Jansson is one of the greats -- both for the seminal Moomin tales and lesser-known, more adult books like Sommarboken. I fell in love with her work through tran

Jansson is one of the greats -- both for the seminal Moomin tales and lesser-known, more adult books like Sommarboken. I fell in love with her work through translations as a child but since reading the originals have realized that the English versions fail to do her justice -- one scene early in Kometen Kommer seems to have been entirely made up by the translator -- and, in general, are of widely varying quality (some are very good). I've considered writing my own, but it's still a pipe dream at this point. More to the point, my relatives who lived through the war in Stockholm were really permanently changed by it. My great-grandfather Klas was somewhat shocked to learn about the Call of Duty franchise and delivered a serious lecture on the reality of war that I was thankfully barely old enough to grasp. I worry that society is forgetting the historicity of those experiences as his generation disappears. When books are all that's left, it's hard to keep in mind that all those awful things really happened to normal people and could happen again.