Not your (well, my) grandma’s library)

I’m embarking on a new travel(ish) series: I will be exploring Norway in the most unadventurous way possible, via its network of public libraries. Hush now, it’s not as boring as you imagine! How many mountains do you need to see on-screen? One, maybe, I think. Maybe two, if somene’s drawn a troll into the picture. And to save you from having to save me from being murdered by Nature, I realised that a safe and not-at-all nerdy tour of libraries around the country was just the inspiration I needed to get traveling. And before you make assumptions: the libraries here are more than repositories for books and media. They’re cultural instutitions, serve so many public needs, and and and – wait, I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with a bit of background:

My Grandma’s Library

You will hear me talk a lot about library visits with my grandmother back in Steenberg, Cape Town. Far back, wait not that far (rude), to the fading light of apartheid authority in a South Africa I that I thought I might one day actually come to understand (ag, shem). Libraries mean a lot to me, and visits with my Ma win top spot in the nostalgia contests of TJ’s mind. We would do our weekly, slow, trundle in the summer heat from her council house to the squat brown building next to the public pool I would always beg to visit (and almost never did). In tiled, airy entrance of this seemingly dull municipal building we would part ways for a spell. Ma doddered over to the grown-up section to the right, and I to the kids’ area on the left. We took our time to browse and read a little, and then we would return to meet once more at the brightly-lit entrance and brace ourselves for the agonsing, book-laden journey home. We were ambitious, us two. So many books, so little time. Ma favoured romance dramas thicker than the Christian bible, and I loved me a good kids’ mystery story. You know, where white British kids were allowed to roam around san supervision around country towns absolutely teeming with brooks, hedges, copses and (if we were lucky) corpses too.

This sense of home I felt at the library in Steenberg is likely a big part of why I love the library here. While they are so very different in terms of the role they play in community-building in Norway, just the strength of the magic that housing all those books has gives me the same tingle I got at seven years old, and the only thing I think the libraries are missing up here are areas reserved only for use by elderly ladies who want to pad about talking aloud to themselves as they wonder whether or not they’ve read that book already. I checked the romance section at my local, and it’s only big enough for one lady, maybe two if they squish, so that’s wrong. I’ll write them a letter.

And so now I have embarked on a pilgrimage of sorts, to visit libraries across the country and get to know my new home in this way. I promise to keep it juicy, because if I am good at anything, it’s asking all the wrong questions of people and thereby getting unexpected responses. So who knows what I will uncover!

Before my first proper step into the series, I suppose I should give a little background on the confusing naming convention of the local library system here. Honestly, I just figured it out today, and it still feels like it should be different.

Next: I promise it’s a library, it just doesn’t look like one and is called something else. (No, that’s a cafe, no no, that’s a cinema. Ah, I see you found a carpenter’s workshop. Ah yes, there! You’ve got it: the library called Deichman that you can make end tables, watch movies, have a dance party, and of course also borrow books at.)