LÆSENOTER: Summer Reading

I Am Not Catherine by Mich Vraa. Last year, my publishing colleague Mich Vraa released the novel Ithaka, which delighted many readers – myself included. I’m curious to see what he has come up with this time.

JOK by Bo Lidegaard. Many years ago, Lidegaard was granted access to former Danish Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag’s diaries and wrote two outstanding volumes about the construction of the Danish welfare state after the Second World War, using Krag as his point of departure. I read them with great pleasure at the time. A few years ago, he published the more biographical JOK, and I look forward to settling down with that one this summer. Alongside literature, I’ve always enjoyed books on politics and history.

I’m afraid I won’t have time for much more than that this summer.

What would I like to read this summer?

I’ve placed an order for a handful of British and American titles that I’m hoping will arrive before everything disappears into summer holidays, barbecue sausages, and paddling pools.

Naked Oyster by Poppy Cockburn

I believe this is her first full poetry collection, though she has published a number of chapbooks and other delightful oddities. Everything I’ve read by her so far has been witty, tender, whimsical, hot, and hardcore all at once. She’s well worth following on Instagram: Tru_romank (https://www.instagram.com/tru_romank/). I imagine these will be the perfect sultry, sad, and funny summer poems. The title alone—wow. A book to be read on the beach, covered in sand and melting ice cream. It’s published by If a Leaf Falls Press in Edinburgh, which I think is one of the most exciting indie presses on the other side of the North Sea. They’re worth following too.

Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men's Lives by Darby Saxbe

I’ve had enough of my own half-baked reflections on fatherhood—I want facts I can use when I’m giving talks. No more feelings. Well, not entirely. I’ve heard Darby Saxbe on a few podcasts, and her work is inspired in part by Robert Sapolsky, who is one of my favourite communicators when it comes to biology and related sciences. Saxbe is part of a research group at USC that investigates the biological and neurological changes people go through when they become parents. She is also one of the few researchers to have focused specifically on the changes men experience when they become fathers. I’m really looking forward to this one. This is purely a personal interest—nothing literary about it.

Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology by Timothy Morton

I came across this book through a podcast by The Blake Society called The Traveller in the Evening: (https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/the-traveller-in-the-evening/id1709626661?l=da&i=1000653066986)

The conversation was about Timothy Morton’s (they/them) 2024 book Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology. As far as I can tell, the book deals with William Blake, ecocriticism, and a radically compassionate Christian—or perhaps simply spiritual—worldview. I haven’t read it yet, but the podcast interview was so extraordinary that I had to stop mowing the lawn several times just to stand still in the garden and listen. There were so many ideas that shifted something in me—not in a religious sense, but in the way they grappled with certain dogmas and divisions, both literary and otherwise, concerning hierarchies, consciousness, and the way animals and objects experience the world. It resonated deeply, though in a thoroughly bewildering way. I came away feeling slightly dizzy. Now I have to read the book. I sit on my local parish council and have promised to keep the church clock wound throughout the summer. So perhaps this is the perfect book for me. Maybe an ecological revolution can begin in a 900-year-old Romanesque church on Funen. Who knows?

Realistically, I won’t read many more books than these. But I do tend to take on at least one classic every summer, just to have something different to turn to whenever I inevitably get stuck in the non-fiction. Preferably something Danish, and preferably something with momentum and a good plot. Last summer it was The Liar. This year it will probably be Lucky Per or A Sportsman’s Sketches by Turgenev. Otherwise, I’m tempted to spend myself into poverty on A Mock Book’s catalogue of German Romanticism and science-fiction classics. What a combination they have going there! My realistic prediction is that I’ll manage two or three books. And they’ll probably be Cockburn, Morton, and Lucky Per. We’ll see. Have a wonderful summer, and happy reading to everyone out there.