5 vragen aan… Judith Barringer, auteur van Olympia en The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece

What books are on your night stand? 

• Charles Dickens, Bleak House
• Anna Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia

• Lees op onze site ook een fragment uit Timothy Snyders Bloedblanden, dat Barringer aanraadt.

When do you read? 

I read work-related things all day long, most every day, which is reading for which I ‘feel responsible,’ that I need to retain it, learn it.  Then there is the non-work reading—I suppose I should call it pleasure reading although a lot of my work reading gives me pleasure, too—and that is what I do over breakfast, at night in bed, and on many evenings; this is reading that I do not feel responsible for, reading that can be very heavy and serious or not.

At breakfast, I always read/translate German; I read a few pages each day of a German novel to keep my German reading knowledge in practice. Just now, it’s Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, and I love it. In the evenings and bedtime, I read either history (often 20^th-century), a novel, or The New Yorker or the New York Review of Books. Sometimes I read archaeology in the evening, but in an area that is not my own or something I know little or nothing about, e.g., last night I read an article about Hellenistic Cyprus, and I have been reading about the Incas.

What book do you force upon your friends? 

This often is whatever I am reading and enjoy at any given moment. Recently, it was Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which I found brilliant, and also Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds from which I learned many fascinating things about cephalopods. Another is Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands. And almost anything by Edith Wharton. I could go on and on.

When you were little, what did you think you’d be when you grew up? 

I wanted to be a zoologist, but some part of me clearly wanted to be a teacher: as a small child, I would line up all my stuffed animals on my bed in rows and ‘give them spelling tests.’ They didn’t do so well.

I always loved reading, loved literature, so when I began university, I studied English Literature and lots of Art History. My engagement with Classical Archaeology began in that very common way: the right teacher and the right class at the right time: the usual serendipity that explains so many career decisions. But I still love animals, still love literature.

What did you enjoy most while working on this book?

What I enjoyed most was the constant state of ‘discovery,’ that there was always more to learn and to consider about Olympia, that no matter how much I had read, thought about, or saw, there was yet more, an ever-expanding ‘universe.’ I found this sometimes daunting, and I was led into some unexpected byways and down rabbit holes, but it was also inspiring, occasionally thrilling. And, of course, I still don’t know everything about Olympia—not by a long way!