversity, climate change, urbanisation: a lot of contemporary topics. It's a nice pairing together with Sapiens. | Österlen, Sweden |
| Herakles | Theodor Kallifatides | I like mythology, especially like Greek mythology. This book is a novel – I guess a bit dramatised – about the life of the hero Hercules. It was good, very vivid and nuanced. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Normal People | Sally Rooney | I saw the series before reading the book, and both formats have their charm. The author has a great language, and manages to capture the atmosphere that surrounds that age from high school to university. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Cosa Nostra | John Dickie | A non-fiction history about the Sicilian mafia. Entertaining. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| About A Boy | Nick Hornby | Very 'fun' and unforeseeable language. The thoughts of the two main characters – the man and the boy – are written in a way that feels authentic. I liked the randomness and quick turns of the book. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Jag Kan Ha Fel | Björn Natthiko Lindeblad | Written by a Swedish businessman who became a Buddhist monk for 17 years. It's not a classic self help book, nor some kind of teaching about Buddhism. It's merely his story, with some of his philosophies thrown in. He mixes serious subjects with wit. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| The Godfather | Mario Puzo | Even better than the movie. More details (of course), and deeper descriptions of characters. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| The Alchemist | Paolo Coelho | I loved it in the beginning, but then it turned out to be boring New Age-y stuff. | Sri Lanka |
| The Zahir | Paolo Coelho | Like The Alchemist, this one was boring. Poorly written, boring plot, and not believable at all. | Sri Lanka |
| The Snow Leopard | Peter Matthiessen | A travel diary of an American in an expedition into the Himalayas. He's real goal is to catch a glimpse of the very shy Snow Leopard. This travel text captures the beauty of Zen without speaking too much about it. It's kind of dense at times, but very, very grand. | Sri Lanka |
| Men Without Women | Haruki Murakami | I like short story collections, and Murakami's language is the best. Read this. | Sri Lanka |
| The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | Barcelona, Spain | |
| A Brief History of Time | Stephen Hawking | Stockholm, Sweden | |
| A Little Life | Hanya Yanagihara | The saddest book I've read in all my life. But oh so good. | Stockholm, Sweden |
| 21 Lessons for the 21th Century | Yuval Noah Harari | Stockholm, Sweden | |
| Hero — David Bowie | Lesley-Ann Jones | Lisbon, Portugal | |
| Sapiens | Yuval Noah Harari | Nice, France | |
| The Mountain Shadow | Gregory David Roberts | Sequel to Shantaram. Not as good, but nevertheless a good sequel. | Gothenburg, Sweden |
| M Train | Patti Smith | New York, USA | |
| A Moveable Feast | Ernest Hemingway | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil | |
| The Essential Hemingway | Ernest Hemingway | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil | |
| Dancing with the Devil in the City of God | Juliana Barbassa | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil | |
| Just Kids | Patti Smith | Very touching, and beautifully written. | San Francisco, USA |
| Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance | Robert M. Pirsig | Vienna, Austria | |
| W. Axl Rose | Mick Wall | Gothenburg, Sweden | |
| Becoming Steve Jobs | Brent Schlender & Rick Tetzeli | Gothenburg, Sweden | |
| Steve Jobs | Walter Isaacson | Gothenburg, Sweden | |
| Shantaram | Gregory David Roberts | Gothenburg, Sweden | |
| Scar Tissue | Anthony Kiedis | Raw and honest. | Gothenburg, Sweden |
| Into the Wild | Jon Krakauer | Paris, France | |
| Black Sabbath | Mick Wall | ||
| The Road | Cormac McCarthy | The minimal language is perfect. | |
| Life of Pi | Yann Martel | Calgary, Canada | |
| Infinity | Brian Clegg | Calgary, Canada | |
| Rework | Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson | Calgary, Canada | |
| The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail | M. Baigent, R. Leigh & H. Lincoln | Calgary, Canada | |
| No One Here Gets Out Alive | Jerry Hopkins & Danny Sugarman | Calgary, Canada | |
| Interview wih the Vampire | Anne Rice | Calgary, Canada | |
| Led Zeppelin – When Giants Walked The Earth | Mick Wall | Kauai, Hawaii | |
| Hammer of the Gods – The Led Zeppelin Saga | Stephen Davis | Kauai, Hawaii | |
| The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway | ||
| 1984 | George Orwell | ||
| Animal Farm | George Orwell | ||
| The Silmarillion | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| Bilbo | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R. Tolkien |
75 books | Feed