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Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D. H. Lawrence »

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a delightful novel and surely one of the most extraordinary literary works of the twentieth century. It is a book with a history – a previously banned book. It was banned in England and the United States after its initial publication in 1928 due to the once-shockingly explicit treatment of its [...]

Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift »

The world literature is full of treasures. One of them is Gulliver’s Travels, a truly remarkable and excellent book. It is a book everybody has read. But most have read it as a children’s book, and many in an edited version where some of the social critique and some of the sexual content in [...]

A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1) , by George R. R. Martin »

A Game of Thrones is one of those big, epic fantasy stories. And this is the first book in the series by George R. R. Martin that is called A Song of Ice and Fire. And indeed – the setting is fairly typical – it is a medieval or late medieval society where knights [...]

The Mauritius Command, by Patrick O’Brian »

Patrick O’Brian’s fourth Aubrey-Maturin novel, The Mauritius Command, is probably the best so far in the series and a delightful read. O’Brian actually retells in considerable detail the 1810 British campaign against Mauritius and Réunion, carried out by commander Sir Josias Rowley. Only here, of course, Jack Aubrey is the commander, and the story has [...]

The African Queen, by C. S. Forester »

C. S. Forester is now mostly remembered for his Horatio Hornblower sea adventures. However, his novel The African Queen, filmed in 1951 by John Huston with stars Bogart and Hepburn, is very well worth remembering as well.
The setting is German Central Africa in the year 1914. At the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, the [...]

Beat to Quarters, by C. S. Forester »

This was the first book C. S. Forester wrote about Horatio Hornblower. However, in terms of the internal chronology of the series, it is the fifth. In England its title was The Happy Return.
In Beat to Quarters (the US title) we find Hornblower, having been promoted to Captain, on a secret mission to the Pacific [...]

Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann »

Some works of art are almost logically impossible. Often literature and art capture and present phenomena in ways that contribute to their understanding. This most certainly is the case with the wonderful novel Buddenbrooks. If it is at all possible to convey 19th century German bourgeois atmosphere and culture in a single book, then [...]

Brand, by Henrik Ibsen »

Brand is the drama of absolute intransigence in support of the religious life as opposed to the hedonistic one. The motto of Brand, the main character, is “All or nothing”. He is a strong person, a very stubborn Norwegian, and he does not admit compromises nor expedients, but goes directly to his goal, over-riding [...]

The Emigrants, by Vilhelm Moberg »

The Emigrants (Utvandrarna) is an epic work of historical fiction. This beautifully written book of historical fiction was first published in the early nineteen fifties and met with rave reviews at the time.

The focus in The Emigrants is on the family, relatives, and friends of Karl Oscar Nilsson. Karl Oskar Nilsson grew up [...]

Ida Elisabeth, by Sigrid Undset »

(Oslo : Aschehoug, 1932, New York : Knopf, 1933.) Ida Elisabeth marries Frithjof, her teenage sweetheart. They get four children together, but only two of them live to grow up. Soon Ida Elisabeth discovers that she has married a real shirker of a man.
When Frithjof embarks on an affair with another woman, Ida Elisabeth [...]