The most recommended books about Denmark

This gorgeously illustrated book helped my daughter and I through a difficult time when I had to travel out of the country for work. The illustrations put into pictures what I could not put into words- that no matter where I was, or what I was doing, she was always on my mind and in my heart. 

Chef Rene Redzepi from the three-Michelin star restaurant Noma in Copenhagen is internationally recognized for his unique reinterpretation of Scandinavian cuisine and for using locally sourced ingredients. Redzepi also focuses on fermentation and experimenting with using as much of the plants, meat, and fish as possible. Jeff Gordiner spent four years spent traveling with René Redzepi and Hungry takes us along on their journey from Mexico to Australia, to Norway, and Denmark, and offers a glimpse into the mind of this amazing and complex chef who has changed the way we look at fine dining. This is a must-read to better understand the creative process in modern restaurant culture.

By April 1848, 24 men of the Franklin expedition had died–37 percent of officers and 14 percent of crewmen. Why were some dying onshore in a large hospital tent? What galvanized the remaining 105 to abandon the ships? Flashback to 1619, when at Churchill, the Danish explorer Jens Munk lost 61 of 64 men to a “rare and extraordinary” disease. Munk’s journal gave rise to a 1973 article by historian Delbert Young, who argued that those men died of trichinosis after eating infected polar bear meat.

It pointed to the 1897 Andree expedition, whose principals died of the same disease, according to a doctor who studied physical evidence. The journal leads, finally, to what I see as the root cause of the Franklin catastrophe: trichinosis.

In Europe it is a tradition to pass down from generation to generation the stories of survival during the German occupation of their countries. I have met some families that actually traveled to the United States to attend military reunions of the units who freed their homelands back in 1944-45. 

Tveskov takes you into the terrifying world of Copenhagen during the war and remembers it through the eyes and experiences of a young boy. His book makes one appreciate how G.I. Joe came to be loved by so many Europeans.

I’m often asked by Americans who aren’t familiar with Wollstonecraft (or confuse mother and daughter), which of her books to read first. Vindication of the Rights of Woman is her most famous, but I always answer that if you only read one, this book is it. It’s her most modern and personal work, and the last thing she wrote before dying of puerperal fever at age 38, after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley. It’s part travelogue, love letter, philosophical treatise, cultural history, and (I would argue) suicide note, bookended by her two attempts after a shattering affair with American speculator Gilbert Imlay. It’s short and accessible, beautifully written, and a glimpse into a magnificent mind.

I enjoyed reading about the courage the young protagonist, Annemarie, had and her determination to keep her best friend safe.

Lowry’s lyrical words put you in the moment and make you feel part of that world. I learned a lot about what WWII looked outside Germany, how people reacted to it, and how many outwitted the enemy. 

My mother read this book to me over the course of several weekday afternoons. I was nine, maybe ten. The book’s protagonist, David, is a boy who escapes from a concentration camp somewhere in Eastern Europe and walks to Denmark in search of his mother. Lying next to my own mother, on her bed, listening to her voice, cocooned by her love, I identified so very powerfully with this unrooted, solitary, questing boy. It stirred me more than anything else I read as a child. There is something in a refugee’s tale that is so primal, so hard to shake off. There but by the grace of God go I, I thought, every time my mother opened the book to read some more.

This is an unusual crime story set in Copenhagen, Denmark. It caused a sensation when it was published in 1992. The main character Smilla Jaspersen is a half Inuit scientist from Greenland, lonely and homesick in the big city. The death of an Inuit boy pulls her into a complex web of crime exposing Denmark’s complicated relationship with its protectorate Greenland. The title refers to the Inuit people’s understanding of their wintry habitat, and is a reminder of the threat to traditional lifestyles of many indigenous people. A thriller, but so much more. 

Best known for its famous quote “To be or not to be.” Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet revolves around the struggles of life.

I find this piece inspiring —not because of the question of suicidal ideation but—because of how it is written. Shakespeare manages to put an entire existential crisis into such a concise statement. I wish I could write quotes like that. Also, Shakespeare’s 5 act structure, although from theatre, builds the backbone of my books.

The language is witty, stating so much in between the lines. What I find most inspiring about it as an author, though, is that Shakespeare managed to appeal to a broad mass by providing entertainment to the simpler folks while addressing sensitive political topics and philosophical questions for the intellectuals.

I read this classic sci-fi way back when I was a teenager and I think, over the years, it has been a quiet, persistent influence on my own writing.

Two groups of time-travellers go back and forth along ‘the corridors of Time,’ fighting to influence history their way. The protagonist is taken from a prison cell to join one group and has to catch up with what’s going on as he’s taken to the future, the seventeenth century, and the Bronze Age.

What stayed with me most vividly was Anderson’s recreation of the Danish Bronze Age and the fact that the main character chooses to give up his own time in order to remain in the Bronze Age with the people he has come to love.