Books in Sweden!

Okay, I promised to tell you all about my wonderful adventures in Scandinavia! Well, here goes!
I thought I'd try to split some of these posts up into themes, rather than just give you a play-by-play of my time there. I will strive for some semblance of order, but I give no promises!

I thought that a decent place to start would be books (yeah, I'm a nerd). They had small bookstores with the delightful tag of "Pocket Shop" pretty much everywhere in the city, especially near train stations and large shopping districts. I would liken them to Walden Books here in the US, but they were unique in that they only carried paperback books, usually in a rather compact size, hence the name.

One of my missions while in Sweden was to find a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" in Swedish ("Harry Potter och de Vises Sten," for those of you keeping score at home), so this was a shop I made sure to visit. They did not have the book I was looking for (apparently it's only published in hardcover), but I did stumble across a few other best-sellers:




The first book in the Twilight saga, known here in the states as"Twilight," is called "If I Could Dream" in Swedish. I see this title and all I can think of is someone saying "Sorry girls, gorgeous, brilliant, filthy-rich, chivalrous, sparkling vampires only exist in your dreams!"Leave it to the Swedes to keep things reasonable.





The second book, "New Moon," literally translated is "When I Hear Your Voice."
My gorgeous, brilliant, chivalrous (but deep-in-student-debt and SO NOT SPARKLY, thank goodness) fiance Gordon helped me to tabulate a list of psychiatric ailments that likely plagued Bella Swan. Some highlights were Clinical Depression, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Auditory/Visual hallucinations, possibly caused by Schizophrenia. He came up with more, but I can't remember them just now...





The Swedish title for "Eclipse" grows even more obscure, translated as "The Light of Your Heart." I'm just not going to even try for this one.









And the final, most cryptic title of all: "Breaking Dawn" is "So Long We Both Breathe." This title confuses me to no end. First, I thought it was the Swedish equivalent to the phrase "as long as we both shall live," referring to the vampire wedding, but then I realized that in the twilight universe, vampires didn't need to breathe, so probably not. Then I thought that maybe it meant "So long! We can both breathe," meaning you can breathe easy now that everything's resolved. But honestly, the more I think about it, the weirder it gets, so I'm content to believe that the Swedish versions, like the American originals, make very little sense.


Here's another title that caught my eye:








"SWEDISH MAFFIA???" Dude. I didn't know they had one of those. But now that I do, I'm frightened. I'm curious to know if they utilize berzerkers like their viking predecessors...


On Tuesday of the week I was there, Dan (my brother, whom I was visiting) said we'd devote the day to doing whatever I wanted to do. That day we visited the Royal Library and the Music Museum (I think he may have regretted giving me so much control). The museum will have to wait for another time, as it doesn't fit the theme of this post, but the library looked like this:














I was a little disappointed to discover it was closed-stacks (you look up the resources you want and ask a librarian to retrieve them for you), but the reference section ended up being a good deal fun anyway (I think even Dan enjoyed himself!).




I mean, come on, there's a spiral staircase! In a library! In the reference section! How cool is that?!

Okay, moving on...





I was curious to see what kind of resources they had on music. We looked up the shelf numbers using the index, and I was rather disappointed with what I found:

I mean, seriously? That's it??? The National Library of Sweden and that's all you have???

Thankfully my brother was more interested in exploring, and happened to stumble across something more a few aisles down (apparently I'm not as adept at the Swedish cataloging method as I had hoped):







Aaaaaaah, that's better! An entire aisle devoted to music reference materials! My faith in Swedish librarians has been restored!





I was pleased to see that our dear beloved "THE NEW GROVE" encyclopedias are the standard in Scandinavia, as well.

Look familiar???
(Okay, Okay, I know MGG is German, but it was still fun to see materials that I recognized!!!)

While we're on a familiar-looking-music-books kick, I thought I'd mention the interesting title I found on my visit to the KungligaMusikHögskolan (the Royal College of Music).*

This is the title they use for their Music History classes:
Yes, yes, that's right: they use the simplified version of our dear old "History of Western Music" (note the author's line: Based on J. Peter Burkholder, Palisca and Grout!). I guess I should cut them some slack, remembering that English is their second language and all (can you imagine studying for your classes in a foreign language?), but I'm having too much fun right now thinking about the Europeans using the dumbed-down version.

Okay, I've run out of book-related fun to pass on,** so I will leave you with this viking parable (found in a book, no less!):

"Wake early if you want another man's life or land..."
Yeah, the wolves and battle imagery is just a tad more brutal than birds catching worms, don't you think?

*Again, this is a story for another post!

**Oh yeah, I found Harry Potter in Swedish, by the way! It's everything I hoped it would be and more! ;)