Dick Harrison on his difficult childhood

Dick Harrison was a voracious reader as a child. His parents saw that appetite for books not as a gift, but as a danger. In his new book, “Forbidden to Read,” Sweden’s best-known history professor describes growing up in an ordinary suburban neighborhood in the 1970s, amid family conflict and restrictions on what he could read.

The limits began with rationing. When Harrison reached primary-school age, his parents allowed him to read only what he needed for his schoolwork. After they found him with a large collection of Icelandic sagas, they banned everything else. Harrison says his parents feared that reading too many books could make him “medically defined crazy” and lead to confinement in a psychiatric hospital.

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All I was not required to read had to be forbidden.

He read in secret. When his father caught him, he beat him. Harrison was also bullied at school in Staffanstorp, in Skåne. Asked whether writing about those experiences had been painful, he said the pain had faded after decades of processing it. He is now 60.

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My parents were convinced that if you read too many books, you risked going crazy.

Harrison describes the book as a combination of autobiography and a polemic on the importance of reading and education. It began with an article he wrote for Svenska Dagbladet’s culture section about being forced to read secretly as a child. Readers who recognized their own experiences urged him to turn the article into a book.

He says many parents continued to fear that their children would become overeducated through reading until late in the 20th century. In his account, the belief in dangerous reading emerged during the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, as public libraries and bookshops expanded and books became widely available. The supplied article ends as Harrison continues explaining that mass reading was a new social experience.

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It is clear that they wanted what was best for me. My mother thought she was doing the right thing, and she meant well. But I do not think it was right for my father to hit me to drive this home.