Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme started by @Lauren’s Page Turners but is currently hosted by Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and explain why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

Lucky Per by Henrik Pontoppidan

Blurb from Goodreads

A true neglected classic, this sweeping 1904 novel is a Modernist masterpiece and arguably “the great Danish novel”– but is only newly available in English.

Lucky Per is a bildungsroman about the ambitious son of a clergyman who rejects his faith and flees his restricted life in the Danish countryside for the capital city. Per is a gifted young man who arrives in Copenhagen believing that “you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast . . . and capture and bind it.” Per’s love interest, a Jewish heiress, is both the strongest character in the book and one of the greatest Jewish heroines of European literature. Per becomes obsessed with a grand engineering scheme that he believes will reshape both Denmark’s landscape and its minor place in the world; eventually, both his personal and his career ambitions come to grief. At its heart, the story revolves around the question of the relationship of “luck” to “happiness” (the Danish word in the title can have both meanings), a relationship Per comes to see differently by the end of his life.

Why I Want To Read It

Happy Monday, everyone! Just like that, we are already on the last workweek of the fifth month of the year. How time flies! As always, time takes its natural course, ever flowing forward, sans regard for any of us. It does not wait for anyone. As such, I hope the year is going—and will continue to go—well for everyone. I hope the year will be kind to you all. Things are still erratic, whether at work or geopolitics. I sure hope the tension in the Middle East will start to de-escalate. I hope that peace will gradually be restored. Meanwhile, here in the Philippines, the stifling summer heat remains intense. I can’t wait for the ground to cool down, as heat is literally rising from the ground. Anyway, I hope everyone has had a good start to the workweek. I hope everyone is in a place of comfort. The new week beckons with hope and fresh starts. I hope it flows in everyone’s favor. Wishing you continued success and happiness.

I know—not many people get excited about Mondays (though I’m sure a few are out there). I, too, am not exactly a fan. I hope that as the week moves forward, you slowly gain a semblance of momentum. I hope everyone’s workweek goes smoothly. More importantly, I hope everyone is doing well—mentally, emotionally, and physically. After spending the first two months of the year reading works of Latin American and Caribbean writers, I commenced a journey across the European continent in March. It took me some time to decide where to land next, but in the end, I chose to read European writers, since most of the books on my 2026 reading challenge list are by European authors. Still, I have several works of European writers on my reading list, hence the inevitable extension of this literary journey into May. I also might extend it a bit into June. Extending this journey to May is also a foregone conclusion.

For this week’s Goodreads Monday update, I am featuring a book written by a European writer whose body of work I have yet to explore. Actually, I am currently reading Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, a book I wasn’t originally planning on reading, but because it is one of the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, I decided to read it. This also gave me the idea to check on the work of other Danish writers; I believe this is the first book originally written in Danish that I have read. I am aware that Denmark has produced a couple of Nobel Laureates in Literature. This was my starting point, hence this week’s featured book. In 1917, Henrik Pontoppidan was awarded the prestigious literary prize, along with his fellow Dane Karl Gjellerup. Pontoppidan was a realist novelist and was lauded by the Swedish Academy for “his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark.“

Among his works is Lucky Per. It was originally published as Lykke-Per in eight volumes between 1898 and 1904. It is considered one of the major Danish novels, and was well received by German literati such as Thomas Mann (a fellow Nobel Laureate in Literature), Georg Lukács, and Ernst Bloch. In 2004, it was made part of the Danish Culture Canon. The eponymous Per is Peter Sidenius, the son of Pastor Sidenius, a man whose family has a long tradition as pastors in Western Denmark. Per is a self-confident and richly gifted man. He broke away from his deeply religious family and the constraints of his heritage and social background to pursue becoming an engineer. He renounced his faith and moved to Copenhagen to study at the Polytechnic University and to achieve his personal objective of becoming “a conqueror”.

The novel’s premise is quite intriguing, although I assume that it is not as straightforward as it is made to be. Securing a copy of the book, however, is going to be a challenge. After all, it has been published over a century ago. Still, I am hoping that a stray copy would find its way to me. How about you, fellow readers? How was your Monday? What books have you recently added to your reading list? Drop your thoughts in the comments. For now—happy Monday, and as always, happy reading!