New Year Book Review

 On Reading, Korea, and the Long View

 

End of the year commentators are in agreement apparently that 2011 was, well, bad news all around and we are well to be rid of it. Much of this badmouthing arises from national or global events about which there is little room to argue, although many people have felt personal unhappiness as well. Some would just like life to get better; others have gone to the trouble of making resolutions to correct their woes.

While there are areas of my life that might well benefit from improvement, I am not making resolutions myself.  And while 2011 had its share of catastrophes, I can't say that it was worse on average than many other years. By December most of us have grown tired of what we have and we'd like a fresh start. 

For me personally, however, 2011 was actually a wonderful year, the highlight of which was spending 19 weeks in Busan, Republic of Korea. 

2011 was also a bumper year for reading books --  for me, at least. I finished the year at 57, a total that may not be a personal record but is certainly in the top two or three totals for any year since I have been keeping track.

For nearly forty years, I have recorded the books I read.  I note down, usually, title, author, genre, and the month I finished.  For a while I did not include books that I finished for a second or third time; but now I do.A second reading is not necessarily a faster reading, and I am by nearly any measure a slow reader.  Not a promising characteristic in an English teacher.

It took me a few years to establish the habit -- the habit of recording what I read, that is -- and I have modified the particulars from time to time. I typed the titles on 4x6 cards for a few years, for example, which I then stapled into the notebook, a modification that clearly involved too many unnecessary steps.

There are some notable gaps in my record keeping as well, especially when I was getting started. The gaps pain me a bit now because I would love to know what books I actually read during my college years.  Or during high school, when presumably I actually did read a few books from cover to cover.

My first entry is dated December 1973, the year I finished my Masters Degree and also the year I began teaching -- which means I have no record of what I would like to think of as extensive reading for my Masters program, nor of what I read as I struggled to learn how to teach during that painful first year. Both of these "missing" lists of titles might provide insight given where my interests have taken me.

The fact that I finished 57 books in 2011, a tid-bit of personal trivia, is largely unremarkable. There are many faster and more prolific readers around. Furthermore, any literary detective worth her salt could easily point out that 9 of these books were poetry, which, as we all know, are usually thin volumes with considerable white space. Another half dozen are short fictions translated from Korean, no more than 100 pages or so.  Admittedly, 57 is a misleading number.  Still . . .

If the number is notable at all, it is notable for two reasons.  The first is practical:  I have no more room in the notebook that I have used since 1973 to keep my yearly lists. [A footnote here that may be of interest: the notebook itself was rescued from a friend who was discarding it as "smoke damaged" after a fire ruined it.  Apparently, a bag of garbage in his entryway smoldered for several hours and filled that end of his house with heavy black smoke.  The notebook still carries smoke marks on its cover.]

In a way, not surprisingly, my book count embraced and benefited from my months in Korea. In addition to the short fictions mentioned above, by such writers as Gong JiYoung, Kim Dong-Ni, Ch'ae Man-shik, and Hwang Soon-Won, and the poetry of Kim Chiha,So Chong Ju, and Ku Sang, I found myself drawn into the work of Korean-American writers in a way I had not anticipated. Reading Chang-rae Lee in Korea, for example, illuminated his characters in a way that simple reflection would not have afforded.

Most of the Asian poetry and some of the fiction was given to me by our good friend Lee Joo-yub, who understood that I needed a systematic grounding in a literature that I had been randomly picking at. So my reading, and my four month immersion in Korean life, and one of the people who made our time not only possible and profitable, but also enjoyable came together nicely to make 2011 a very good year, all in all. 

With the new year, I have closed the old notebook, so to speak, and begin a new one.  I made my first entry this morning, so I am off to a good start for 2012. I don't expect to read 57 books this year, nor do I expect to keep making entries into the new notebook for the next 39 years.  But I will give it a shot anyway.