A Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell
was our book club choice this month, which we discussed today. A non-fiction book that was laugh-out-loud funny at times, and textbookish at other times. The story is about a young couple from London, England, who move to a small, rural town in Denmark for a year. The husband (Lego Man) has a new job opportunity at LegoLand headquarters in Denmark. His wife, Helen, gives up her high-profile, stress-filled magazine job in London, to freelance in Denmark and write a book about their experience and the happiness quotient in Denmark.
Each chapter is a month in their journey and what she learned and experienced. They were definitely fish out of water, but they learned a lot about Denmark and Danish traditions, and so did the readers. Parts of it were fascinating, and parts were filled with contradictions of happiness.
At the time this book was written, Denmark was the happiest country in the world according to the World Happiness Report. For the past 6 years they have fallen to 2nd place with Finland in first, and Iceland in 3rd. (For the record, the US is number 15.)
Why are they the happiest nation—the Scandinavian countries excel at taking care of their citizens—living wages for all jobs which come with one of the highest tax rates, but the taxes do something for them. They have great benefits from free health care, free education –through college. In fact, they pay students to go to secondary education. They give families a year off with pay after having a baby, and they greatly subsidize childcare, so both parents do work.
As readers, we didn’t think life could be that rosy with really cold winters and 4 months of it, along with only 43 hours of sunlight a week! You need to be hearty to live in Denmark. We also learned a lot about their traditions, and they have a lot of them--and I do love traditions. Instead of a Danish smorgasbord, we had a southern smorgasbord with fabulous food
-and no one asked for the pickled herring, which Chris had.
We all enjoyed reading it, but it was not a fast read. There were a lot of statistics which made it read more like a textbook at times, but her personal journey and stories made up for that. One of our readers would have preferred just the story parts. We all took longer than normal to finish it, with all but one finishing it the morning of book club.
Everyone the author interviewed she asked them how happy they were on a scale of 1-10. No one was less than an 8, but most were 9 or 10. I asked the same of our book club. We had three 7’s, one 8.5, one 9, and one 10 (and that wasn’t me—I was 9). For ranking the book on a scale of 1-5 (5 being the best), our lowest ranking was a 2.5 and the highest was a 4.5 – with an overall ranking of 3.6. I think you would find it interesting to read.