Read Your Way Through Helsinki

Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books.

Finns love to read: It’s their favorite thing to do in their time off. The country is a little smaller than Montana, but its library network is extensive, with hundreds of central libraries, branch libraries and mobile libraries.

I was two years old when my family, forced to flee the Yugoslav Wars, found refuge in Finland. We settled in Porvoo, a small city of around 50,000 people about an hour away from the capital, Helsinki. Picturesque and popular with tourists, Porvoo is a medieval town known for its old buildings, wooden houses and 15th-century cathedral.

One thing it didn’t have were books in my family’s language — my first language, Albanian. I can’t say that I was ever encouraged to pick up a book. We didn’t do that in my family. But once I learned how to read Finnish, I never stopped, becoming both an oddball in our household and a frequent sight at the small school library.

I was 10 years old when the new building of the main library of Porvoo opened its doors to the public. When I visited for the first time, I was so in awe that I cried. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen: endless shelves carrying tens of thousands of books, records, movies, magazines and newspapers. And the best part was that everything was free. I couldn’t understand how that was possible. All these books, these worlds, this information — free of charge? Really?

I rarely, however, borrowed a book, and if I did, I kept it hidden. To this day, I don’t know why that was, exactly — why it felt wrong and scary somehow to bring books home with me. Maybe I wanted to keep books to myself, a secret of some kind. Or perhaps I was just scared that something would happen to the books if they were somewhere they didn’t seem to belong. But unlike the real world, books never distressed me — even crime, horror and thriller titles — and I read everything. I would pick up a book from the shelf, sit down at a table, read, then return the book to its place and continue the next day from where I’d left off.

The war in Kosovo in the 1990s made our family home rather anxious, so I spent as much time as I could away from it, in the new library — falling in love with books and stories and the Finnish language; gaining confidence as a speaker and as a child of immigrant parents; and dreaming of writing a book of my own one day, slowly growing from a reader to a writer.