Tentacle Words - the Swedish Bookworm
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A treasure hunt in Damascus
I love the feeling of this story. It's like getting moved into one of those lovely BBC tv-series. I like Evangeline, she's cool, and the story is adventurous in such a nice way. Deanne Raybourn has written a story with a lovely Agatha Christie flair.
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The Lost Girls of Paris
I am actually a bit fed up with books about WWII. There’s been so many of them these last years. But hey, this is Paris! And I do have, as you might know by now, a faiblesse for Paris. You can’t go wrong with Paris. And even though there’s actually not that much about Paris in The Lost Girls of Paris, Pam Jenoff pulls it off. I’m hooked from page one, or more correctly, from the first minute since I listened to it. Here we meet Elenor Trigg and the girls she picks out as spies, curirs and secret agents during WWII. She handpicks the girls, make sure they get…
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Mardi gras a la Suède
While other countries indulge in huge, festive carnevals today, here in Sweden we celebrate Mardi gras in our own ”lagom” way. No captivating music, no pearl necklesses, no beautiful costumes, just delicious wheat buns filled with smoth almond paste, whipped cream and topped with icing sugar. Delicious. The traditional wheat bun, called semla, has been around for centuries and some prefer to eat it dipped in hot milk as they did ages ago when the bread maybe wasn’t as fresh as it is today. The semla is so popular that one of our childhood heroes, the private detective Ture Sventon (written by Åke Holmberg), has to eat semlas to save…
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The Gilded Wolves
There’s something about Paris. Books that takes place in Paris seems to work for me – every time. Mix that with a beautiful and intriguing tale about friendship, love, justice and some magic. Well… then I’m sold. That’s exactly what Roshani Chokshi has done in her debut novel The Gilded Wolves. It’s a book filled with glamour, decadence, mystery and adventure – and it kept me up all night reading. During the Exposition Universell 1889 treasure hunter Séverin and his friends are faced with their most dangerous task ever, to find and retrieve a treasure for the powerful society Order of Babel. If they succeed Séverin might finally get the…
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Secret love, secret recipes and secret heirs
This book might as well have been called Eat, Pray, Love – aside from the praying part. There’s not much of it, none at all infact, even though it’s set in the Vatican State late 1500s. But there is a lot of love, great love, and good food in The Chef’s Secret by Crystal King. Is I started listening got curious, who was this Bartolomeo Scappi? Was he purely a work of fiction or was there some truth behind the story. And it turns out Scappi was the first celebrity chef. Famous for his work at the Vatican, for several popes and cardinals and for the first mega hit cook…
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It’s that time of the year
No, I’m not talking about Christmas, we’ve all lived through that quite recently. No, I’m talking about the Swedish book tradition – Bokrean – The Big Book Sale. At the end of February every year all bookstores, IRL or online, offers all the books they want to get rid of or are try to convince us to buy them at a really good price, a bargain hopefully. I remember the Book Sale as something very special growing up. Flipping through the brochure from the nearest book store, trying to choose what to buy. For some reason I always wanted to buy more than my wallet wanted… The book store, Hallmans,…