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.
(translated by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard)
(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.
(translated into Norwegian as Slangeknuten by Fride Friestad)
(translated into Norwegian as Rapport om Adam by Karna Dannevig)
(translated into Norwegian as Kvinne ser på menn som ser på kvinner by Knut Johansen)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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