The problem with novels

is that they're all written by novelists. The amount of creativity and perception it takes to write a 500-page, made-up story requires a few lifetimes' worth of isolation and social rejection, and novels are always full of vivid descriptions of the sheer horror of interactions with others.

The other book I read when I was in Amsterdam was 'Out Stealing Horses', an old-school rumination on how your shitty childhood leads to your shitty adulthood, your shitty children, and your shitty death. Sounds pretty perky, huh? It was written by a Norwegian dude named Per Patterson, and is filled with passages like the following, on grocery-store small talk:

People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook.
No one can touch you unless you yourself want them to. You only have to be polite and smile and keep paranoid thoughts at bay, because they will talk about you no matter how much you squirm, it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.
[...] I'm surprised at how unfilled my shopping baskets have become, how few things I need now that I am alone. I suffer a sudden onset of meaningless melancholy and feel the eyes of the check-out lady on my forehead as I search for the money to pay, the widower is what she sees, they do not understand anything, and it is just as well.
[...] 'Many thanks,' and I am on the verge of tears, for Christ's sake, and go quickly with my purchases in a bag and across to the filling station. I have been lucky. They do not understand a thing.

See how you feel all wistful and empty inside now?  Stretch that across 264 pages, and you have the sensation of reading this book. It's tremendous. Seriously.

Fighting, fucking and fantasy may work better in movies, but when it comes to the existential, everyday dread and misanthropy that make up the other 97 percent of our lives, nothing beats a good Scandinavian novel.