Book Challenge Month Three

This month I decided my theme would be Nordic Humour and I went to the local library and asked the friendly librarian what she recommended and I went home with three authors and six books.

For the Norwegian author I went with Knut Nærum, I think he is hilarious, he is the author I read some Easter Crime books of here.
This book is called PEER, and is a sort of child friendly, shorter and more updated version of Peer Gynt by Ibsen with songs since the author thought the original lacked that.
Unfortunately I only knew a couple of the songs in this book, but the opening made the whole book worth reading. The opening is from Beauty and the Beast, the song the villagers sing about Belle only here they are singing about Peer. I won't lie I started singing out loud in this sequence and it was well written and flowed nicely like a song should, not at all like badly written songs by relatives for a special party. The book in it self was short and written like the play but I did enjoy it. I read it on a Sunday while Mister M struggled to stay awake reading whatever he was reading and eventually I was reading accompanied by Mister M's snoring. A quite enjoyable day.

Speaking of Mister M, he likes this Finnish author and he has read most of his books although in Finnish so I can't borrow them from him so I thought I could borrow the ones from the local library, and (not the one about the hare because Mister M can't remember if the hare fares badly and I don't want to read about a dead hare), somehow I managed to borrow two books Mister M has never read.
Arto Paasilinna, who I for some reason call Pasinen.... Or Pasonen.

Adam og Eva was a good book, I liked this one more than the other. Adam is divorced with a load of kids and is struggling with his battery business, he owns a lot of back taxes and in the middle of this he is inventing a new kind of battery. He meets the drunken lawyer Eva who helps him financially while he finishes his battery, but not everyone wants him to succeed. The oil-business is not too happy and sends an assassin to kill him.

The pace of this book was fast and the twists was fun and the characters unusual, I loved the book until it's final chapter, then I hated it, but I do think it ended how it should have.

Herre min hatt, was not quite so enjoyable in my opinion, it felt a bit half finished, like it should have another 50 pages or so. 

This book is about God, he is tired and wants a vacation, so he asks Gabriel and St.Peter to find a replacement for a year or so and Birger Ryynänen is chosen. He is a crane driver and often prays in his little crane high above the city, if he is not reading something.

There are a lot of fun twists here too even if I am not quite happy with how heaven is pictured or how heaven is managed. But I do like the idea of heaven being situated in Finland in an old big wood church in Kerimäki. 

Then I read two books (I have not yet read the third) from Jonas Jonasson, a Swede.
And these books were rather fun! I am not sure I have a favourite out of the two, they are both good, but in Analfabeten som kunne regne one of the main characters is female, the other females in the other books were not main characters I think. This book starts in South Africa and ends in Sweden with a girl who can read and can write and count and a man who does not exist and his brother who does and his angry girlfriend and a nuclear bomb which also does not exist but also does....
Well I can't explain it, just read it...

Morder-Anders og hans venner (samt en og annen uvenn)

I think this book is the book I might have snorted out loud when reading, I like reading about shady characters and some cartoon violence and twisting and turning and unlikely events.

Morder-Anders is as his name implies a murderer but he is not a murderer by trade, he is a torpedo and hits people in their knee if he gets paid for it, but things are not going so well because he can't differentiate between right and left... And then he meets a receptionist and a priest who does not believe in God and together they join forces....

I wish I found an Icelandic book, but the librarian could not find one from the top of her curly head and I did have plenty of books so I thought I could not finish all of them in time, which I didn't, I still have one book left, Hundreåringen som klatret ut gjennom vinduet og forsvant.

I have now read 16 17 of 52 books.

I hurriedly read the last of the humour books and I just finished in time to take it back to the library.

I liked it, and funnily enough Paasilinna was mentioned in this book, that the events were almost taken from one of his books which I found rather amusing. Other than that I can say that I probably would have liked this better if I had read it before the other two. I have a tendency of getting "sick" of a writer's style after a while and even if it was funny and good written I think I would have liked it more if I had read it before the others. But I still think it is better than the "analfabet" one.

This book is about a hundred year old man  who gets up and leaves through the window of his own birthday party and disappears. Then he meets people and things happen. Here we also get two timelines and hear about the man's life and it is rather entertaining. I haven't seen the movie, but I might. I would recommend all of these books to read if you want a funny fast reading unbelievable novel.