Yes, I think these selfreflective bouts are very interesting and also quite
relevant -- part of the community-building, I guess -- to look at who,
theorizingly, we are as academics and how we got to be there...
...I don't think I can remember not being a reader, I seem to have "cracked
the code" some time at the age of three (and evidently had been asking
questions about words-and-letters long before that). Someone once said it's
not very smart being an early reader, because then nobody will read to
you... but in my case, fortunately there were my younger sisters who did
not read yet, so I had that, too. Children's books (Astrid Lindgren!)
newspapers, magazines (Donald Duck!) in a not very academic middle-class
home. And at my grandparents in the summer, anything I could find: old
school books... my mother's old teenage-girl "novels"... just anything. A
reading that "evoked worlds" beyond the text (is that Ricoeur?) (The only
ones I didn't like were the moralizing stories, where some "greedy" or
"rude" child was predictably punished-by-fate... for the rest I swallowed
it all.)
Reading at school, reading to be able to answer questions, was a very
different matter, yes. I guess that my school reading must have benefited
from my experience of texts "coming alive" -- but as I remember it, "real
reading" was almost like a secret, something that had to be guarded from
nosy school questions. Living with double standards.
I think it must have been somewhere about the time that I dropped out of
school that I "graduated" to something more like the world (and national)
literature... like reading the great Russians... but also a lot of
mythologies and folk tales... and yes, I discovered a first round of
Science Fiction. Then, for a few years it was... not really possible to
read anything but things like Jan Myrdal's "Report from a Chinese Village".
Later still (more blessings to Ludvika town library) back into reading Most
Anything: Great Novels (guided by a six-volume History of Literature) but
also a lot of non-fiction: psychology, geology, history...
and then a little later yet I more or less kept myself alive
through a bad divorce by the "autodidactic" feat of taking my secondary
school grades by "reading at the kitchen table" (while the kids were at
school) and then every two or three months or so going in by the 50
kilometers by bus to have a private exam with some teacher at the local
secondary school...
...and it was THEN that I became an academic. This is to say that reading
has for most of my life been a "free zone" an "other place" -- and a
blessing (probably a sword that cuts both ways, though). I realise when I
write this that I am writing my hero story. It is, of course. But I also
realise the more for every year that there are just SO many other odd and
painful ways into academia...
Well, friends
bus time again...
--no time for current reading habits or comments on the survey
Eva