A decade of reading

This decade is soon over, and this has prompted a trend on Twitter that encourages people to list their accomplishments of the past ten years. In response to this, Professor Diane Watt suggested instead to make a list of things people have read in the past decade. Perhaps needless to say, I much prefer such lists, as I am often more excited about discussing books than discussing the ups and downs of my personal life - or even my professional life. I responded to this challenge on Twitter, but due to the medium's constraints I only presented a very few highlights of my own personal reading. Consequently, I am writing this blogpost as a way to expand a bit on the list, and to actually talk a bit more about the reading itself. So in the following, I'll present some of my personal highlights in the past decade of reading.

A main point I want to emphasise about the past decade is that I have become more ambitious in my reading. And I meant that in several ways. First of all, I have become more omnivorous as a reader, trying to sample a wide range of the world's available literature, and trying not to stick solely to my comfort zone. Granted, my reading is still to a great extent guided by my own personal aesthetic - there are themes, authors, genres and literary tools I prefer over others and that still constitute the majority of my book consumption. But I have increasingly come to see the value of reading books whose genres, themes or authors I might not explore in greater depth, but that at least provide me with a small window into a new world. I maintain a very firm belief that such knowledge of worlds outside your own, however small, holds a value in itself.

In this past decade I have also become more ambitious in the sense that I have gained greater confidence in my own ability to finish larger reading projects. This has drawn me out of the comfort that limited my reading in the first three years at university and plunged me into reading projects that will keep me busy for decades to come. However, this is not to say that I was unambitious before, but that previously my ambition was mostly formulated through ideas of future projects, things that I might pick up or might finish once I had become brighter, more experienced. I was waiting for some obscure moment when I would find myself ready to embark on all those projects I had jotted down on lists. But there was no such moment, and fortunately I emerged from that laziness and trusted in myself more.

Another aspect that has also presided over much of my reading in this past decade is a growing awareness of the limitations of my previous reading. This ties in with the issue of personal aesthetics that I mentioned above, but it goes in a slightly different direction. While I became more willing to go beyond my immediate preferences, I also realised that I should read more from various different voices. Those other voices were sometimes found outside my personal aesthetic, but sometimes also within it. This meant, for instance, that I began actively seeking out more texts by women. It also meant that I began exploring the literature of new countries, something to which I will return below.

I want to emphasise, however, that the following is not intended as a way of showing off. There is nothing particularly impressive about my reading or about the selection presented here. I am a slow reader, and sometimes an overly pensive reader, and it means that I probably read fewer books a year than a lot of my friends and colleagues. Rather, this is just an excuse for me to talk about some of the things I read, and I always take any excuse I can to do so, because talking books is one of my favourite things in the world.

With this as a backdrop, here are some of my personal highlights from the past decade of my reading.


The Making of Saint Louis (Cecilia Gaposchkin)

The Making of Saint Louis is an academic monograph that details the development of the cult of Saint Louis (Louis IX of France, d.1270), especially through the liturgical sources that were produced in the wake of his canonisation in 1297. The study is immensely well written and accessible, and it deals with a source material that makes for a wonderfully detailed presentation of the subject matter. I was notified of this book by my supervisor in the second year of my MA, and it became a key text for how I understood my own topic and how I framed my own questions and employed my methodology. To read this book was like entering through a succession of doors that lead you to one revelation after the other, and I am deeply indebted to this book for how I have developed as an academic. 


Don Quijote (Miguel Cervantes)

My reading of Don Quijote highlights what I mentioned above with regards to finally embarking on those projects I had left for future me to deal with. In my first year at university, 2007/08, I bought a copy of Arne Worren's Norwegian translation, and later on that year I compiled a long list of all the books I should read in the course of my lifetime. That list naturally included Don Quijote, and as I had already purchased a copy I would have been able to cross that off my list relatively soon. But something held me back. I suspect it was laziness and some vague sense of not being ready, not having done enough of the preparatory reading that would enable me to appreciate it. In 2014, however, as I was writing applications for a PhD and trying to find out what I would do next, I came to the realisation that I would probably not have as much free time for reading as I had that spring, at least not for a very long time. And so I started reading the exploits of the hidalgo of La Mancha, and I absolutely loved it. So much so that it remains my favourite novel to this day. As happy as I am to have read it, however, I am glad I waited for as long as I did. Back in 2007, I did not have the frame of reference required for understanding so many of the elements of the novel, but after my MA in medieval history I had a much greater appreciation for the playful intertextuality of Cervantes. I should also say that it took about half a year for me to get through it. I didn't read continuously, but also picked up several other books along the way, so the spring of 2014 was a good time to begin, and it also made me able to shelve Don Quijote in my mental reference library in time for my PhD.


Finishing the Aubrey/Maturin series

I first began reading Patrick O'Brian's masterful series of historical nautical novels in 2006/07 and I devoured the first thirteen or so within the first years at university. But after finishing The Far Side of the World, I left the series be for several years because I started my MA thesis, and I was worried that if I continued reading the series, I would be so consumed by the books that I would neglect the reading I would have to do for my MA. It was a tough choice to make because it is a literary world I had come to love and in which I felt at home due to Patrick O'Brian's ability to imbue his characters, even the most minor of all the characters, with a depth and humanity that makes them seem like old, and sometimes extremely detestable and annoying, acquaintances. I resumed my reading of the series in 2015, in the course of my PhD, and it turned out that I had made the right choice those five years prior, because I very quickly immersed myself in that world and did sometimes let it affect how I spent time I should have spent differently.


Reading Spanish

In senior high, when I was seventeen, I began learning Spanish. However, in my interminable stupidity, I did not keep it up and retained only a very limited vocabulary and sense of its grammar throughout my university days. When I started on my PhD, however, I became friends with several Spaniards who incentivised me to return to Spanish, and who introduced me to various aspects of the literature of Spain. Gradually I improved my skills in the language, and I began reading the albums of Mortadelo y Filemón, one of the great classics of Spanish comics. Most of the titles from the Spanish-speaking world, however, I read in translation, because I did not trust my own level of Spanish to be sufficient for such endeavours. But eventually I became more ambitious, and the great breakthrough came in 2018 when I read the poetry collection Salamandra by Octavio Paz. This was the first Spanish text, aside from the comics, that I had read primarily in Spanish, only using translations for checking unfamiliar words, and it felt like a great victory. It taught me that with some patience and a good dictionary I am able to get to grips with longer texts in Spanish, and it enabled me to read texts from new countries, texts unavailable in translation into English or Norwegian, such as the achingly beautiful poems of Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou.


Utopian literature/hollow earth fiction

For reasons I do not quite understand, I found myself drawn to Utopian novels in the course of my PhD. Perhaps as a sort of misguided escapism - misguided because Utopian societies serve mainly to emphasise the prejudices of their creators rather than instilling any sense of humanity's potential into the reader. I suspect it began with Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth (in William Butcher's translation), which presented a number of threads that in turn led me to other works of hollow earth fiction, a genre that is in its genesis connected to Utopian literature. This is perhaps most clearly seen in my personal favourite of these storiers, namely Niels Klims reise til den underjordiske verden (Niels Klim's Journey Under Ground) by Danish-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg. The novel was written in Latin and published in 1741, and I read the Norwegian translation by Kjell Heggelund. The novel describes a fantastical world on a planet in the centre of the earth, and in the novel Holberg outlines his ideal society with a learning and humour that makes for a very entertaining read. And it also provides excellent reasons for why we should have complete gender equality in our society, an issue that is still unresolved in our own time.


The Dark is Rising Sequence (Susan Cooper)

When I finished my PhD in the autumn of 2017, I began a voracious reading regimen to properly celebrate that what I had worked on for three years was now done and I could change my pace and let my mind breathe, as it were. One of the books I started reading that autumn was Over Sea, Under Stone, the first book in Susan Cooper's fantastic series of children's novels collectively known as The Dark is Rising Sequence. I read the first book when I was back in Norway on a short holiday in October, a reward to myself for finishing the thesis, and the second book I read during Christmas, and so it continued until I had read them all. It was a series that resonated with me as a medievalist who has been dealing a lot with English history, and it provided me with a literary world that I could easily immerse myself into.


Travelling the world through books

As a final instalment in this verbose yet restrained list, I will include another example of my increased ambition as a reader. This also began in the autumn of 2017 when I had finished my PhD. After having had my head in the Middle Ages for the better part of the past three years, I decided I needed to do something different, to start expanding my literary horizon. The solution became a project that was inspired by British journalist Ann Morgan, who in 2012 set out to read one novel from every country of the world, detailed in her blog A year of reading the world. This prompted me to try something similar, albeit far less ambitious. I decided that I should read one book - be it poetry, drama, short fiction, novels or non-fiction - from every country of the world. Unlike Morgan, I have not set the start for this list in 2017, so I those countries I have already read will not have to be read again for the sake of the list. Two years into this project, I am only at 88 countries and so not even half way. But in the course of this project I have encountered a lot of wonderful stories and learned a lot about a myriad of countries and cultures that have given me a much greater appreciation of the literary depth of the world. This is also a case where I have been guided by my intention to read more women's voices, and, consequently, when selecting a book that will represent a new country, I usually select one by a woman. I have come to believe that women often give a more thorough representation of their societies than men do.

When I started this project I had access to the interlibrary loan system of the University of Southern Denmark, so this allowed me to seek out books from very distant corners of the world. Among the highlights of the project so far are Colonised People by Grace Mera Molisa (Vanuatu), The Land Without Shadows by Abdourahman Waberi, translated by Jeanne Garane (Djibouti), The fortunes of Wangrin by Amadou Hampaté Bâ, translated by Aina Pavolini Taylor (Mali), and Aibebelau by Ucheliou (Palau).



These are just some of the many aspects of my personal reading this past decade. And as the decade dies and a new is on its way, I'm looking forward to what new books I will be reading in the next ten years.