Day 10 – Favourite classic book

I’m going to cheat again and feature two classics, one Swedish and one English. I read mostly in English but I want to read more Swedish so I feel justified

My English classic was quite easy to choose: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This was quite an easy choice, I mean I have written two MAJOR papers on this book (my senior project in high school and my Masters Thesis). It is a book that had a profound impact on me as a teenager in that it really impacted on the way I saw the world, especially the way I view the consumerist society in which we live. It was also my first real introduction into feminist theory (although I didn’t realise that until much later). Through its presentation of a futuristic society it debated many of the big ethical issues in our time. Issues that were big when Huxley wrote the book and that are perhaps even bigger now.

My second book is also a book I read in high school and loved (I know I said yesterday that I don’t normally like assigned books but these two are the exceptions that prove the rule (there are others but them I mostly loved after analysis, these I loved on reading them)). The book is Mina drömmars stad (Stockholm: City of My Dreams) by Per Anders Fogelström (the first two books are translated in English by Jennifer Brown Baverstam). This is the first book in the City series, a historical fiction series, which tells the story of a family in Stockholm during a 100+ year period (the book takes place from 1860-1968). Like the books about Lina that I featured on Day 7, these books helped me become more aware of Swedish history in the form of fiction. The books can be pretty depressing at time but at the same time they are at times filled with love and care. They are very well written both the language and the historical parts. You really feel like you are in the poorer parts of Stockholm during these times. I like these books because they focus on “regular people” in a historical context. When we study history these people often become statistics and faceless entities. Although this is fiction you feel like it could have been reality.

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