How I learned to love reading – the redux version

At its core, this blogpost is one I have been meaning to write for some time, and if I had not seen a particular video clip online today – more on which anon – I would have left this text to stew a bit longer in my brain, and I would have collected some photographs to illustrate it better. However, since I was reminded about some disgusting assumptions that people still entertain about class and reading, I’m publishing the redux version of a personal essay about how I learned to love reading.   

What prompted the writing of this redux version was a video clip where a judge for the Booker price expressed cheerful disbelief about a book club that included a dinner lady and a steel worker. I will not link to the clip, but it can easily be found with some basic searching. The relevant clip is very brief, and at first it might not seem a great offence, but it should be clear to anyone listening that to be mirthfully surprised about two working class individuals reading literature is to entertain a very misguided, erroneous and misguided view of whom literature is for, and how class should be used as a metric for judging individuals. Because class remains a dominant marker in contemporary society, to perpetuate such views is downright damaging, especially in an era when so many education systems and libraries are embattled by defunding and derisive treatment from – mostly right-wing – governments and other social forces. Precisely because arguments against the funding of libraries and public education play on notions about how access to books can be bought, there is also an implicit corollary that if you are too poor to buy books you don’t need or deserve books, or you are just not interested in books. Such arguments tie into many other strands of thinking, all of which tend to involve variants of the idea that people in certain classes do not need, or do not have any interest in, literature. Any such arguments and any such strands are rubbish, and the fact that they are rubbish is demonstrated by my own trajectory towards a love of reading.  



 Since this is the redux version, I’ll go easy on the autobiographical details, and I’ll skip some of the various milestones in my own history of reading. What matters for this text, however, is a general overview of my background. I was born on a farm in the Western Norwegian fjords. On both sides of my family people have been working as farmers, and been engaged in a variety of jobs that would classify as working class. To map the class-belonging of the past three generations is not easily done, however, because a typical aspect of working life in the Norwegian districts for the better part of the past hundred years or so is that one person would have many different jobs in the course of a lifetime, many of which were seasonal, and many served simply to strengthen the buffer against starvation.  

In the history of my love of reading, one important reference point is my paternal great-grandparents. They were sharecroppers, which in the social fabric of rural Norway meant that they did not own the land where they lived, but rented it from an independent, self-owning farm in exchange for services in the course of the agrarian year. Usually, sharecroppers were financially poor, and often had to add to their income by taking on other jobs. My great-grandmother worked as a seamstress, for instance, and my great-grandfather worked as a sexton. But above all else, they were agrarian labourers, and inhabited one of the lowest rungs on the social ladder of the Norwegian districts. In other words, my great-grandparents were the kind of people that certain judges would find implausible members of a book club.    

Yet my great-grandparents did read, and it was part of their reading that formed a part of my own literary trajectory. I never met them, but I grew up on stories from my grandmother and my grandaunt, and a significant, if not large, part of my childhood was spent in their house where my grandaunt lived for most of her life. In this house was, and still is, a book case that contains the majority of my great-grandparents’ library. Much of it is religious literature, as was typical at the turn of the nineteenth century. But there is also a frayed and fragile copy of Snorri Sturlusson’s Heimskringla, a collection of sagas of the Norwegian kings. This copy is from the first printed edition of Gustav Storm’s translation, published in 1899 in two versions, one deluxe and one which was significantly cheaper called “folkeutgåva”, or the people’s edition. The copy in my great-grandparents’ library is the cheaper copy, but this is still a magnificent book with medievalesque woodcut illustrations executed by leading Norwegian artists, and printed in a Gothic type clearly meant to evoke a medieval aesthetic.  

The printing of this people’s edition was part of a multi-pronged nation building that dominated much of Norwegian cultural life in the years before Norway’s independence from Sweden in 1905. As a part of this nation building there was the idea that the Norwegian folk-spirit could be found among the farmers, and it was in the district that the true Norwegian essence had survived centuries of Danish overlordship, and a near-century of Swedish overlordship. While the ideas about the Norwegian folk spirit are deeply problematic and grounded in a dangerous romanticising of poverty and hardship, there was one aspect of this view of the rural communities that proved very valuable: Namely the notion that the people, also in the poor rural districts, would appreciate the great medieval literature as represented by Heimskringla. I do not know whether my great-grandparents received this copy as a gift or whether they bought it, but based on the frayed edges and the weak spine, it was clearly a much-read book. It was in this condition I first encountered it.  

I do not remember exactly when I first came to this book. I have a vague recollection of some party, probably around Christmas, when being in a strange middle ground between relatives who were toddlers and relatives who were adults, I gravitated towards the book case. By this time I must have been around six or seven. I had already learned to love reading, so in a sense the title of this blogpost is rather misleading, but I was still in this heroic age of reading, where new challenges appear frequently, and where the limits of comprehension are being explored and pushed. The grown-up-looking book with arrows on the cover and tantalising illustrations of men armed with swords and helmets drew me in, and I began to read portions of it, not necessarily understanding much of the antiquated text which was more Danish than Norwegian in its orthography, but at the very least I was able to read the captions to the illustrations, and I became engrossed in the book.        

Since I first discovered this copy of Heimskringla, I returned to my great-grandparents’ book case at every family gathering, and my parents eventually bought a more up-to-date edition, with modern orthography and translated into Nynorsk. I read this book frequently, and although I have to this date not yet read it in its entirety, my own copy shows more than enough wear and tear to indicate its heavy use.

As stated, by the time I began reading Heimskringla, I had already learned to love reading, because it was that love which drew me to my great-grandparents’ book case in the first place. That love was certainly strengthened by the books kept in that book case, but it was also developed through numerous other channels. Some of these channels will only be mentioned as a concluding summary here, although in a more comprehensive version of this essay I aim to go deeper into these as well. The point is that my childhood in the Norwegian district was filled with books, books that I read and books that enticed me into more heavy literature, and books that, although I never read them fully, remained reference points on the journey towards a grown-up reader. Just as important, there were also magazines and comics, many of which were no less educational than the grown-up books, and most of which I have returned to in adult life with perhaps even greater pleasure.        

These influences caused me to love reading. My maternal grandparents had a similar book case, filled with bound volumes of children’s magazines and Norwegian literary classics, where I also sought refuge during family gatherings on that side of the family. My paternal grandmother bought me a subscription for one of those children’s magazines that she herself had grown up reading during her sharecropper childhood. My maternal grandfather gifted me many old copies of such magazines, along with various books. My parents bought me comics and books that allowed me to have those first exhilarating moments of advancing through the various stages of reading comprehension. The details are for another time, but for the present it bears repeating that all these initial stages happened within, and were made possible by, a family of farmers and rural workers, where my parents’ generation was the first to have much formal education after the age of 15, and where reading was valued and appreciated.

It is thanks to my rural family that I am the person I am today, and a large part of who I am is an avid reader – of books, of magazines, of comics, of many types of literature. I have been allowed to pursue my love of reading in my professional life, and my reading has shaped me in ways that I hope will prove beneficial in the grand scheme of things. One of the most valuable lessons I have learned in the course of my reading life is exactly this: That people from lower social classes have no less appreciation for and love of reading than those who grow up in middle and upper classes, and are also no less deserving or capable of participating in a reading world. Unfortunately, this lesson still needs to be taught, even in 2022.