[Opinion] Reading Holiday

At least students in the 1970s were not as busy as the ones today who have tutorials even during vacation. Those who were regarded as great readers at that time used to read fine pieces of juvenile stories during the elementary school days and superior pieces of novels and classics from home and abroad on vacation during their middle and high school days. The one or two month-long vacation was not long enough to finish a complete collection of 50 to 100 books. These were the days when finishing a certain difficult book became a source of pride and the premature reading by girls made similar-aged boys feel inferior.

One respected teacher said that during every vacation he took when he was young, he poured over classics both of Western and Eastern descent at his home in the countryside. After stately spreading a folding screen in the middle of a room, he read behind it all day long, starting from early morning and on. Readings from those days might be a source of his overwhelming teaching power to students, with his profound knowledge in various fields despite being over 70 years old. I wish to achieve only half of the amount of books and writings that he has read, but I cannot even catch up to him a bit despite spending 30 years on it.

Great kings of all ages and countries loved books. King Sejong executed a system for providing a reading holiday for the refreshment of young scholars called “Sagadokseo” and sent scholars such as Seong Sam-mun and Park Paeng-nyeon to a temple to make them read. The cost needed for reading was defrayed out of the national treasury, and scholars were encouraged to read by receiving food on such an occasion. England’s Queen Victoria granted a one-month paid reading holiday every three years to high officials. This “Shakespeare vacation” led to the submission of impressions of roughly five books after closely reading Shakespeare’s works. Fortunately, it is said that President Roh Moo-hyun is on vacation at his official residence with a prose collection of Park Ji-won, whose pen name is Yeon-am, and a translated book suggesting a vision of policy and an alternative plan.

It is impossible to find joy in reading by only completing three or four bestsellers a year and turning the pages of a few free newspapers and magazines. It has been common knowledge among bookstores for a long time that the best season for reading is vacation and holidays, not autumn in which there are lots of fun activities and food. It would be the best holiday to read through books that you have always wanted to read and to be determined to finish at least one book per day in a valley or at a mountain temple. In addition, it is more effective to read a collection rather than a separate volume, and to concentrate on books classified by writers and fields rather than random reading.

Editorial writer, Oh Myung-cheol oscar@donga.com