Looking for reading inspiration? Here are the best books I read in 2020 (in no particular order):
(Copenhagen, Denmark; February 2021)
Finally, I finished this travelogue and ethnographic classic. There were long, intense and sometimes controversial opinions, spiced by classic British dry wit.
I have been to the Brazilian jungles and spent weeks with natives – although the ones I encountered lived in houses on stilts and all owned an outboard boat engine and a cellphone – and if they lived in a non-flooding area of the Amazon, a motorbike. Times change. I wonder what Claude Lévi-Strauss would say about the modern conversion of a large portion of the Amazon.
(Copenhagen, Denmark; October 2020)
Bookshops? you may inquire. Who goes to bookshops anymore, when you have Kindle, Amazon, and the easy kiosk bookshops at airports? Fortunately there are still people who love the smell of books and the feeling of picking an unknown but intriguing book off the shelf, knowing it may change your world if you just sit down and give it attention. Fortunately there are still people who love the excitement of discovery in 3D which is not possible if you browse Amazon, like a holiday trip but much cheaper (unless one comes out carrying one’s weight in paper).
My opinion is that every bookshop is important. And then there are bookshops which are both important and special, somehow. Perhaps because of their history, or how they are run. Or simply by the books they carry. Here below are a few of my favorites in no particular order, the ones that I easily lose an hour or two in. If it is not on the list it may be because I have not yet visited it – so please drop me a note!
Shakespeare and Company (Paris): English language books in a maze-y bookshop from the 50s on the Left Bank in Paris. That is an amazing combination in itself already, but it gets better: if you are an aspiring writer you can stay for free in any of the small beds hidden away between the shelves, writing away on any of the old typewriters ensconced in quiet nooks. All you have to do in return is help around, maybe read aloud, and read and review books. You will be one of tens of thousands of writers who stayed, and if you are lucky you will run into celebrated writers who occupy a room upstairs. This wonderful shop is named after the legendary shop which entertained Hemingway, Pound, Fizgerald, and the lot in the 1920s, until WWII broke out. In summer there is usually a line outside so come early in the day. It’s worth the wait.
City Lights Bookstore (San Francisco): The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded City Lights just a few years after Shakespeare and Company was re-created in the 50s. He called it the sister of the shop in Paris, perhaps because both drew crowds of beat poets and writers. While the browsing experience is not at all like that of an old nearly derelict Parisian riverside building, I love this shop because of its history, the founder’s wonderfully hilarious poetry, and the book content. If social activism, world history and politics or poetry is your thing, this shop is for you. The most-bought book is probably the beat poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg.
Powell’s City of Books (Portland, OR): 1970s shop specialized in vintage and rare books, but also carrying a big collection of new books (side by side with the old ones). The key to visiting Powell’s is time: the building spans an entire city block and the rooms are color-coded, to help navigate with a map you can request. Powell’s also has a café and when I visited the place 10 years ago we were invited to take our book picks and read – even if we had not paid for them just yet. The shop also has a Rare Books Room which you can request access to if rare books are your thing.
Daunt Books (London): Edwardian building with a glass roof, specialized in travel books, even publishing its own collection of interesting books around the world. What can be a better reason to visit London? The top photo of this post is from Daunt Books and as you can see, the shop is to be browsed according to geographical location, save for the front room which has a traditional by-topic setup of mostly non-travel books. Daunt Books owns a few other well-curated bookshops around the UK, disguised under other names, so have a look at their store listing before you visit.
Pilgrims Book House (Kathmandu): Deep in the old town maze of Thamel hides a surprisingly large bookshop, with not only books but wonderful crafts, incense, and gift items. While the company is over 25 years old, the old bookshop burnt down in 2013 and the new shop probably does not stock quite the same selection of rare books, but you can still find them here. As well as books on mountaineering, Nepalese and Tibetan history and culture, outdoors, and of course Hinduism, Buddhism, and actually pretty much any other world religion or philosophy.
Heffers (Cambridge, UK): My favorite haunt when I studied in Cambridge. The last time I visited this shop was in 2015, with the result that I together with my sister lugged home about 10 kg of books in our suitcases. Including the ones below. Heffers is catering for world-class university students and scientists, and so if you are interested in micro-topics like the social life of trees, quantum biology, or famous historical people who liked to talk walks in London at night, this shop is for you.
Blackwell’s (Oxford, UK): As of a few years Heffers is actually part of Blackwell’s, a UK university-town bookshop chain. Like Heffer’s, Blackwell’s caters for academics and the Oxford shop is another fabulous place to get lost in, as well as the original base of Blackwell’s, founded in 1879. Part of the shop is underneath Trinity College, including the Norrington Room which holds a Guiness World Record for its 5 km of shelves of books: the largest room of books for sale in the world.
When longing to visit a most-wonderful bookshop: If you really love books, perhaps you’d like to smell like one? The scent of old books is a science in itself, and the past few years boutique perfume companies have issued scents that smell of old paper, books, and everything we like to associate with it: perhaps a little leather from the book cover, smoke from a pipe or cigar, wood from the shelves, or dried pansies from grandmother’s table. The only one I have been privileged to smell is Bibliothèque by Byredo, available both as a candle and perfume so we can all dream of bookshops when we are not in one.
(Vejle, Denmark; October 2019)
Let’s talk about reading lists (I am assuming you are interested in books!). No, not the reading lists one is forced to survive through in school, but reading lists we choose to plow through. I chose to spend 10 years plowing through my previous reading list of 106 books of pretension. It was a major classics binge and worth at least 100 books out of the 106.
And so, last year I found myself in the luxury situation of compiling another reading list. What would be a good topic for a 30-something person to delve into? More classics? Books on naturalism? Meditation? Biographies? Or just some freaking great modern novels? What do we all do when we need an answer? We google.
I googled “books with wisdom”. I thought if I start now, I might just be able to improve how I live my life so that it would have a significant impact on the remaining half a century I (might) have ahead of me. And google did not fail. It pulled up three lists of three blogging individuals, which I have compiled into one long reading list called Books of Wisdom.
This is not my list. I intend to make my own once I am through these recommendations. Some of these, like Suzuki and Aurelius, will definitely be on that list. Others, like Kaufman and Pirsig, are not for me as much as they might be for you. I am nearly half-way through. Here, take a dive into the below. And come back for my own Books of Wisdom list in one or two years’ time.
Compiled from the lists of James Clear, Michael Balchan, and Darius Foroux.
(Brande, Denmark; May 2019)
Plastered, ochre and sand-colored houses with moss green window shutters. Stone slab pavement. A few potted plants. Sparrows chirping in the alleys. A group of locals having pasta with wine for lunch underneath a parasol. Bordighera must have been the same already centuries ago. 
A century ago one could reach Bordighera from Paris in “just” 24 hours, and London was not much further away. Claude Monet found much to paint in the stillness of hot, languid Bordighera summer days. George MacDonald came over to warm his Scottish bones and to write of fantastical, sometimes dark places while sitting in the shade from the scorching sun.
Bordighera is also one of the two locations André Aciman thought of when writing Call Me By Your Name. Because there are only a few places where days pass in such a lazy pace that there is time to discuss the origins and meaning of the word “apricot”.
(Bordighera, Italy; July 2018)
Lovely ones, do you remember the meme doing rounds on blogs in 2008, called “The 106 Books of Pretension”? It was a list of the top 106 (why one-hundred-and-six?) books marked “undread” by Librarything users. The “pretension” referred to books considered classics, or modern classics, that were actually unread by many avid readers and literary aficionados.
Out of the 106 books I had perhaps read around 35. I saved the list, and started reading the remaining 70+ books. I told myself, this is a list of books a civilized person should have read during a lifetime. There were books I had managed to skip during high school English classes. Books that had recently been made into movies. Books that many talked about the moment they were published – and the talk never ceased.
I discovered the curious stories of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell; and of Cavalier and Clay. I found I loved Dostoyevsky and Neil Gaiman, and that the great Grapes of Wrath bored the wits out of me. But most importantly, I exposed myself to once-revolutionary thoughts; great stories; and incredible minds. Book after book I explored thought-worlds that changed the world we perceive as real. Censored books like Madame Bovary. Slandered books like Lolita. Shocking books like In Cold Blood. Classics like Homer’s Odyssey. And I realized that often we repel insurgent views because we hate to be told by a visionary storyteller. Books much hated have become books much respected. It was not the book that changed, but the collective mind and the world around it.
Only four books I could not finish: the Iliad (an account of who fought whom and how they died); Gravity’s Rainbow (I thought I would love this one! Did not get past 150 pages); The Silmarillion (come on, can you really blame me?); and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (what is wrong with me??).
Finishing off this list of 106 books was part of my Day Zero Project. I can now tick this goal off the list, after 10 years of reading (not with perfect adherence to this goal). The list of the top 106 books tagged “unread” at Librarything has changed surprisingly little: 95 are still on the list today. What a great shame as most of these books really are gems worth the effort.
For your reading pleasure, here is the original list from 2008. Have fun exploring 106 new worlds.
(Brande, Denmark; September 2018)
There are people who travel just to see famous libraries. I should like to be one of those people. There ought to be a Michelin guide for libraries: where one star is an honor, two stars recommend a detour to have the experience, and three stars a special journey out just to see the place. The Austrian National Library truly is one worthy of traveling to just to see the place. 
The Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI surely thought of a library worth three stars, as he constructed a State Hall in the shape of a cathedral and placed himself, surrounded by the sun-pattern on the floor, in the middle to be worshiped. One should better worship the books and knowledge and poetry, but with the Baroque splendor all around, one might just forget about the content and stand in awe before the building itself.
Even books used to be so much more beautiful back then: golden inscriptions and delicate sizes, favoring multiple volumes over the brick-size murder weapons that some pocket books are today.
Should one’s eyes wander all the way up to the ceiling, they will most likely remain stuck there for quite some time. And no, the images are not about Christian Bible legends or Paradise, but about the great Habsburg dynasty, as if it were god-like.
Walking toward the radiantly depicted Holy Roman Emperor statue, below the fresco of Habsburg heavens, in a building designed like a cathedral, I was not quite sure if the said Emperor really had constructed the library as a haven for knowledge, or as a deification of himself. Perhaps not the humblest of perspectives, but then again, who expects an Emperor to be humble?
(Vienna, Austria; February 2017)
English bookstores will be the end of me. I think it runs in the family. Once my sister and I spent a week in London and lugged home 10 kilos of books. Another time she spent 3 hours in Heffers in Cambridge. I was not bored, either.
This time we spent a week in Oxford and London and I managed to come home with only 5 books (yes, one missing from the photo). But where else can one find an entire book about nightly walks of artists and literary figures in historical, sometimes dangerous nocturnal London? Or a book on quantum mechanics in biology? Or books and books about trees, the ocean, and naturalism?
Help. I may need help. If not for any other purpose, then to expand the entire wall of books I have at home. Just as soon as I’ve finished this book I am reading.
(Helsinki, Finland; January 2017)
Lazy summer nights must include books and sunshine. Some of us read the books. Others use them as pillows when napping. Both ways are allowed and encouraged.
(Helsinki, Finland; July 2016)
As I browsed through the stock-full shelves of the Shakespeare and Company book shop, I pondered what it is that makes a city a writers’ and artists’ city. Why is it that in the 1920s Paris was the place to be, and perhaps today one should be in Berlin? Why did so many artists congregate on the French Riviera in the end of the 19th century (was it just the peculiar light?)?
So I did what everybody does today when they have a question: I typed in Google, “What makes a city a writers’ city?” The top 5 search hits were about New York City: half of them listing why New York City is a writers’ city, and the other half telling writers to leave for better cities than New York City. Odd, however, that all the cities mentioned as great writers’ cities were located in the United States. 
Google made me none the wiser, except for one important factor: money and cafés. A writer thrives in a location which is esthetically pleasing and has good cafés where one can observe life – but that even a poor creative soul can afford. Places like Brooklyn and San Francisco, and St Germain-des-Pres in Paris, used to be hot hangarounds for creative people – until so many came that the area became “too hipster” (now define it if you please) and the poorest but also coolest full-time aspiring artists had to move out to find yet another inspiring haunt.
Perhaps it does not matter where one writes, as long as one is surrounded by things that inspire. Or perhaps it does help to be allowed to crash at for example Shakespeare and Company, to punch away on the age-old typewriter in the corner, or to bounce around ideas and angst with fellow aspiring writers in-between shop duty.
In any case, a picnic at Luxembourg gardens may help. Many have tried and succeeded.
(Shakespeare and Company bookshop; the ceiling at La Coupole restaurant; Oscar Wilde’s tombstone; and Luxembourg gardens. Paris, France; July 2016)
This blue marble 