"Be flexible. Be compassionate. Rules can never cure insecurity. Integrity matters. Never try to script what your relationships will look like. Love is abundant. Compatibility matters. You cannot sacrifice your happiness for that of another. [...] It is almost impossible to be loving or compassionate when all you fear is fear of loss. Trust that your partners want to be with you, and that if given the freedom to do anything they please, they will choose to cherish and support you."

Ich hatte gute Erfahrungen mit Langenscheidt's Schwedischkurs, leider ist die neue Auflage des Spanischkurs aber bei weitem nicht so gut. Die Lektionen sind viel zu bunt (wörtlich zu verstehen) und es wird zu wenig Eigeninitiative gefragt, als das man wirklich erfolgreich dabei was lernt.

I've been looking for suggestions for a good book about Norse Mythology for some time, and I found this in the Bibliography of American Gods (and the Sandman) on Neil Gaiman's homepage. This book is exactly what I wanted - a retelling of the Eddaic Poems in normal text / story form, easy to understand. Kevin Crossley-Holland has retold 32 Myths from collected sources, and always used the most likely source for the main story, sometimes embellishing small details from other sources.

There are all the minor stories like the Adventures of Thor and Odin and Loki, and of course the important ones, like The Creation, The Mead of Poetry, Balder's Death, The Binding of Loki and the final Ragnarök. I think the Myths are retold very well, though there's still a lack of detail sometimes (which I assume has to do with the sources). Effectively it's just a collection of various stories that have to do with the same characters.

Another good thing about this book are the notes on each Myth. The author names the sources, sometimes quotes things he left out and suggests backgrounds and inspirations with other pantheons and beliefs.

After two chapters, I realized this is too spooky for me.

This is the first book I ever read in one of my foreign languages Swedish, so naturally I didn't understand every single word, but the context and the story was pretty easy for me to understand.

The book is about a teenager called Malin, who is secretly being followed by a mysterious stranger who knows everything about her - what she likes and dislikes, what time she comes from school, what time she meets her boyfriend Adnan, how she broke up with her ex-boyfriend Jocke, etc. He is constantly observing her, but all of their lives change drastically when Malin disappears and similarities with other cases are discovered.

At first I though the writing style of this book was a little cheap, because it's somewhat a book aimed at teenagers ages 17-19. But when the suspense finally began I was totally hooked and couldn't stop reading. This is definitely a very exciting book which thrills you to the last page. And it even has a somewhat surprise ending.

Since it's definitely pretty easy to read and good entertainment, I can recommend this as an easy read for learners of Swedish (as well as natives Swedes and people who are interested in a translation, of course).

Still a nice premise, but ultimately the resolution was pretty meh for my taste. Great potential, somewhat wasted on mediocre character development. It also has lots of really cringe parts, like that whole stuff with the priest that just made me go 'wHy???'. I sincerely hope the adaptation will improve on everything, just as they did in S1 of Silo.

The tagline on the cover of this book says "Some secrets should remain buried", and I have to totally agree with that. This book is 99% a prequel to Wool, and IMHO completely unnecessary. It explains how the world came to be what it is, how the silos were created, and why things happened the way they happened. But why would I want to know this? Not knowing every detail of these things is what made this world so interesting for me in the first place.

It also doesn't help that the main character is called Donald of all names... and does some incredibly stupid things, especially at the end of the book. It's absolutely unfathomable to me why he did what he did to Anna. Why?? WTF? Also, reading about Jimmy's solitude became really boring really fast.

Not to mention the frustration of just wanting to know how Juliette's story continues and not getting that satisfaction.

Altogether, a very mediocre sequel to an okay first book. I hope the final book is better.

I read this book after I watched the TV adaption, which covers only the first half of the book. While I enjoyed reading it and learning about the story beyond what is portrayed in the TV show, I have to say that the TV show improved this in every possible way. Literally all the characters have much more depth in the TV show, and they even added a lot of plot points that just make this world way more intriguing.

It's still an enjoyable read, and I love this type of dystopian fiction. I'll continue by reading the two other books in the series to find out how the story progresses.