Bogormen

Title: The Phantom Tollbooth
Author: Norton Juster
Genre: Childrens
Rating: 2.5/5
# pages: 256
Date read: February 2013

For Milo, everything's a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only because he's got nothing better to do. But on the other side, things seem different. Milo visits the island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping), learns about time from a ticking watchdog named Tock, and even embarks on a quest to rescue Rhyme and Reason.

A mix of several different books like "The Little Prince", "The Wizard of Oz" and "Alice in Wonderland". I can't quite figure out what I think of it. Parts were rather slow-moving and "weird just for the sake of being weird" (much my problem with Terry Pratchett as well. I love good-weird like Douglas Adams, but some people just try too hard), but other parts I really liked!

In the end, I'm glad I stuck with it, because it's quite a fun and quirky book in parts, but I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more - even loved it - if I'd first come across it as a child rather than in my thirties.

Title: The Exception ("Undtagelsen" in Danish)
Author: Christian Jungersen
Genre: suspense
Rating: 9/10
# pages: 621
Date read: January, 2007

Summary: Four women work at the Danish Centre for Genocide Information. When two of them start receiving death threats, they suspect that Mirko Zigic - a Serbian torturer and war criminal - is stalking them. But perhaps he is not the person behind the threats - it could be someone in their very midst.

As the tension among the women builds, they begin to turn on each other and discover that no one is exactly the person she seems to be. The office becomes a battlefield in which every move is subject to suspicion. An obsession with tracking down the killer turns into a witch hunt as the women resort to bullying and victimization. Yet these are people who daily analyze cases of appalling cruelty on a worldwide scale, and who are intimate with crimes against humanity and the psychology of evil.

The Exception is a unique and intelligent thriller about the many guises of love and evil. (From http://www.theexception.eu)

Review: It took me awhile to get properly into this book, as I started out not thinking the writing was very good... too much telling, too little showing, but I guess that was because it was necessary to get the backstory into place, because Christian Jungersen quickly stopped explaining so much and got on with the plot. Once I did get into the book, I couldn't put it down. The descriptions of the bullying is amazing. The book is split up into parts, and each part is told from the view point of one of the women. Somehow Christian Jungersen manages to make you sympathetic with whoever's thoughts you're currently following. When reading the woman who's bullied the worst, you feel incredibly sorry for her. The next chapter is told by one of the women who *does* the bullying, and you start thinking "There you go, she doesn't mean it. It's just the other person who's too sensitive." even though you know that it's not the case. Very impressive! The book is filled with twists and turns that'll leave you guessing until the very end.

I highly recommend it - both as a good suspense novel, and as a novel about bullying at work. Also, because of where the women work, facts about genocides are included in the story to explain the plot (works very well - not nearly as heavy-handed as one could have feared), facts I wasn't aware of, and found extremely interesting to read.

And fortunately, as rare as it is for a Danish book to receive international acknowledgement, this one HAS been translated to English :-)

Book List