A year in reading - 2022

 
My last blogpost for 2021 was an overview of some highlights from my year in reading, as well as a few other book-related moments. For someone like me, whose life must seem terribly boring to those not living it, my adventures by page and pen remain the most interesting aspects that are worth sharing, and I also confess to finding a great deal of joy in sifting through my notes and pictures from the past year in order to distil those adventures into a reasonable digest. Consequently, I have decided to provide another overview of this year’s reading as well, largely following the template of last year.           

The selection of books included in this blogpost is aimed to provide a representative overview of the range in my reading, as well as the reasons behind those choices. As I explained in some detail in a previous blogpost, my reading is in large part guided by various lists, but also by the vagaries of my professional life, where research for articles and presentations, as well as preparations for teaching, provide significant impetus for specific choices. 

Moreover, a year in reading also encompasses other forms of reading than what is in focus in the present blogpost. For the most part, this selection is comprised of books that I have finished reading in the course of the year. By books I here mean individual, standalone works, either published as a unit or written, disseminated or transmitted as a unit. Consequently, individual articles that are part of a volume or an issue of a journal, are not included in my list of the year. Likewise, the reading of drafts of texts, either my own or those of colleagues, and the reading of page upon page of student dissertations, essays or exams consume a lot of my reading life, especially in a year of much teaching such as 2022, but these pages are never counted. Reading comes in different forms, in other words, and the current blogpost is neither complete nor meant to be particularly impressive or boastful, but merely an attempt to accurately represent my year in reading.   



Travelling by page    

Although I do a lot of travelling for work in the course of an academic year, my main form of travel remains through the vehicle of books. This year I have continued to seek out books from various parts of the world, and I continue in my quest – inspired by Ann Morgan’s 2012 project A Year of Reading the World – to read one book from each country. As is the case each year, my selection does not follow a particular pattern, and depends on what books I can get hold of, as well as which countries that remain unread. Sometimes, however, patterns do emerge, and this year I found myself gravitating towards books from the Arabic-speaking world. One of the joys of the forming of such patterns is that stories from within the same linguistic and/or religious sphere tend to have shared points of reference, even though the cultures and countries are different in many aspects. These similarities make it easier to gain a sense of understanding, and also to pick up on references that might be explained in one work but only obliquely mentioned or applied in another. Consequently, although Syria, Oman, The United Arab Emirates and Jordan are countries with unique histories and cultural configurations, it was also immensely rewarding to read them within the same year so as to note those shared features and gain a better comprehension of the wider cultural context of each country.   

Adunis, Mihyar of Damascus: his songs
(translated by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard)

Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies 

(translated by Marilyn Booth)

Fadia Faqir, Pillars of salt

Maha Gargash, The sand fish 

As much as I appreciate patterns in my reading, however, I do easily get a bit bored if the pattern becomes too dominant or insufficiently interspersed with variations, so I was also glad to visit Belize, Zambia and Zimbabwe by page this year.  

Kayo Chingonyi, A blood condition

Zee Edgell, Beka Lamb

Chenjerai Hove, Bones 
(translated into Norwegian as Knokler by Mona Lange)

New places for reading        

Although the most far-flung of my travels take place on the page, I also enjoy broadening my horizon physically speaking, and it gives me a great deal of joy to travel to new places, be it a new city or a new country, or simply a place in my local area or my native village that I have not yet sought out. For me, reading in such a place becomes a way of connecting myself to that place in a much stronger way than would otherwise have been the case. It is as if the act of reading weaves the location more strongly into my memory. This weaving means that seemingly insignificant places, or places where I only spend a brief period, take on a greater place in my memory than it otherwise would have done. Moreover, this connection through reading means that many small places visited once become much more firmly lodged in my memory than larger places visited several times. 

This year saw a change from my usual approach to seeking out new places, in that I did not spend much time in my native village this summer, and because of the weather a lot of the time I did spend here was not spent seeking out new locations for reading. As a consequence, the new places in which I did some reading in the course of the past year entered into my list of such places more by accident than deliberation, but this does not mean that the experiences in these places were any weaker or less valuable. For instance, in the middle of February I dedicated most of a Sunday to explore the menu of a café I had been meaning to try for some time, and this culinary exploration was done in conjunction with reading most of the Norwegian translation of François Mauriac’s novel Le Nœud de vipères. I have since returned to that café on several occasions, for instance on one memorable rainy, dark autumn afternoon to escape the rain and fortify myself with a cup of coffee and a read of the Norwegian translation of Siri Hustvedt’s A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. That first Sunday, however, stands out. Among other such highlights among the new places of 2022 is a café in Warsaw where I read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland, the café at Hovedøya outside of Oslo where I read the Norwegian translation of J. M. G. Le Clézio’s debut novel Le Procès-verbal, and the café at the Gothenburg Central Station where I passed my time waiting for my train back to Oslo by reading Toni Cade Bambara’s short-story collection Gorilla, my love.       

In other cases, my reading was done in transit, and sometimes the entry into a new region or new geography by train or bus makes the reading more noticeable even though you are technically not reading in a specific place, but travelling through a row of different places. Yet as I had the chance to explore the hinterlands of Oslo by train this year, some moments of reading have stood out, such as the reading of Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection The Colossus while travelling into the flatlands and forests north of Oslo along the river Glomma. 

François Mauriac, Le Nœud de vipères 
(translated into Norwegian as Slangeknuten by Fride Friestad) 

J. M. G. Le Clézio, Le Procès-verbal 
(translated into Norwegian as Rapport om Adam by Karna Dannevig)

Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women 
(translated into Norwegian as Kvinne ser på menn som ser på kvinner by Knut Johansen)

Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, my love

Reading by lists         

Throughout the year I have also made sure to maintain my self-imposed goal of reading three books of each of the fixed categories by which I navigate my reading. This goal is easy to achieve since my categories are fairly broad, and several categories can apply for one and the same book. Among the highlights this year was Dracula, read during rainy summer evenings while a three-month-old puppy kept trying to get into my room, thus creating a very suitable atmosphere to Bram Stoker’s descriptions. I was also happy to finally get around to reading Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart, especially because my copy of the book carries a piece of memorabilia from my own past, namely a price tag from the campus bookshop from my alma mater, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Both these books were included on the list I drew up for my future reading in the spring of 2008, a list from which I aim to at least read three books each year.

Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart 

Bram Stoker, Dracula 

Another highlight belongs to the category of scholarly books, a category meant to rectify the unfortunate situation that although I very often read scholarly texts, I often have to either mine them for specific information or references, or I start reading them without finishing. The highlight in question was the article collection St. Sunniva – irsk dronning, norsk vernehelgen, edited by Alf Tore Hommedal, Åslaug Ommundsen and Alexander O’Hara. This collection articles about one of the very few native saints from medieval Norway was a joy to read, and it was especially gratifying because such a collection has been needed for a very long time.

Alf Tore Hommedal, Åslaug Ommundsen and Alexander O’Hara (eds.), St. Sunniva – irsk dronning, norsk vernehelgen (Saint Sunniva - Irish queen, Norwegian patron saint)  


Another pleasing item from one of my fixed categories, that of Nobel laureates, was the play The death of Tintagiles (La Mort de Tintagiles) by Maurice Maeterlinck. What made this read particularly memorable and pleasing was not so much the play itself, although it is very atmospheric. Rather, it was the physical book, which had been donated to Oslo university library by Carl Burckhardt, possibly the Swiss historian. The book also contained an inscription from 1918, where the book had been gifted to someone addressed as “Apollo” by someone describing himself as ‘the least of his satellites’. Who these people were is not clear, but it adds a wonderful layer of bibliographic history to the book as an object, and it is a good reminder of the kind of treasures often housed by university libraries. 

Frontispiece from the collection Three little dramas by Maurice Maeterlinck

(translated by Alfred Sutro)

Dedication to Oslo university library by Carl Burckhardt

Not reading but writing        

Some of the highlights of my literary adventures in 2022 were not strictly speaking related to reading, but rather to writing. This year saw the publication of two scholarly articles on which I have worked extensively back and forth for the past couple of years. What made these publications even more gratifying was the reception of the physical copies of the books containing these articles, and although I have not yet read neither the books nor the articles in question, they stand out as important milestones in my personal literary landscape, and they have been instrumental in making 2022 such a great year for me in literary terms.  

Barbara Crostini and Anthony John Lappin (eds.), Death, Sanctity, and the Cross

Anna Lampadaridi, Vincent Déroche and Christian Høgel (eds.), L’historie comme elle se présentait dans l’hagiographie 



Added to the joy of these texts were a couple of other, smaller publications, such as a brief article I was asked to write for the in-house student journal of my department. As stated in the blogpost I wrote about this publication, I am also greatly appreciative of such smaller outputs that do not register in the publication lists sought by hiring committees or other such bodies, but which provide outlets through which I can disseminate some of my own interests. 

'Helgenkult og institusjonell identitet i mellomalderen - Sunnivakulten i Bergen'

('The cult of saints and institutional identity in the Middle Ages - the cult of Saint Sunniva in Bergen')

A related highlight came in the form of a lecture I gave to MA students, a lecture on palaeography that focussed on manuscripts from twelfth-century Norway. I was able to give the lecture via Zoom, so I could enjoy the scenery of an April fjord while digging into the material aspects of the Kvikne psalter, one of the oldest surviving books from Norway. This lecture required a lot of preparatory reading, and while I did not finish a single volume in the process, the reading culminated in a very satisfactory way that reminded me of how much sheer pleasure I find in talking about books. 

Similar blogposts (from 2022) 

Reading by lists 

How to choose a book 

The biggest book so far 

Contrasts in a reading life 

Assembling my Oslo library 

For Oslo Pride 2022 

Finding nuggets - the rewards of reading widely  

How I learned to love reading - redux 

Outdated materiality in the library 

A brief appreciation for the pathetic in literature 

Signs of our times - details from a week in Warsaw

During my stay in Warsaw this week, I saw numerous displays of Polish solidarity with the Ukrainians in the ongoing invasion. These ubiquitous displays served as hard-hitting reminders of how sheltered my life has been, and this is the closest I have physically been to a war zone. Despite the gravity of the situation, there was something heartening about these shows of solidarity, but they also opened up for some reflections about how to decode these impressions. For instance, I was told that with the continuous economic pressure, the material support that Ukrainian refugees in Poland need is dwindling, so even though these various displays of solidarity capture both public and private initiative, I was also reminded that to show solidarity is easy enough, but such shows do not always capture the more complicated truth of everyday life. Moreover, once I had first allowed myself to be impressed with the signs of Polish-Ukrainian kinship, I reflected on how little I actually know about the life on the ground in countries so close to an ongoing war, and how some of these signs were very good indicators of grassroot feelings. While the flags of the two countries flying at the gates of the humanities campus of Warsaw University is clearly a decision by the university leadership, some drawings hung on the wall of a pub in a Warsaw suburb Friday evening represent a much more visceral emotional strain. 

There was something good about these displays and especially in their great variety which better served to capture the attitudes of the Polish people. Yet I also could not help reflecting, time and again, on the dissonance between display and action, and how little I know about the actual support. Displays of solidarity are sometimes grandiose because they are meant to create pathos and stir people to the right actions, but sometimes they serve as window-dressing, as distractions and disguises. During my week in Warsaw, I was constantly reminded of my lack of knowledge, of my lack of a solid foundation for correctly interpreting these signs of our times. And aside from teaching me a lot about current sentiments in Poland, these signs also reminded me to be careful and slow when analysing a situation, and not to get carried away by enthusiasm when it first sets in. Put differently, the very public nature of some of these displays alerted me to my deep-rooted scepticism of public uniformity, which is a great hindrance for the nuance that everyday complexities contain.

Some of the displays of Ukrainian flags were certainly heartwarming - the paper ones containing the words "solidarity with Ukraine" that colleagues at the history department had placed in the window, the sticker in a taxi, the drawings in the pub - all these rang true to me and seemed to reflect genuine emotions, although I have no right to speculate about the exact pitch of those emotions. The display of the Ukrainian flag at a car sellers conference at the hotel where I stayed had a very different tone to it, and it was difficult not to sense the impulse of capitalist adaptation to exigencies.     

In all, it has been an educational week in more ways than one, but the most important consequence for me has been the exercise in nuanced thinking that these impressions have opened up for me.  

The gates to the humanities campus of Warsaw University

The history department

A window in the history department building

The elevator of the history department

A pub in a Warsaw suburb

A view from the common room - some brief reflections on a week in Warsaw

 


One of the benefits of the project where I am currently working is that the collaboration across borders allows for some long-awaited travel. This week I was in Warsaw to work on an article that I am co-authoring with a friend and colleague, as well as to meet up with a few other colleagues at the university. Looking back, I realise it was quite a varied week with a lot of different tasks that required my attention and energy, but in the midst of the work itself, I was mostly focussed on the work pertaining to the article, namely the writing, the planning, the organising, the discussions, and the copious notes we took along the way, all carried out in daily meetings of varying length. Granted, since this article work was something that we dealt with each day, it is no wonder that it is at the heart of my recollections. However, there is also another reason why I think of this week mostly in terms of that particular workload.

On Monday, I went to the Warsaw University campus for the humanities together with another friend and colleague from Oslo who is also a part of the project. My co-author met us and showed us around in the department, and guided us into the department's own library, and to the library's common room which is often used as a workplace. Here, in this relatively small room with a very high ceiling tucked away in the bowels of the classicist department building - carefully rebuilt after World War II - the three of us sat down to our different tasks, the two of us writing and discussing together, the third working on his own. We sat like this for various periods throughout the week, sometimes talking through details of content and structure, sometimes quietly tending to our own immediate tasks. 

The view from the common room's high windows, the noticeable scents of spring - for instance by some wafts of flowering chestnut - and the sense of calm that pervaded the entire room infused these sessions with a sense of community that is the lifeblood of academia. This was not a grand, overpowering feeling, nothing bombastic or pathos-filled, but a simple description of what the three of us were quietly building in that common room, and what the entire project is building in the many different nodes of collaboration that comprise it. It was a reminder, a very useful reminder, that as an academic I am dependent on what community I manage to partake in and maintain, and when academia works as it should, it fosters these communities. While academia is in a very bad state in general - no matter which country or tradition you are talking about - it is also helpful to be reminded that despite the frailty of our general academic framework, we are at times able to create pockets of communal work. And it was a great relief to have that experience. 

Conference: The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central Europe and Scandinavia until 1300

 
Next week, from Monday November 8 to Tuesday November 9, I am co-organising a conference as a part of the project where I am currently employed. The project, ELITES: Symbolic Resources and Political Structures on the Periphery: Legitimization of the Elites in Poland and Norway, c. 1000-1300, is a collaboration between the University of Warsaw and the University of Oslo. The conference will be held in Warsaw. 

The title of the conference is 'The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central Europe and Scandinavia until 1300', and can non-participating audiences can follow this conference by livestream from the University of Warsaw's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO3-bjLxBShHeZQQWUn19Ew. 

All are welcome!

Surrounded by simulacra - my first encounter with Warsaw

This week I spent two days in Warsaw for a work trip. Since we – my colleagues and I – had a short timeframe for discussing professional matters, most of the time I spent in Warsaw was taken up with discussions, later followed by talks and even later by chats. It was invigorating, inspiring and pleasant, as good work trips are in academia, but one consequence of this tight schedule was that my encounter with the city itself was relatively brief. However, thanks to the generosity of some of my Polish colleagues, those of us who had travelled to Warsaw from Norway were given a guided tour from the outskirts of what was once the early modern city to the interior what was once the medieval city. It was a crash course in the city’s history. It was very interesting. It was also profoundly moving.

Warsaw is in many ways a complex city, as it blends elements from late medieval cityscapes, the vulgar Baroque of the eighteenth century, the seemingly French-inspired neoclassicism of the nineteenth century, the vestiges of the Communist past, and the scattered skyscrapers of a modern city. But this complexity is in its way deceptive. Or perhaps I should rather say that this complexity is deepened by the illusory sense of history that envelops the flaneur as they make their way through the broad streets of the early modern city into the squares and alleys of the medieval city. This illusory sense of history is then shattered whenever one remembers that all of this – or at least almost all of it – is simulacra.

The medieval town, Warsaw

The great watershed in Warsaw’s history is the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, a sixty-three-day struggle in which Polish resistant fighters tried to take Warsaw from German control. The uprising failed, and on orders by Hitler almost all of the old town was levelled to the ground. The city was later rebuilt, and from photographs and paintings the individual buildings were replaced with replicas of astounding likeness to their originals. The effort was so successful that when walking through these streets, it would be impossible – at least for the non-expert in, say, architectural history – to see that what surrounds the viewer in as good as every direction is a collection of simulacra. 

It was a very eerie experience walking through these replicated layers of history – layers that were in one sense coeval with one another, but which alluded to different epochs and created an impression of layers that once existed. It was on the one hand marvellous, because the recreation was done so immensely well – I could definitely sense something of the same atmosphere that I have sensed in cities where such layered history is preserved and strongly visible, cities like Rome, York, Salamanca, Split. Yet once I noticed that feeling of giddy joy that overtakes the enthusiast, that feeling was immediately followed by a strong note of sadness. The sadness came from the realisation that this was, despite an incredible effort, not real. There was something not quite genuine, something that was not quite guaranteed about the verisimilitude of this assortment of simulacra: buildings, streets, horizons, nooks and crannies. 

It is not that cities like those mentioned above are not also grappling with some of the same issues. Wherever history is preserved in layers, there is a degree of uncertainty connected to it. There is always some restoration that has gone into the work, there is always a selection and discarding that has been done in order to decide what to preserve and what to give up to the changes that must happen in a cityscape. The preservation efforts are also hostage to the whims of human judgement, and it can be difficult to assess whether a restoration is actually a restoration or a creation: whether the past is presented on its own terms – whatever they might be in any given situation – or whether what we see is in actuality the fantasy image of the past as envisioned by an individual or several. Such uncertainties abound, even in the most historical of cities, however we want to understand that term. But in Warsaw, that uncertainty is different. Because on the one hand, we are certain that this is a reconstruction, and on the other, we cannot be certain about the number of liberties taken, or the number of gaps of knowledge that had to be filled by educated guesswork. This uncertainty is in a different configuration as that of other cities with a long history, and it makes for a very different experience when brought face to face with the city as it stands now.

The royal palace, Warsaw

The Trinity Church, Warsaw

There is no doubt that the reconstruction of Warsaw is impressive and based on materials that can be checked and compared with, and this post is in no way intended to denigrate that effort. Quite the contrary, I wholeheartedly applaud the effort, and it has given visitors to Warsaw an immensely beautiful scene. But it does come with a feeling I have never felt before, because never has the unreality of my surroundings been so clear, so well-known, so overt. These simulacra entice emotions that are similar to when I visit other cities as those mentioned above, but there is that constant and ever-returning knowledge that these emotions are based on replicas. (I studiously avoid the term “fake”, because that is not what these buildings are.) These feelings, brought on as they are by reconstructions, make me wonder what the difference is between the original and the reconstructed in terms providing that kind of emotional connection with a place and its past that people often encounter – willingly or unwillingly – in certain locations. These feelings also remind me that there is a very complex discussion to be had about the reality of the past, and about expectations, and about the value of simulacra in the absence of the original – and whether such differences matter all that much in certain situations.

My encounter with Warsaw often caused me to become stunned at various moments as I reflected on this resuscitated reality and the sadness that lingered in the very fact that what I saw around me on every side was an attempt to preserve what had been irrevocably lost, at least from the material point of view. 

The Church of the Holy Spirit, Warsaw