Geriatic reading: "The Hundred-Year-Old Man: Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared" by Jonas Jonasson

Nordic literature (TV series too, at that) is supposed to be dark, introverted stuff, right? Well, The Hundred-Year-Old Man: Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is not dark at all, but a joyous geriatric romp through the Swedish countryside in the company of a motley crew of ageing and really-not-that-bad crooks, led, bizarrely by our hero, the 100-year old Allan Karlsson. After he absconds from his old people's home, just before his 100h birthday party is due to begin, steals a suitcase full of drug money and hits the road to nowhere in particular, events continually conspire to expand his band to include an unlikely selection of characters up to and including an escaped zoo elephant.

The vicissitudes of the group, on the run from law enforcers and law-breakers alike, take on the nature of a Swedish road-trip, complete with a couple of relatively harmless murders. But this is all less than half the story, for much of the book is spent in flashback, telling us the past of Allan Karlsson - a past which spans pretty much the entire twentieth century.

Turns out that Allan Karlsson is a kind of long-haul Swedish Forrest Gump, an idiot savant with a knack of being where the action is, hobnobbing with world leaders and incidentally taking a decisive hand in pretty much everything from the Spanish Civil War, through the invention of the atom bomb and Mao's Great March to Reagan's Star Wars programme. Karlsson is on cordial (usually vodka-drinking) terms with two US presidents, Mao (and Mrs Mao), General Franco, Kim Il-Sun and Albert Einstein's not very clever half brother, to name but a few. Pretty much the only one the avowedly apolitical Karlsson cannot get along with, vodka consumption notwithstanding, is Joseph Stalin, who he finds over-sensitive and lacking in human warmth. Besides, that encounter ends badly, with Karlsson spending six years in the Gulag for a minor faux pas.

Over the book's not inconsiderable, but eminently readable length, the flashbacks and the road trip converge, as the forces of law and order converge on the unlikely gang and Karlsson gravitates slowly back to his homeland. What happens then, well, really confirms what we have come to expect of our improbable hero.

Is this all supposed to have a deeper meaning? Well, yes, there's satire; yes, there's moral relativism; yes, there's a quizzical eye cast on world history, but really this is just fun. A lot of fun.

Recommendation? This is one to take to the beach for your summer reading. You can't fail to enjoy it (unless you think it is all really a bit too silly) and it'll go by in a flash. Ibsen it ain't, but if you're up a bit of clever Swedish fun, give it a go.

Perverse reading: "Underground Overground" by Andrew Martin

It is a pretty perverse choice, it has to be said, to read a sideways-look at the history of the London Underground while doing an "executive leadership" course in the Silicon Valley sunshine. But there you have it, it was next in my reading queue. In my defence, I could add that this was my first e-book, thus appropriate to the location, read on my new kindle, which I recently bought in the face of the reality that I cannot practically schlep my usual pile of summer reading books on the long distance holidays we have planned this year. In my further defence, I would say that if you have been obliged to read the latest work of your Stanford Business School management guru at the same time, a little bit of drizzle-doused, understated English quirkiness is probably a reasonable antidote.  (Complimentary copy of said tome, Power Up - actually lower case power up - is beside me as I write. Don't expect a review here...)

At the risk of slightly undermining my apparent commitment to new technology, I should point out that I do possess the old-fashioned paperback version of this book, and bought the kindle version later for travel purposes. I mention the fact merely to point out that this is yet another of that now venerable category of serendipitously-found-books-in-Foyles-St-Pancras. Yes, that modest bookstore worked its magic once more, a few months ago, only to be overlaid by the technological revolution by the time I got round to actually reading it.

Post Soviet Baltic reading: "With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows" by Sandra Kalniete

I have professional dealings with Sandra Kalniete, though she does not (yet) know me personally. She is a Latvian Member of the European Parliament, and is a familiar name to most in the Parliament because of the constant stream of emails emanating from her office publicising exhibitions, films and other events focusing on Latvian history, usually its bleaker aspects. In my case, things are a little more specific, as I was one of a number of addressees of a letter from a group of MEPs, but coordinated by Mrs Kalniete, complaining that the small history section of the Parliament's visitor centre, the Parlamentarium, for which I am responsible, places almost exclusive emphasis on Nazi atrocities in World War II, with scant mention of those committed by the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union. (As so often, the holocaust and Auschwitz are cited as the lowest point of human history from which Europe had to recover in the post-war period.)

This complaint is indeed is a relatively common one of Members from Central and Eastern Europe, and in particular from the Baltic States, against what they see as a cultural and historical bias towards a Western European narrative of history requiring correction, or at least balance.