Last night, I read the last chapter of Sent i november (Moominvalley in November) to Johan, and thereby closed the reading of the Moomin books. I can’t remember when I started reading the first one to him, but we had a long hiatus in the middle of Det osynliga barnet so I’m sure it’s more than two years.

I think everybody should read the Moomin books. . . some of you have heard me say this before, repeatedly, but I mean it! Even if you can’t read them in the original Swedish the content is still the same; I believe that the translations are quite ok if not wonderful. An interesting aside is that most of the English translations are fairly early, and several of the books have come in new versions with slightly different titles in Swedish since, so for instance Comet in Moominland is rather different from Kometen kommer, being a translation of the first version of the book, Kometjakten! (It’s a cat, really, not a monkey. Now you know.) New translations should be made, I think — they are such wonderful, wonderful books and deserve to be read.

The modern cartoons, on the other hand, are pretty dreadful, but there’s a comic strip that Tove Jansson and her brother Lars made for London Evening News from 1954 until 1975 IIRC; that is one wonderful comic, which was published in 20 languages. Today it’s frequently being re-run in Swedish dailies and has been published in comic books in Swedish — but the original English version can’t be found anywhere as far as I understand!

Moomin illustrations. The coloured ones at the bottom of the page are the modern versions — disregard those. . .