Editorial Content for Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books

It might seem superfluous to most visitors of this website to recommend a book intended to encourage more reading. But regardless of how avid a book lover you may be, don’t pass on Hwang Bo-reum’s charming EVERY DAY I READ: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books. In addition to scores of practical tips to keep one’s reading fresh, it’s a subtle exploration of all the ways books can bring more meaning to our lives.

Originally published in her native Korea in 2021 and now translated by Shanna Tan, Hwang’s book comprises 53 essays, the longest barely four pages. In a style that’s both fresh and open, she has a range of sensible suggestions for an audience that includes both passionate and reluctant readers. Hwang offers ideas for overcoming the distraction of the internet while reading, how to fit reading into the small pockets of time that exist in even the busiest of lives, and numerous thoughtful options for how to choose one’s next read. She even channels her inner Marie Kondo with an entry on organizing a bookcase. (She recommends keeping no more than 500 books in one’s home to make that more practical, with “buy less, read more” as her motto.) She shares all of these thoughts in a gentle, inviting voice, without any hint of the dogmatism or didactic tone that sometimes mars books in this genre.

"[EVERY DAY I READ is] a book that deserves a prominent place on any reader’s bookshelf, to be pulled down for a bit of inspiration or insight wherever you may be on your reading journey."

For Hwang, who left a corporate job as a software engineer to write fiction (she’s published one novel in Korea), reading is an essential part of her identity and an important means of self-discovery. In reading novels, she says, “it’s as if I’m looking at my own life through the fictional characters. Our lives may be vastly different, but I see some parts of myself in their actions and words.”

Encouraging others to read with that same sensibility is a subtext that runs through many of the pieces, including ones with titles like “Read to Seek Answers,” “Read When You’re Happy, When You’re Anxious, and in the Moments in Between,” and “Read to Live the Life You Want.” Hwang, it seems, rarely encounters any text from which she’s unable to glean some scrap of meaning she can apply to her own life, urging readers to record favorite quotations as an effective way to preserve those insights.

Hwang’s pieces are seasoned with numerous book recommendations, both fiction and nonfiction. Some of her favorites --- which she calls the “guardian angels in my life” --- include Hermann Hesse’s DEMIAN, W. Somerset Maugham’s THE RAZOR’S EDGE, Henry David Thoreau’s WALDEN and Erich Fromm’s THE FEAR OF FREEDOM. Some preferences among contemporary authors include Paul Auster, Paul Harding and Geoff Dyer.

Lest one think that she’s pushing an elitist reading agenda, the book’s opening essay, “Read Bestsellers,” and another piece entitled “Read Classics” (in which she argues, in part, that “to read only classics carries the risk of being stuck in the time-space of the past and losing our way in the present”) should dispel that idea. Unfortunately, one of the book’s limitations is that a sizable number of the titles she promotes are by Korean authors and probably are inaccessible to Western readers.

The book’s final essay, “If Books Disappeared from the World,” takes as its touchstone Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451, a nightmare vision of a world in which books are incinerated and of the brave souls who fight for their preservation. She catalogs all that the world would be deprived of by their elimination and admits that her imagination fails at the prospect. “Until my last breath, I want to live my life reading, always,” she concludes.

EVERY DAY I READ easily can be consumed in a couple of hours, but it’s best savored in small bites (preferably with a pencil in hand to annotate it, as Hwang suggests). Better yet, it’s a book that deserves a prominent place on any reader’s bookshelf, to be pulled down for a bit of inspiration or insight wherever you may be on your reading journey.