When I was in my second term at university I was still quite euphoric about the wealth of available literature that had opened up to me as a student. Frequently, I would scour the shelves of the campus bookshop and the university library, and I spent a significant part of my rather modest student loan on books. That spring I started to get a better understanding of how much was actually out there, and how much it would take for me to read in order to feel well-read - or at least sufficiently well-read. Spurred on by this bibliophilic delirium, I compiled a list of all the books I decided I should read in the course of a lifetime. It became quite a long list, comprised in large part of various classics with a few untypical choices thrown in for balance, and to satisfy my wish to read broadly, widely and every now and again obscurely. This list was ambitious, but also marked by my still very limited experience and knowledge. Already in the next couple of years my horizon expanded immensely, but I decided not to add anything to the original list because I would then be adding quicker than I would subtract, and while I do enjoy lists - even impossible lists - I do not appreciate lists that become Sisyphus-like.
Now, more than ten years later, I still have a long way to go on the list. My advancement has been slowed down for many reasons, the most important of which is the sense I felt when I had compiled it, namely that because I had listed all these books now, I should focus on books that were not on the list, and which I imagined would be more difficult to come by. To this day I cannot quite explain my reasoning.
Other books I deliberately left off because I felt insufficiently mature. I worried I would take too long getting through them, and that they would be less rewarding as a consequence, or that I would not have the time needed to enjoy them because of my studies. This was one of the reasons, for instance, that I did not start Don Quijote until after I had finished my MA.
As in the case of Don Quijote, there were some books that I decided to postpone reading because I felt the time was not right. And I am very thankful to my younger self for making this decision, especially now that I have both gained more experience in general, and have read more of those books that I did not know existed when I putting together my ambitious list. This past year, in particular, has really made it clear to me how some books are to be read at the right time, and that I have been very fortunate in some of my choices, and that I have done well in waiting.
Last week, I finished reading the last of the five novels in the story of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais. The first four novels were put on the list in my second term (while the fifth was left out because young me was stupidly bothered by it not being written by Rabelais, only put together from his notes by an unknown author). I had, in other words, been wanting to read them for a long time, and I purchased the older Penguin Classics translation by J. M. Cohen in 2016, intending to finally picking it up. Yet I delayed my reading, and although this was probably not a deliberate postponement, I am very glad that this was how it turned out. When I finally started reading the first novel earlier this year, I realised quite soon that so many of the references to various figures, events and concepts familiar to Rabelais and his own time had only become known to me at later intervals and through exploring corners of my field of interest that I had not anticipated back in my second term at university. Some of these references I could remember right away where I had picked them up, as in the case of the fourteenth-century jurist Bartolus de Saxoferrato, whom I know a little about solely thanks to a brief attempt at putting together a PhD project that I thankfully abandoned.
I should emphasise, for the sake of humility and accuracy, that there are still numerous references in Rabelais' novels that are lost on me, and there are plenty of jokes that I did not get and names that I did not know about at the time of reading, and if I ever re-read these novels I will hopefully be able to understand just how much I have now not understood. Yet because I know more about the period than I did before, because I have taught and read and discussed with friends about topics touched upon in these books, I was better prepared than ever before, and I was able to enjoy them more than I would have done at any point between now and back then when I compiled my list.
Similarly, when I picked up my next novel to read, I recognised very early on that it was a good thing I had not started when I first bought it a couple of years ago. The novel, The Corsair, by Abdulaziz al-Mahmoud, translated by Amira Nowaira, is set along the coasts of the Arabian peninsula in the early nineteenth century. It plays out against a backdrop of centuries of colliding imperial ambitions in which Ottoman, Portugese, Persian, Omani and British interests shaped the unfolding events of the region. I bought this book as a part of my still-ongoing project - inspired by journalist Ann Morgan - to read one book from each country of the world, and The Corsair is the representative of Qatar. At the time I bought it, I knew very little about the region in general, and I had only the faintest understanding of the region's history in that period. However, this autumn I taught a module on the early modern world, and in an attempt to move away from Europe, and make the students familiar with other parts of the world, I included a lecture on the political clashes in the Indian Ocean in between 1500 and 1800. As a consequence of this preparation, the political backdrop of Abdulaziz al-Mahmoud's novel is much easier to grasp than it otherwise would have been. And while I should point out that I am by no means an expert, neither on the region nor on the period in question, the teaching preparation also prepared me for a greater appreciation of the wider vista of the plot and characters of the novel.
These two books are among several examples of books that I read at the right time, or at least after I had arrived at a point of knowledge at which it became more rewarding to read them than if I had read them earlier. This is of course mostly chance, helped and assisted by a solid dose of personal inertia - perhaps typical of the unrepentant bibliophile - but the main point remains the same: Some books are simply worth waiting for, because when read at the right time they yield an even greater reward.
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