By Sophia Blea Núñez
It was the kind of reading for which I am nostalgic, full of a relaxed intensity, accompanied by at least four cups of tea and the furry warmth of my dog at my side. It gleefully ignored the piles of grading and laundry, the need for a grocery run, and all screens, but particularly email and Moodle.
It was a promiscuous kind of reading, flitting among five different books, moving quickly through some and slowly through others, leaving sticky notes in the library books to take notes later and penciled comments in my copy of Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination. When I was younger, I also used to read multiple books at a time. This is not a sign of distraction, but of letting my mind dance. I was not planning to read St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation today, but when I found myself with only one chapter remaining of Seth Kimmel’s The Librarian’s Atlas, I wanted a change of pace before I finished it, wanted perhaps not to finish it quite yet.
It was a physical kind of reading, my body no more stationary than my mind: I read at the kitchen table, at my desk, at one end of the couch and the other, legs criss-crossed or dangling or tucked up to make a resting place for a book, sprawled on the floor on my belly, sitting on the rug in front of the couch, even walking my dog slowly through the neighborhood, book in hand.
Title: 1) Imagination: A Manifesto, 2) The Librarian’s Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain, 3) Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain, 4) On the Incarnation, 5) España y su civilización
Hours read: 8.5 hrs