Three Of The Best Books Of The Decade, recommended by BRB Editors
Are these the best Norwegian books of the 2010s? Our editors think so... and very few people outside Oslo would disagree.
The Bømlo Review of Books has long been at the forefront of the literary renaissance in greater Sunnhordland, and what a decade it's been for high art across the region. As we see out the ten-year period, leading editors of the BRB (many of them noted authors in their own right!) celebrate their favourite reads of the last tenth of a century.
The Wild Salmon Longs to be Free: Selected Essays of Knut Trollfossen
by Knut Trollfossen
selected by Knut Trollfossen
With climate change increasingly on the agenda (if only due to the fake news spread by Oslo-based mainstream media), the end of the decade provides us with a vantagepoint from which to assess man's relationship with nature. No book of the past ten years has provided a more masterful overarching assessment of that fragile symbiosis than The Wild Salmon Longs to be Free, a collection of essays that take their inspiration from the windswept landscapes of the majestic Vestland coast. What, Knut Trollfossen asks in the title essay, does freedom mean for a salmon? Can concepts such as liberty be applied to the animal kingdom? Clearly, the essay concludes, they can: to be free, in the animal kingdom as in its human counterpart, involves emancipation from the chains of big government and an embrace of individualism. "Each salmon is stronger alone" must surely be among the most poignant aphorisms of the twenty-first century to date.
Top Marx: The Child's Guide to Revolutionising Your School Experience
by Njål Kvalheim
selected by Njål Kvalheim
While most reviewers look back at the past decade, the leading minds of our generation are already gazing forward... Peering ahead into the mist not of the 2020s, but the 2030s and the decades after. The revolution has already begun, although the revolutionaries as yet are barely able to walk unaided. Top Marx offers an accessible, user-friendly guide to radicalising the school system, and is perhaps the only book of its type to have been published anywhere in the world. Among its breathtaking innovations are the replacement of the "teacher" figure by a committee of students, each selected by the pupils and for the pupils. "From each child according to his or her abilities, to each according to his or her needs," is the kind of radical new, utterly original thinking that can lead us forward into the central years of the century.
Blog Off!: Against the Blog Revolution
by Trygve Steinhaug
selected by Trygve Steinhaug
On or about December 2010, the human character changed. The fruits of the enlightenment have withered, and the weeds of the internet age have grown up to take their place. Few books written in the past decade have had the courage to confront the heads of the technological hydra, but those that have are all the more impressive for their refusal to follow the herd. Trygve Steinhaug has long been one of Sunnhordland's leading authors, and in 2017 he offered a scathing critique of the blog phenomenon - his insights all the more piercing due to the fact that he earns his living almost exclusively as a blog reviewer. The blog is the apotheosis of selfishness, and the apotheosis of all things trite. To think that literary analysis can be condensed into a 500-word post is jejune and utterly pathetic. Why do people insist on promoting their self-penned drivel at the expense of work by talented professionals? Why, and how, has the literary amateur triumphed so conclusively? Why can't I get the recognition I deserve from the Bergen-based cabal of Vestland "writers", none of whom is literate enough to string together even a novella, or perhaps even a poem? Why [200 word limit reached]