The most recommended books about Denmark

The idea of this book is so simple and so brilliant! What if war broke out, not in some faraway part of the world, but in your own home country? What if your house had been bombed, your sister injured, and your grandparents killed? What if you, a European teenager, had to flee with your family to a country in the Middle East, where you are barely tolerated and forced to live in poverty? 

On 64 pages, in a book the size and shape of a European Union passport, Danish writer Janne Teller makes the reader understand what it really means to be a refugee from war and persecution.

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.

Everyone may love a hero, but let’s face it: They’re far more enthralled by a really good villain. An antagonist can be far more conflicted and complex, and thus more interesting, than a steady, predictable protagonist. And when it comes to infamous couples gone bad, two of the most famous are Gertrude and Claudius from Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. I was once part of a traveling Shakespeare company, years ago, and sometimes still act. So novels that feature characters from classic plays and either update or develop them more deeply fascinate me. Updike’s skilled, vivid take on Hamlet’s mother and scheming uncle-turned-stepfather does not disappoint. He makes them far more sympathetic and human than one would ever infer from the original play, and I was quickly immersed in the setting and era he so vividly recreates. But, fair warning: You may find yourself rooting for the opposition in this revisionist… show more.

This book is about “The Danish universe of meaning,” or, the view of the world as it is has been captured by Danish words and meanings. The work includes deep semantic analysis of cultural constructs such as hygge, roughly, ‘pleasant togetherness’ and tryghed, roughly, ‘sense of security, peace of mind,’ as well as cognitive verbs, emotion adjectives, personhood constructs, and rhetorical keywords. But Levisen’s aim is not only to study Danish—at heart, the book is about cultural semantics at large. The aim is to use Danish as a case study and to provide a new model for comparative research into the diversity and unity of meaning in European languages. To my mind, this book wonderfully succeeds in achieving this aim.

When I read this it felt like a seagoing version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it was touch and go which to include in this list. But if you’re like me, and love the sea, there’s no real choice.

In this epic novel we’re shown how the Danish port town of Marstal – and people who call it home – evolve over the course of a century. The novel brilliantly captures the pull that the sea has over the town’s inhabitants, and their struggle to keep what makes them human when faced with its power and scale.

There’s a fantastical element too, just a touch here and there, which somehow matches how most of us experience the unexplainable.  

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.

This is on many people’s lists—and for good reason: an essential book, it will give you a solid foundation on which to build your knowledge and skill set, most specially if you are just starting out, though there is much to learn here for even the more experienced woodworker. Frid’s training contains the practical knowledge of centuries of woodworking passed through an apprenticeship system as it began its transition into the 21st Century, adapting power tools, new materials, and ways of working that will give you the information that will let you build almost anything. He wrote 2 more books in the set, also valuable, but if you can only afford one, get this one.

While Snorri wrote in his native Old Norse in Iceland, unbeknownst to him, a Danish writer remembered as Saxo the Grammarian ('Grammaticus') was writing a monumental history of the Danish kingdom in Latin. Since the old gods were held to be the ancestors of the royal families of medieval Scandinavia, Saxo spends quite a bit of time in the first nine books of 'The History of the Danes' retelling their stories. Many fans of Norse mythology who read the Eddas still never approach Saxo's work, which in fact has been mined in recent centuries for many rich details that are preserved nowhere else. Like Snorri, Saxo tries to "rationalize" the old gods into becoming misguided or deceitful human beings from the distant past, and he does a more thorough job of it, but even through this veneer, it is hard not to recognize the same characters that we know from… show more.

This is not only a wonderful travel book following the coast of the North Sea from the Kattegat to Amsterdam, but like other outstanding place-writing books these days a meditation on the pitfalls of history and memory and how we face it individually.  

Not an escapist book, but still perfect reading for the dark season when rain or snow howl around the house and you're snug inside, reading on the sofa.

Danish parenting advice is the best thing to come out of Denmark since hygge and in this book, authors Jessica Joelle Alexander and Iben Sandahl explain why. Stressing emotional health, free play, and – of course – hygge, The Danish Way of Parenting makes a strong case for a more empathetic way of raising children than the old school authoritarian style and gives parents practical tools to avoid yelling and spanking. A modern parenting classic with a decidedly Scandinavian flavor.