Fredrik Strage

A Swedish anthology containing texts by Fredrik Strage, renowned pop-culture journalist with a penchant for constructing smallish sentences filled with trivia. I love that stuff, especially when music is involved.

This is a plethora of interviews, articles and reviews spanning 20 years (or thereabouts). The author has commented every bit of writing and his reflections on how bad his writing used to be is quite profound and nice to read.

Where good: asking interesting questions to the people he's interviewing. It's not textbook boring.

Where bad: Strage tends to delve into the extremely odd at times, which upon reading this book in one stretch, can be daunting and in itself quite boring; all the tidbits hit me like "a tsunami of melted lead", to quote the author.

All in all: recommendable. The late part about the black metal scene is indispensable and some of the inner workings of Sweden are truly on display, e.g. where he dissects Tengil, the main antagonist of The Brothers Lionheart.… (meer)