Kathy Hamilton Every Day I Read by Hwang Bo-Reum is a gentle, restorative book. If you’ve ever found yourself feeling disconnected, burnt out or distracted from books, this collection of essays offers a welcome reminder of why reading matters in the first place.
What Every Day I Read Is About
I picked up this book on a whim. Having loved her previous novel, Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop, I was excited to see another of her works translated into English. Unlike her novel, this is a collection of 53 essays written years earlier, offering an intimate glimpse into a reader’s life, the books she loves and the role they play and how they shape her as a person.
The structure of the essays is what really makes this book work. Each one is only three or four pages long, making it easy to dip in and out of whenever you have a spare moment. After a year of feeling disconnected from reading, after the birth of my first child, this book came along at exactly the right time for me. I found I could read a single essay in a quiet pocket of time and come away feeling as though I’d have a meaningful encounter with literature. In many ways, each essay served as a personal pep-talk!
There’s No Such Thing as the Wrong Book
Hwang Bo-Reum writes with an unguarded sincerity about reading. There’s no sense of performance, just musings from a person who loves books. She reflects on how to build a consistent reading habit. How to ensure you’re never without a book and why re-reading is as welcome as discovering new authors. Some essays feel contradictory: “read bestsellers” vs “don’t read bestsellers”, but this serves the larger goal of this book.
Instead of telling you what to read, she consistently reminds you that any book you enjoy reading is a good book. I often place unnecessary pressure on my reading life. I feel that I should be reading “important” novels. Ones that, more often than not, leave me feeling overwhelmed or guilty for not reading enough. This book gently challenged that mindset. It reminded me that there is no such thing as the “wrong” book. That our reading tastes can, and should, shift depending on where we are in life.
Every Day I Read: A Book for the Weary Reader
Inspired by one of the essays, I started placing books where I might logically find myself with time to read them. By my favourite armchair. On the bedside table. Even on my desk at work. I also downloaded the library app so I would always have something to hand on my phone.
The change was surprisingly effective. Reading became less of a task and more of a quiet, ongoing part of my daily life. At the time of writing, I’ve read more books this year than I did in the entirety of the last. More importantly, being reconnected with books has helped me rediscover the simple pleasure of it.
In Conclusion…
If there’s any limitation to Everyday I Read by Hwang Bo-Reum, it’s that the essays occasionally feel slight. Readers who look for a deeper meditation on reading or narrative complexity may find them too simple. But I think that it’s this simplicity that is the book’s strength. This book has encouraged me to widen the scope of my reading. To read because it’s fun. And to think of reading as a companion to life.
Ultimately, Everyday I Read is less about the books and more about the life you build around them. It’s a quiet and reassuring companion for anyone looking to reconnect with reading, not as a goal to achieve but as a habit to return to again and again. After all, what’s better than curling up with a good book at the end of a busy day?
If you’d like to read Every Day I Read by Hwang Bo-Reum, you can pick up a copy here(bookshop) or here (Amazon)
