Reading-spots, part 1 - glimpses from a personal history of reading

As I have spent more and more time reflecting on reading, I have also begun to dwell more on the various other aspects connected to the reading experience. This means that I am not solely concerned with what I read, but also where, when, why, and sometimes even how. I think about these things solely because by doing so I gain a deeper understanding of how I draw pleasure from reading, and in so doing I learn to savour the reading experience more fully. For instance, I have a rather unscientific idea that if what I read does not have much to recommend it, something of the experience itself can be improved by those other circumstances. As a way to dig deeper into how reading stays in my memory, I will dedicate some blogposts to specific moments of reading that have an important place in my memory. 

 
The first reading-spot to be presented in this series is this grassy point that juts into one of the lakes of my native village, a lake called Skilbreivatnet, whose name roughly translates as "the lake that is broad as a shield" or "broad-shield lake". This lake is one of my favourite haunts whenever I am back home, and it has been an important part of my life ever since my childhood, but through my own experiences there as well as the stories told by my grand-aunt who worked as a milkmaid here in her youth. Due to the numerous nooks and crannies along the lake shore, there are also numerous new reading-spots to seek out, something I do as often as I can to gain a more detailed understanding of the landscape.  

To this date, I have only used this little point - which is part of a larger and broader promontory - as a reading-spot one time, but that was also a very memorable time, at least for me. This was in June 2020 and I had finally been able to return home after six months in Sweden during the beginning of the pandemic. For the first time in my life I had been unable to come home for Easter, and my homesickness was at times brutal. 

When I was finally able to return home, I was in quarantine in a cabin that we rent out to tourists, making sure that I had not caught Covid along the way. The eleven days I spent in this cabin were essentially a holiday, and one of the best times of my life. I spent much of my time walking, paddling and rowing, and on several of these occasions I brought books with me. 

The day I came to this promontory I had begun reading the Norwegian translation of Jules Verne's L'Île mystérieuse, a novel I first encountered in an abbreviated form when I was six years old, and which has been an important point of reference for my cultural imagination. At last I was able to read an unabridged translation, and doing so in the Norwegian wilderness greatly enhanced the experience. While the island imagined by Verne, and the struggles of his protagonists, have little in common with the idyllic and, above all, familiar scenery of my native village, it was far easier for me to envision the exploration and the various episodes of the novel surrounded by the the quiet calm of birch trees and the ubiquitous movement of water from melting snow gorging the many brooks and rivers coming down the mountainsides. Lying in the grass by a well-known and beloved lake, being transported back in time through this nineteenth-century novel - both to an imagined past as well as my own childhood - and not having to think about anything beyond the here-and-now was one of the most wonderful reading experiences I have had. Granted, I only read part of the book there, but it is especially that spot which comes to mind when I think back to those days of carefree reading, and the little point on the larger promontory has become a treasured place of memory - to bastardise and misrepresent a concept by Pierre Nora. To put it differently, reading a part of Verne's novel in this spot has both enhanced my joy of reading the novel, and it has also strengthened my love of that spot.