For me,
2024 was the closing of a chapter, as my forty-month postdoctoral contract came
to its end. The knowledge that this would quite possibly be my last year in a
long while having access to a university library, did have a significant impact
on how I went about my reading. While most of my reading in any given year is a
balance between the structure and chaos, between plans and whims, the struggle
between these opposing forces was felt more keenly as I sat out to prioritise
like someone saving books from a burning building.
Luckily,
2024 was a busy year for me, one that provided a lot of opportunities to
travel, and a lot of opportunities to delve into new material and expand my
horizon in many different directions. As I always enjoy how travel and books
serve to reinforce the impressions from either in my brain, there turned out to
be many memorable moments throughout the year.
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Travelling
by page
While I
have been fortunate enough to do a lot of travelling during my recent
employment, most of my travelling is by page. I always try to travel as widely
as possible, but this year I was particularly anxious to explore new countries
through their books, since I wanted to make the most of the university
library’s holdings, as well as the interlibrary loan system. In the end, I
think it would be an overstatement to say that I made the most of it, but I did
manage to tick several countries off my list.
The first
country I visited was Equatorial Guinea, through Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s
novel By night the mountain burns, which describes life on the island of
Annobón. The book was a steadfast companion during my wanderings in Madrid, and
by a lovely coincidence I was still reading this novel by the time I visited
the anthropological museum and beheld some artefacts from Equatorial Guinea
(although the mainland, rather than Annobón).
Several of
my paginated peregrinations this year were directed to the Arab-speaking world,
partly by deliberate choice since I saw an opportunity to fill in the blanks on
the Arabian peninsula. Unlike the synchronicity of reading By night the
mountain burns, the three books in question contrasted notably with my
surroundings as I was reading my way through them. The best example is perhaps Rajaa
Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh, which is a fantastic portrayal of social
stratification and gender roles in turn-of-the-century Saudi Arabia. I read
most of this book during a train journey between Bergen and Oslo that was
delayed by several hours, and where the snow-covered mountains were a world
away from urban life in Riyadh. The contrasts were less striking when I read Wajdi
al-Ahdal’s A land without Jasmine (a crime story from Yemen), since I
was then travelling through the Netherlands and Belgium. This was also the case
when reading Sarah A. al Shafei’s Yummah (a sort-of historical novel
from Bahrain), as I was then in a relatively warm Oslo. Nonetheless, the differences
between the read and the travelled worlds were notable. I learned a lot through
these books, especially Girls of Riyadh, which should be read by most
men due to its various insights into the vulnerability of women in a
patriarchal society.
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As for the
remaining three countries, the contrasts were also notable. Men of Maize
by Miguel Ángel Asturias provided fascinating views of Guatemalan folklore, as
well as social history, and most of this book was consumed en route to and from
the narrow and extremely beautiful village of Flåm in the Western Norwegian
fjords. Mother’s Beloved, a collection of short stories by Laotian
author Outhine Bounyavong depicted a world very different from December in
Western Norway. Similarly, the dry desert vistas and narrow vales of Azerbaijan
in Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino (in a Norwegian translation) was in many respects alien to my own frame
of reference. Yet all these novels did provide an inroad that allowed me to
sense a deep-running vein of familiarity, namely because they all dealt with
aspects of rural societies. Even though life on a farm is significantly different
in Norway compared to these countries, the concerns and much of the work remain
startlingly similar in various aspects, and I felt I could immerse myself more
deeply in these books than I might otherwise have been able to do, had I not
had a farming background.
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New
places for reading
Luckily, 2024
was a year of travelling, both for work and for my personal pleasure. For me,
part of the pleasure of travelling consists of finding new places for reading.
The very act of moving through pages in a new location makes me connect more
strongly to that place, and what might otherwise have been a very fleeting and
difficult-to-remember occasion, instead becomes lodged in my memory in a very
positive way. Such memories are important, as they are part of the arsenal to
wield against those dreary days where routine and overwork make time feel like
a grey stodge.
Some of the
most memorable reading-places of 2024 are connected with my foray into the
history of the cult of Saint James the Elder in Santiago de Compostela. Not
only did I travel to Compostela twice in the course of the year, I also read
several books about the cult and its development. Reading some of those texts
in Compostela made it easier to envision the past about which I sought to learn
and write. I found it particularly thrilling to read part of the liturgical
repertoire of Saint James – as contained in the first book of Codex
Calixtinus, a mid-twelfth-century collection of texts pertaining to that
cult – while staying in the place where this repertoire was put together. Relying
on a translation of the liturgical texts, I read them both at what became my
regular haunt in Compostela during a five-day sojourn, and also in the nave of
the cathedral itself. Reading liturgy hits very differently when you imbibe the
words in the very same location where they have been performed for generations,
and, perhaps more importantly, where they were intended to be performed.
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In the course of two trips, I spent ten days in Compostela last year, and this was not enough time to get through all the texts pertaining to Saint James that I read throughout 2024. After leaving Compostela, I went to Lisbon. There, I found another regular haunt – as is my habit when staying somewhere for several days – and at this café just beside the entrance of where I was staying, I continued the literary journey that had reached its zenith in Galicia. This was in May, and a few months later I continued this particular theme when travelling to Belgium, where the chance encounter of a chapel dedicated to the Compostelan patron reminded me that this particular cult was an important phenomenon in the Middle Ages.
Even though
the cult of Saint James the Elder loomed large in last year’s reading, there
were many other books, and many other travels which brought about new places
for reading. A trip to Vienna in January allowed me to read about medieval European
perceptions of otherness while sharing in the Austrian penchant for apricot
juice. Moreover, as I was in Vienna for work, and as my colleagues and I were
working in a converted post office which now houses the Austrian Academy of
Sciences, I occasionally withdrew to the ground floor café where the
architectural grandeur of a bygone age became a pleasant framework for both
reading and writing. My travels in the Iberian peninsula also provided good
opportunities for finding new places. Aside from those examples that I have
already noted in relation to my reading about Saint James the Elder, I also
took great delight in reading about the cult of saints in medieval France while
eating traditional Galician cooking in both Compostela and Pontevedra,
especially because these were places frequented by the locals. Similarly, as
cancelled plans provided me with a very quiet December Saturday in Madrid, I
could read about relics in the medieval Nordics at an almost empty little café
in one of the barrios on the outskirts of the capital.
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Reading
by lists
While I am
a chaotic reader, driven by impulses to a far greater degree than I would like
to admit, I do try to follow a set list of twelve items each year, divided by
four categories: a) Nobel laureates, b) Norwegian books, c) academic books, and
d) books from a list I put together during my first year at university. However,
since I was painfully aware that my current chapter was coming to a close, and
since I own many of the books in category d, I neglected this category
completely, and instead focussed especially on academic books. Consequently, I
did a lot of learning as I delved into a number of fascinating monographs and
article collections, several of which pertaining to the cult of Saint James the
Elder. Other academic books, however, were chosen for different reasons, and
partly owing to my unwillingness to be too logical about my chosen reading. It
was on an unrestrained impulse of this latter kind that I ended up reading
Jennifer Nelson’s wonderful Disharmony of the Spheres, a brilliant
analysis of the theological, scientific and art-historical zeitgeist of the 1530s.
This is a book that has little to do with my own work, at least for the time
being, but it was very inspiring, and a true eye-opener.
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This year,
I also mostly neglected Nobel laureates, with the exception of Asturias’ Men
of Maize. On the other hand, my work allowed me to delve into a number of
Norwegian historical sources, both medieval chivalric romances, and medieval
laws. The deep-dive into the laws was prompted by the 750-year-anniversary of
the Norwegian law of the realm of 1274. This anniversary was an event that
presided over the public discourse throughout the country, and it provided me
with a good opportunity to incorporate the law material in my teaching as well
as in public lectures. Moreover, a friend and I were commissioned to write the
script for an exhibition at the historical site of Moster in Western Norway,
where we provided a longue durée perspective in Norwegian law history.
Naturally, 2024 was the year when I finished reading the Law of the Gulathing
province (written down in the mid-twelfth century) and the Law of the realm. As
interesting as these books are as sources, they are nonetheless slow reads, and
therefore they came to play a big part in my year of reading.
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A
meeting in Madrid
The
greatest book-related highlight of the past year was a meeting in Madrid, where
I caught up with Raquel Lanseros, my favourite poet of all time. Her verses are
deeply important to me, and they have been so ever since I first encountered
them in the first spring of the pandemic. At the time, I was cooped up in a
small barrack on the edge of a Swedish wood, and translating some of her poems
into Norwegian became a way of keeping relatively sane. Thanks to her immense
generosity, moreover, I was allowed to put these translations on the blog, and
share them with readers. This generosity laid the foundation for a treasured
friendship, and in 2024 we finally managed to meet up. I was then gifted her
latest collection of poetry, namely El sol y las otras estrellas (The
sun and the other stars), which is a powerful meditation on love in its myriad
iterations. This collection became a treasured companion that I read at my
regular haunt during my Madrid sojourn, in Compostela, and finally in the
Western Norwegian fjords, where I finished it.
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Utopian
literature
As in 2023,
last year I immersed myself in utopian literature, aiming to read a number of
texts related to this topic. Part of the motivation for doing so was a course I
co-designed with a colleague and friend, where we traced certain themes in
utopian thinking from Antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Early
Modern Period. However, I have also been able to work on this topic for
articles, lectures, and conference presentations, and it has been a great
pleasure to immerse myself in a wide variety of such texts. As part of this
work, I have read The Letter of Prester John, a forgery made at the
court of Frederick Barbarossa, which purported to be sent from a Christian king
who ruled a fantastical kingdom in the middle of India. The figure of Prester
John had a massive impact on Western European utopian thinking form the twelfth
century onwards, and continued to provide a touchstone for several generations
of utopists.
Other texts
in this theme have been Anno 7603 (1781), a time-travel theatrical play
by Johann Herman Wessel, Denis Veiras’ The History of the Sevarambians
(1675), A Narrative of the Life and astonishing Adventures of John Daniel
(1751) by Ralph Morris, and The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes (1708)
by Hendrik Smeeks. Even the last finished book of year, The First Men in the
Moon (1901) by H.G. Wells falls into this category. These books have been
very enjoyable in their own right, but also immensely useful as I continue to
research utopian thinking and how this aspect of the human imagination
continues to impact the current discourse.
A book
in every language
As with
every year, small mini-projects of reading materialise along the way. In the
autumn of 2024, I realised that I was on my way to read one book in each of the
six language in which I have reasonably fluent in both speaking and writing,
and so I decided to complete the set, especially as I have not managed to do so
in many years. Norwegian and English were easy to tick off the list, as these
are the two main languages of my reading in any given year. Spanish is likewise
a language I engage with a lot, but it is far rarer that I finish an entire
book. One Spanish book that I finished in 2024 was El porque de los mapas
(literally The why of maps) by Eduard Dalmau, a very fascinating account of the
history of cartography until c.1500. Despite its shoddy treatment of the
Middle Ages, it was a pleasant companion on several of my travels last year.
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In Danish, I read the novel Spionen fra Atlantis (The spy from Atlantis) by Erik Juul Clausen. This is a delightful fantasy novel which describes a mission to find and steal a secret weapon in Egypt and bring it back to Helgoland, the centre of an Atlantis populated by proto-Danish speakers. Swedish was represented by Lena Liepe’s wonderful account of the cult of relics in the Nordic Middle Ages, Reliker och relikbruk i det medeltida Norden (Relics and the use of relics in the medieval Nordics). I do, however, feel that I have cheated with regards to German, as I read Alberto Manguel’s Sehnsucht Utopie (Utopian yearning), which was a translation from French that I encountered in a Vienna bookshop.
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What made
me particularly happy about this mini-project was that I was able to finish my
first book in French, namely Voyages en Utopie (Travels in Utopia) by
Georges Jean. Granted, this book is very well illustrated, so it did not
require a lot of reading to finish it, but I nonetheless felt a delightful
pride in what is my first proper step in the further exploration of
untranslated Francophone literature.
Sundry
highlights
In addition
to these main themes, there have also been several other highlights, both small
and large, that have comprised the reading year of 2024.
Writing the
last entry in the guest book at the family shieling, and whose first entry was
written in 1957.
Dropping by
the Madrid book festival.
Purchasing
a collection of medieval sources pertaining to Portugal at a metro station
bookshop in Lisbon.
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Contemplating
my book haul after two weeks in Iberia.
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Seeing the
local bookshop in my native municipality advertising a multivolume work of
local history with the slogan ‘You don’t need Google when you have the hamlet
book’ (a hamlet book being a historical overview of all the families and farms
of each local hamlet).
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Receiving
author and editor copies of a co-edited volume of articles.
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Working on
articles at the shieling.
Encountering
a mini library at the train station in Lier, Belgium.
Visiting
the exhibition on the Law of the realm of 1274 at the National Library in Oslo
(several times).
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Spending
some last sessions of reading and writing at one of my favourite haunts, namely
the library café at the University of Oslo.
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