Visiting the Book Fair

A local book fair at the end of March seems to be on the way of becoming a tradition in Borås. This was the third year in a row. I blogged about the first back in 2017. I bought two books on that occasion. Last year it seems I did not blog about it, but I did pop in at the book fair then too, and bought one book. This year, I came home with three! 

One of them was given away for free - an offer hard to resist...  (That's the one with "Sarajevo" in the title.) 

One is about a tragedy that the author discovered in her own family history, and decided to research and write about. (I have not read it yet but the cover says it's the story of a woman who murdered her children - back in 1929.) I was intrigued by it because it reminded me of things I've been meaning to perhaps try to continue looking into myself, related to my own family history. Nothing as drastic as murder; and not likely to result in a book. But, as I said to the author while chatting briefly to her about hers, while buying it: Sometimes one does comes across bits and pieces here and there that makes one wish that someone had written the full story. 

The third one is the first in a 'cozy crime' series that escaped my attention until now. One of the rather many such series set in an otherwise rather idyllic small Swedish Town. In this series, the scene is Hjo, such a small town on the west coast of Lake Vättern, in the province of Västergötland (the same province where I live). And as it happens, Hjo is one of the towns that my brother and I visited on our tour around Lake Vättern two summers ago. I resisted the temptation to buy the whole series (five books so far) but I did buy the first one, and am enjoying reading it now. If nothing else, it's fun to read a book where one can call to mind quite a few flashbacks from one's own memories of what the place looks like. Here's a shortcut to one of my blog posts from Hjo from 2017. (To find even more, look up September 2017 in the Archive in the sidebar of my blog.)

I also attended a lecture by a well-known Swedish-Finnish author, Susanna Alakoski (link to Wiki article in English). One of the very many who moved to Sweden from Finland back in the 1960s, in her early childhood; the parents to work and the children just having to "jump right into it", going to Swedish school and learning Swedish etc without much special introduction for immigrants back in those days. I had several classmates from Finland throughout my school years. Children pick up language and dialects very quickly. Harder for their parents! With Susanna Alakoski (having come here in early childhood) you'd never guess now except for her Finnish surname that she is of Finnish origin. But in her lecture she talked a bit about these things - language, immigration, integration, identity etc; comparing the situation back then (1960s, with immigrants coming here from Finland + eastern and southern Europe, to work), and today (with immigrants coming from "all over the world", lots of different backgrounds, and many as refugees). Some interesting observations and thoughts, well worth considering. I'm also looking forward to reading her next book which she said will be published in the autumn and will be the first in a series that involves the Swedish textile industry. So just now she was in Borås to do some research. (As some of you know, if you've been following my blog for a while, Borås is an old textile industry town, and we also have a Textile Museum and a Textile College.)