Pippi Långstrump (1945)

Astrid Lindgren's 1945 Swedish original, shown here in its English edition as Pippi Longstocking, has been translated into 80 languages, so it is one of the easiest Scandinavian classics to find wherever you are. Its chapters work as standalone episodes: Pippi plays tag with the police, goes to school, goes to the circus. A girl with superhuman strength who breaks every rule with total confidence makes a gleeful send-up of grown-up authority, and adults enjoy that as much as children. Lindgren's sentences are lively and direct, with plenty of dialogue, and the absurd situations are easy to picture even when a word is unfamiliar. Learners of Swedish should start here.