I received this book from the publisher, Bloomsbury, at no cost. It’s out now.

(Translated from Korean by Shanna Tan.)

I am not the audience for this book. That’s the main thing I took away from reading it. Perhaps as importantly, I don’t know – and I’m not sure the book itself knows – who the audience actually would be.

Sometimes the book’s purpose seems to be to give readers a way into, or back to, sharing the author’s love of reading. A worthy goal, of course – but I question whether most people who are struggling to find time to read (or to see it as a worthwhile activity) would pick up a book about that activity. So I was confused by that aspect – and also, that is not a problem for me, thus: I am not the audience for this book.

Sometimes the book’s purpose seems to be celebrating the joy that is reading, and this is one that I fully get behind (obviously). But the slides into didacticism – here are reasons for why reading is good for you! – felt very off-putting in that context.

The book is at its best when the author presents a sort of book biography. The books that have made an impact on her life, the times reading has helped her cope with difficult times in her life, and so on. I did also like the way she points out what reading a variety of books – bestsellers and not, short and long, staying within your preferred topics and venturing further afield – can be like. And yet… it also felt a bit pretentious. Again, maybe that’s me and my personal hang-ups, and maybe I still feel defensive about my preferred genres. But almost every book mentioned was a “classic” and there aren’t many books that could be called recent (aside from Murakami… and see “classic”). Pretty much all of the fiction is realist. And then there’s the dismissal of ebooks, conflating “reading online” with “reading electronic books”. And yes, perhaps many people do consume ebooks differently from how they read paper books. But many of us don’t.

Anyway. As noted, this is not a book for me. I hope it finds an English-language audience; I just don’t know who they will be.