I’ve got a soft spot for books that describe people walking away from everything they know and starting fresh in another place. In this case, the author and her husband move from London to Denmark when he accepts a job at the LEGO headquarters in the countryside.
The book describes getting settled in a new country a little bit, but really is focused on figuring out what makes Danish people so happy. It is writing in style full of dry wit, and I ended up laughing out loud several times while reading, which is always a good sign. That said, I did feel like sometimes the writer took the joking a little too far – enough that occasionally I wasn’t sure if something really happened or if it was a sarcastic side note.
Examining her own happiness, the author compares her experiences in the UK and typical experiences in America with how things happen in Denmark. She uses a lot of statistics (maybe too many) to analyze happiness, However I’m not sure statistics are the best way to measure some as intangible as ‘happiness’. Still, it is interesting to see the differences between cultures illustrated in such a funny way.
I learned a lot about Danish society, and the book brought back a lot of memories of when I first moved to Japan. Like the author, I thought I’d only be around for a year and it ended up lasting much longer than that.
One interesting thing was that my copy of the book was an updated electronic edition from the library, and the author included an epilogue of sorts – explaining how things had changed in the 6-7 years since she wrote the original book. This epilogue included some big contemporary topics like the anti-immigration movements in Denmark and elsewhere, the Black Lives Matter movement and even the onset of COVID-19. I was especially impressed that she spent time talking about the incredible privilege she enjoyed while being white and blending into the homogeneous (white) culture of rural Denmark, and how much easier it was for them to fit in. These kinds of epilogues are rare in paper books, so it showed an advantage to ebooks that I hadn’t really considered before.
So it was a very funny and entertaining book – and I really enjoyed reading it during these days of non-travel. Next I’m reading Anxious People by Fredrick Backman.
