Mike Carey Writes Well
Aard super-regular Birger Johansson very kindly sent me a bunch of supernatural detective novels by Mike Carey, the Felix Castor series. I’m on the second one now (from 2006) and enjoying it a lot. The...
View ArticleChoosing and Accessing My Reading Matter
I listened to BBC Click about the future of publishing and had the idea to look at a couple of parameters in my reading habits: where I get the idea to read each book-length text, how I get hold of...
View ArticleHarry Martinson Talk
The Swedish Skeptics have received the 2012 Harry Martinson Memorial Prize from his birth municipality Olofström and the Harry Martinson Society. Martinson, a Nobel laureate, was a poet and prose...
View ArticleAnother Crappy Publishing Deal
Sigh. Another crappy publishing deal. This firm wants me to write a 500-word encyclopaedia entry and assign copyright entirely to them, with the right to re-edit in the future. And what do they offer...
View ArticleNew Guide Book on Medieval Uppland
Sweden’s traditionally divided into 25 landskap provinces. They live on in people’s minds despite having been superseded by a new län division in 1634. The boundaries of the landskap go way back into...
View ArticleVacation Fun
Spent a week gloriously off-line at my mom’s glorious summer house in the archipelago. Oh the joy of reading 300 pages for fun in one day without feeling the need to check e-mail! Here are the books I...
View ArticleFiction Authors, Remember Who Your Narrator Is
I’ve blogged before about authors who write fiction in the first person past tense but clearly have no idea of in which situation or at what point in time their narrator resides while telling the...
View ArticleScifi, Rocketry and Occult Silliness
Jack Parsons (1914-52) was a rocketry pioneer, a science fiction fan and a deeply committed occult follower of the aged Aleister Crowley. I recently read the 2004 edition of John Carter’s biography of...
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Book Review: Erotic Refugees
I’ll tell you two things up front: this book is my friend’s first published novel; and I would have read it with great enjoyment even if I had no idea who the guy was. Paddy Kelly classifies it...
View ArticleBest Reads of 2012
Here are my best reads in English during 2012. I read 50 books this year, six of which were e-books. I flirted with LibraryThing for a while, but lately I’ve found that Goodreads is more the kind of...
View ArticleHedge-Wizards and Hedge-Parsons
The Grey Mouser, along with Fafhrd the Northerner hero of Fritz Leiber’s genre-defining sword & sorcery story cycle, is the archetype of the Dungeons & Dragons thief. He began his career...
View ArticleKay Glans Mourns Authoritative Newspaper Discourse
Kay Glans used to edit the literary pages of Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden’s main conservative* newspaper, and Axess Magasin, a conservative Swedish arts & social sciences mag that also has a TV...
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The Sacred Blue String of Ethnic Identity
In this well-written, painstakingly annotated and beautifully designed book, physicist Baruch Sterman (with contributor Judy Taubes Sterman) traces the history and prehistory of a certain blue pigment,...
View ArticleNew ?Guide Book To Medieval Stockholm
Historiska media is a publishing house in Lund. In recent years they have been putting out pop-sci guide books about Medieval Sweden, province by province. I’ve reviewed the volumes about Södermanland...
View ArticleI Was Wrong About Book-On-Demand
Here’s a fun case of me not anticipating an imminent technological development, not thinking that last centimetre of far enough. In July of 2007, six years ago, I wrote: Lately I have come to think of...
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An Attempt To Move The Hanging Gardens
About the time of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, Greek writers started to offer lists of Seven Wonders that the well-read traveller should see. In the 2nd century BC the Hanging Gardens of...
View ArticleBest Reads of 2013
Here are my best reads in English during 2013. It was a really good year for quality, though I didn’t read very much: 41 books, twelve of which were e-books. The latter number was boosted by the Humble...
View ArticleThe Muddler’s Button Collection And Multivariate Statistics
I put Tove Jansson’s Moomin character the Muddler, Sw. Rådd-djuret, into a presentation. It’s about multivariate statistics for archaeologists, and I accompany the picture with the following quotation....
View ArticleAlboin and Cunimund in Hell
Back in 2012 we had a look at the first novel written in Swedish, 1666/68′s Stratonice by Urban Hiärne (1641-1724). He went on to become a high-ranking doctor, founded a hydrotherapeutic spa resort,...
View ArticleViga-Glum’s Fits Of Murderous Laughter
Sweden doesn’t have much of a written record for the Viking Period. We have most of the rune stones but hardly any of the sagas. And thus among Swedish Viking scholars it is not uncommon to be rather...
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