Vol. 37, No. 2
June 2007

STAYING COOL IN ARIZONA

Our regular summer feature on beating the heat by reading cool takes us to Scandinavia this year, a region definitely cooler than Arizona in spite of the long hours of daylight during the summer months.  We could start with some mystery novels, such as Listen for the Whisperer (RC61871) by Phyllis Whitney, the story of a young woman whose search of her mother takes her to Norway and straight into danger.  Katherine Hall Page’s The Body in the Fjord (RC47273) features Faith Fairchild’s friend Pix Miller, whose trip to Norway with her mother in search of a missing friend uncovers a plot to smuggle Viking silver out of the country.  Next door in Sweden an art teacher is found frozen in an isolated village.  The villagers think it’s an accident, but could it be murder?  Find out by reading Under the Snow (RC47055) by Kerstin Ekman.

Oslo and New York are the setting for a somewhat humorous retelling of the story of three generations of a Norwegian family and its eccentric women in Before You Sleep (RC50816) by Linn Ullmann, while a trip to Finland by middle-aged friends brings them new resolve to make changes in their lives (Sisterchicks on the Loose, by Robin Jones Gunn, RC60270).

Ken Follett’s’ suspenseful Hornet Flight (RC55279) is set in the early days of World War II.  When a young Dane finds a secret Nazi radar installation on his island home, he attempts to cross the North Sea to warn the British.  We also have an exciting non-fiction book about the war, We Die Alone (RC49996) by David Howarth that chronicles a daring covert landing of allied commandos in German-occupied Norway in 1943.

There are several historical novels that feature Scandinavia, including Music and Silence (RC51974) by Rose Tremain.  Set in 1629, the novel revolves around the court of King Christian IV, told from the perspective of a flute player in the Royal Orchestra.  The physician of another, later, King Christian gains absolute power but is eventually undone by his affair with the queen in The Royal Physician’s Visit (RC59098) by Per Olov Enquist. 

Officers of England’s Royal Navy are sent on dangerous missions in two different novels.  Richard Sharpe must deliver a bribe to neutral Denmark during the Napoleonic Wars in Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe’s Prey (RC61519) and Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater, head of the Royal Navy’s Secret Department, travels to Norway to deal with a secret treaty during the same wars in Beneath the Aurora (RC57229) by Richard Woodman.

A pair of classic novels by Martin Andersen Nexo, Pelle the Conqueror, Volume 1 (RC33640) and Volume 2 (RC46672), round out our historical fiction.  These novels follow the life of a motherless young man as he achieves independence and adapts to a changing society at the end of the 19th century.

On the non-fiction side, The Rescue Artist (RC61523) by Edward Dolnic chronicles the 1994 theft from Norway’s National Gallery and later recovery of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, a painting valued at seventy-two million dollars.  The Last Imaginary Place (RC62643) by Robert McGhee offers a portrait of the northern polar regions of Canada, Alaska, Norway, Iceland, and Greenland, and The Northern Lights (RC54386) by Lucy Jago is an account of the Norwegian physicist who unlocked the mystery of the aurora borealis in 1899.

Some biographies of Scandinavians in our collection are Notorious, The Life of Ingrid Bergman (RC53248), Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens (RC57485), and Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller (RC53399).

We will finish with a fairly new edition of Andersen’s fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories (RC56309), which was translated into modern English in 1974 by bi-lingual author Erik Christian Haugaard.

Enjoy your reading and by all means, stay cool.