Short answer, unfortunately not very much. Summers are usually my best reading time, but with a new house and everything my energy seems to have been spent elsewhere this year. Anyway, some books have been read, and I believe a short blog update is long overdue.
In total I have read 48 books this year by authors born in 14 different countries. New Zeeland is unexpectedly dominating the statistics, but that is just because I bought an ebook containg a collected edition of Ngoi Marsh’s detective novels, and have been reading them whenever I need a light read. This has apparently often been the case, my spreadsheet tells me that by now I have read 18 of her novels (Opening night was my favourite among the ones I have read most recently).
Selected recent reads
The first read I would like to highlight is Tower by Bae Myuung-Hoon. I thought that it would be fun to try a South Korean science fiction novel, but having read nothing about it beforehand I wasn’t expecting how memorable many of these interconnected short stories would actually turn out to be. In a year of mostly unremarkable reads, this one was a really good find.
Otherwise my most memorable recent read has been a short story collection by Madeleine Bourdouxhe, containing Sept nouvelles and Sous le Pont Mirabeau (translated into Swedish). The short stories were all very good, but it was Sous le Pont Mirabeau, her short memoir on the WWII attack on Brussels while she was still in a maternity ward, that really stuck with me.
Some other things I have been doing lately
I read that in a book 
You say you haven’t been reading much, but forty-six books is around the number I’ve read this year, and that’s pretty good for me! Your memorable things: a trip on a boat called Hendrik Ibsen and a boathouse (?) by a lake are beautiful but not unexpected for Norway – however a stave church looking like a Buddhist temple (or is it vice versa?) has me puzzled!
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It’s not the number of reads so much as the number of memorable reads that bothers me, although not too much as it has been a good year in many other ways.
The boat house and and the Thai pavilion are actually both in Sweden, the latter built to commemorate King Chulalongkorn’s visit to the area: https://thailandtidbits.com/2021/06/09/the-thai-pavilion-in-sweden/ The pavilion is a real oddity in the rural Swedish landscape, but also rather nice, and as I was there on one of the hottest summer days it felt very appropriate.
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Sounds like you did find a couple of memorable reads, even if you haven’t been able to read as much as you like! The pictures are lovely, and the Buddhist temple is intriguing. Will you explain at some point?
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It is the Thai pavilion in Ragunda, west-central Sweden: https://thailandtidbits.com/2021/06/09/the-thai-pavilion-in-sweden/ It is in a very rural area which main claims to fame I believe are the fact that they have a river with no water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%B6da_fallet and that they were once visited by King Chulalongkorn. It was a surprisingly interesting place, and as I don’t really like heat, probably as close as I will ever get to visit Thailand.
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Beautiful photographs and lots of reading, sounds like a great year! I hope you’re settling into and enjoying your new home.
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Thank you! We are, it is lovely to finally have a place of our own!
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Sounds like you’ve been busy! Lovely photos of your part of the globe, and pleased to hear you liked Madeleine Bourdouxhe as I have a short story collection on the TBR! 😀
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Thank you! I hope you’ll enjoy Bourdouxhe!
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Lovely pics! And the weather, too!
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Thank you!
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