If you want to start
Try it yourself
And of course we also have better conditions for self-study today than ever before.
We are so incredibly lucky in Norway that we have access to pretty much everything that exists, through free interlibrary loans. You just have to know that it exists.
1 · The ListBooks that aren't at the front of the shelfOlder children's books, operas, plays and film. All of it tried out on a ten-year-old. 
2 · The placesWhere to goWe are so incredibly lucky in Norway that we have access to pretty much everything that exists, through free interlibrary loans. 
3 · The methodKey episodes in historyI pick a few key episodes in history, and get into that moment as richly as I can. 
4 · PlaysHow to read a playJust trust that it comes together, and keep reading ;) 
5 · Interlibrary loanYou just have to know that it existsThey're always available through interlibrary loan, from all over Norway, incl. university libraries. 
6 · Cinema and stageOpera and theater at the cinemaIt means you get "the whole world to Hamar". 
7 · Parallel textIf you give me a parallel text, I will try to read the original languageThat's the rules. 
8 · First operaIt all started with Kirsten FlagstadA year ago I had never heard or seen an opera, and thought it was completely uninteresting.
Where to go
BokselskapMost classic Norwegian literature is out of copyright. Like Kinck, Ibsen etc. A lot is available as e-books on bokselskap.no. We're really lucky to have Norsk bokselskap, which makes some of this available as epub (e.g. Love Without Stockings). 
NasjonalbiblioteketAlways fun to search around on nb.no. I really love the digital archive, and looking at "what people said back then". You can check out the books on nb.no, which has scans of all kinds of things — for a lot of the older stuff I guess you'll be reading Fraktur there. But that's nice too! 
KulturbaseA site where I'm trying to make Fjernsynsteater, along with programs about artists, and eventually also opera/ballet/symphony much more accessible. It also links to the text of the plays where they exist, Sceneweb, etc. I made this one myself. 
Met Opera on DemandA paid service that I pay for with the greatest of pleasure — they have many hundreds of operas available in high quality, and I love how elaborate the sets and costumes are, with tens/hundreds of actors on stage. 
National Theatre at HomeI would very highly recommend a subscription to National Theatre at Home. Suddenly I'm watching three different productions of Macbeth, reading the text of the play, listening to podcasts about it. 
Opera til folketCheck out operatilfolket.no, and also operaen.no — lots of events for kids, free previews of operas etc. 
The Catherine ProjectA totally fantastic initiative that offers reading circles and tutorials around classic and more modern texts completely free. I took a seminar on the Iliad — led by someone who normally teaches at Stanford. Unfortunately a lot of the times don't work very well from Norway. 
Fredheim / WergelandakademietKeep an eye on Ingeborg Refling Hagen's cultural center Fredheim for more events. Readings, seminars and a summer culture camp at Tangen. 
OperaVisionSince then I've seen a lot of opera in recordings, through Arte, Operavision, and Met Opera... There's an incredible amount of good full-length opera recordings on Youtube, incl. some funded through an EU project. My very first opera was The Barber of Seville in a great production from the Stockholm opera, on OperaVision's channel. 
Arte Concert 
Hamar Kino: KinoSceneOne thing that especially interests me is KinoScene — the fact that you can see opera, theater and classical concerts at the cinema. It means you get "the whole world to Hamar", and you get a completely different experience than at home in the living room. The more people are interested, the more the cinema will put on. By buying a ticket you "vote" for us getting more culture at Hamar Kino! 
Koigen HamarI've made an activity site for Hamar and the surrounding area that tries to catch everything that's going on, and present it in an appealing way. We have our own kids' section. There I automatically link to the archive when it's relevant. There's no contradiction between stage performance and stage on TV, quite the opposite!
A place to start: the Odyssey
Once you start reading the Iliad and the Odyssey it's incredible how many classic and modern works you find references to them in. A really good way to start for people who have never tried to read it is Pollestad's prose translation of the Odyssey, read alongside Daniel Mendelsohn's book An Odyssey... Daniel is a classics professor, and one day his old father decides to join his seminar on the Odyssey... they end up taking a cruise in the Mediterranean that follows the route of the Odyssey just before the father dies. A fantastically warm book about family and relationships, and about teaching, which gives you a lot of aha moments about the Odyssey itself too.
There's also an exciting book — Return to Ithaca by Eyvind Johnson, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. This is a retelling of the Odyssey that came out in 1946, and what marks it is that it goes deep into the psychology of the war hero Odysseus, the difficult homecoming, the relationship to old age, family, informed by World War II. (All the books are at the library).
With kids
Just started reading the Odyssey (an adaptation) to my son over the breakfast table... while I read Pollestad's translation myself.
Everything that's listed on The List I have actually read with my son (some of it I've read the whole book out loud, more often I read a bit out loud and he keeps reading on his own). We start by reading out loud, and then the book gets taken along and read further.
Theater works well for reading out loud, with some dynamic use of your voice etc. It also works great for retelling — I've retold a lot of plays while we've been walking in the woods (easier than retelling a novel!).
Two things people don't know they have
We're so lucky that we actually have access to all these books — sometimes they're in the stacks, they're always available through interlibrary loan, from all over Norway, incl. university libraries. But you have to know that they exist!
Here in Hamar they have heaps of books at the recycling station for 1 krone each, in just a couple of months I've managed to build an almost complete collection of older Norwegian literature — Ibsen, Kielland, Bjørnson etc etc. So not being able to afford books is at least no longer an excuse for not having books at home... (Unfortunately this is because so many people are getting rid of their bookshelves altogether to have "clean design" etc).