In May 2016, a friend I met through Ravelry brought my attention to a Kickstarter for a book her friend Karie Westermann was writing called This Thing of Paper, with knitting designs inspired by Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press. Even with a planned publication date of April 2017, I knew I wanted this book. It’s a good thing I was patient because I didn’t receive it until December. Westermann divided the book into three sections, as she had layed out in her Kickstarter proposal. […]
Honestly, It Sounds Pretty Great
Best for: Anyone possibly considering a move to Denmark. Or just people who like fish-out-of-water stories. In a nutshell: Writer Helen Russell moves with her husband to the land of Legos for (at least) a year, and takes the time to document her experience and how it differs from life in the UK. Line that sticks with me: “ ‘We have a lot of ‘curling parents’ in Denmark, who do everything for their kids and won’t say not to them. The expression is named after […]
Culture Shock
First Fieldwork was an assigned reading when I took Intro to Anthropology in college. That was a good 15 years ago, and since then I’ve reread this book probably five times. It’s short, it’s interesting, and it’s hilarious. Barbara Gallatin Anderson recounts a fieldwork assignment in the tiny fishing village of Taarnby, Denmark. She and her husband are there to study the changes that urbanization is making to the culture of the small town. To this non-anthropologist, that sounds dull as dishwater, and I’m guessing […]
Miserable Weather + Terrible Taxes = Happy People?
If I’d just seen Michael Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, I never would have read it. First of all, the cover of the Finnish edition is hokey as hell. Bad publisher. Go to your room and think of what you’ve done. Second of all, what would you think, if you saw a book that’s just 300 odd pages about Scandinavia and Scandinavian people? Boring, right? Booth mentions very early on that many people to whom he talked about his book project […]