My last 5 books: Why read in one language when you can read in four? :P

1. Thin Air, by Michelle Paver. This book was brilliant. Written like an old-fashioned account of events, I originally thought it was an old story, but it's actually less than 10 years old. I've always had a fascination for the explorers of the past - how brave and daring they must've been to venture into the unknown with barely any technology to speak of; early 20th century expeditions into the Arctic and Antarctica, or through the African jungles in the 19th century, or chasing the horizon across the seas for millennia, or climbing that mountain to the top. So this story takes place in 1935 and it's written like it. It follows a group of Englishmen attempting to climb the third tallest mountain in the world; the Kangchenjunga, and they're all in awe of a previous expedition to the mountain in 1907. None of the hitherto expeditions have made it to the top, and the one they're all admiring ended pretty badly. The thin air on mountains make you sick, and mountain sickness messes with your head. All of this adds up to a chillingly brilliant ghost story. 

2. From the Earth to the Moon, by Jules Verne. I'm a big fan of 19th century sci-fi, because the science is dubious at best and ludicrous at worst, but the sheer hope for the future is just amazing to see/read. So what happens in this one is that the Gun Club in the US is fresh out of things to do because the Civil War has ended. One of them proposes that they send a projectile to the moon, basically to just prove that they can, and the entire Club agrees that it's a splendid idea. What follows are a lot of gentlemen hard at work doing calculations to figure out the best time to fire such a projectile, how it should be done, what it should be made of, and how in the world they'll manage to give it the speed required to reach the moon. When the day for the launch draws near by a couple months an adventurer appears and suddenly the entire enterprise changes from "sending a projectile to the moon" to "sending people to the moon". Basically so that they can establish communication with the civilization on the moon. It's kind of fun to read their logical arguments for why there obviously (duh!) is a civilization on the moon, and on every single planet in the solar system. They go on a long tirade about how the supposed civilization on Jupiter is superior to that of the Earth (guess nobody had figured out that Jupiter is basically just gas yet?) This book was first published in 1865 and I had a lot of fun with the supposed science and how they applied themselves to get to the moon with the resources they had. Verne wrote this story more than a full century before we actually placed a person on the moon. Mind-blowing. 

3. Sekaiteki Youtuber ni Natta Tohoku Sonzai no Eikokujin, by Chris Broad. If you have watched every single video by Chris and listened to the podcast then you have a pretty good idea what this book is about. Chris tells the story of how he ended up going to Japan, what brought him there, what his years as an English teacher were like, and how he ended up doing Youtube full-time. He gives his opinions on the Japanese society; what's great and what could be improved. He relates the story of how his channel grew to where it is today and finishes the book by telling his readers about the covid pandemic and what it did to foreigners in Japan and how it impacted him more personally. He ends the book by telling fans how he'd like people to act when they run into him. All in all it's a pretty sweet book. Chris talks a lot about understanding, collaboration and charm and it's obvious from the pages (and his videos) that he genuinely loves Japan and what he does. It's heart-warming to read. It took me forever because I can't read as fast in Japanese as I can in English or Swedish, but in the end I really did enjoy this book.

4. The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton. Read in Swedish. I've had some bad experiences with translations and so I often avoid them where I can, but this translation was beautifully done. This book would have been right up my alley when I was 12-14. Historical venues, family mysteries, hidden places, and strong-willed women were all things I enjoyed reading about at that age, and that was the main reason I decided to pick up this book. For the first part of this book I wasn't convinced, nothing seemed to be happening and the different perspectives showed up seemingly without any connection to each other. But in the second part the different perspectives started to meld together to form one coherent story and that's when I became invested and realized that I still like a lot of the same things now as I did at 12. I thought this would be a book I would donate, but it became a book I'd like to read again. The story follows Nell, Cassandra and Eliza respectively. In her early 20s Nell finds out that she is a foundling and not the biological child of her parents and she spends the rest of her life trying to find out where she came from. It wasn't until she was in her 60s when her father died that the things she was found with were returned to her and following the clues from those things she heads to Cornwall, England from Australia, where she ends up buying a cottage. Circumstances of life later prevents her from going back to that cottage and finding out the real story of where she came from. Her granddaughter Cassandra inherits the cottage and the mystery of her grandmother's origins. After the death of her husband and son, followed by the death of her beloved grandmother, Cassandra decides to go to England to get a change of scenery and also to poke around the cottage. Her initial thought is to sell it, but she gets tangled up in Nell's mystery and goes on trying to solve it. All while Nell and Cassandra follow clues in their respective present day (1975 and 2005 respectively) the reader also gets to follow Eliza from 1900 to 1913 and Eliza's story has some very pronounced effects on both Nell and Cassandra. It's been a great ride and I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would. 

5. Mondo et autres histoires, by J.M.G. Le Clezio. This is one of the books I saved from when I studied French at uni, to read later without the pressure. Le Clezio's language is beautiful and he writes fantastical stories in a pretty magical way. I can see how pretty they are, and I feel the magic when I read them, which is why it's so frustrating that they don't engage me. It was a chore to pick this book up. I read it on and off for almost a month without really making much progress, and in the end I decided to DNF it. I really wish I'd enjoy this book because it's so beautifully written. But I just didn't.