100 books like Korea

This book is, quite simply, the best introduction to modern Korean history. Like other similar books, it covers the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, but it also has a helpful chapter that gives an overview of Korea’s premodern history.

What really sets this book apart is its carefully chosen insights on key aspects of modern history that give readers a deeper understanding of current events in Korea.

The book is a pleasure to read thanks to the author’s engaging writing style; it also provides an intellectual thrill because of the author’s questioning of Western assumptions about Korea as well as about the Cold War.

It is fortunate that this book is among the growing number of Korean novels that have been translated into English. I think this is the best book at capturing the historical experience of Koreans in the twentieth century.

Cho Chong-Rae, one of South Korea’s foremost novelists, has a particular genius for depicting how the lives of complex and compelling characters were impacted by the turbulent events of Korean history.

The book is especially memorable because of its main character–a communist peasant who adopts a new identity during the Korean War and becomes a successful businessman in the South. By doing this, the novel shows that the division of the country is not just political but has also split the collective psyche of the Korean people.

Park Wan-suh is perhaps postwar fiction's foremost chronicler of women’s lives. Of the many translations of her novels and short stories, I think this book is the best to start with.

A mixture of autobiography with fictional and essay-like elements, it covers the first twenty years of her life, from her early years in the countryside outside the city of Gaeseong to her family’s move to Seoul and the outbreak of the Korean War.

There is much to learn about modern Korea from this unique generation of writers as they experienced life during the Japanese occupation, had clear memories of what Korea was like before its division, and directly witnessed the horrors of the Korean War.

This book is a true rarity. Written by the journalist Helen Foster Snow (using a pseudonym), it recorded the life story of a Korean communist working in the Chinese communist movement–the result of their chance encounter in Yan’an.

It provides an intimate view of his conversion to communism, his involvement in some of the major struggles between Chinese communists and nationalists, and his time in Chinese prisons. What emerges is a compelling portrait of an intelligent and well-read man who is open about his life and willing to be self-critical–a portrait that upsets many preconceptions of what a communist is like.

This is essential reading for understanding Korean communism and, by extension, the division of the country.

I didn’t even know that indentured servitude to the police could be a thing for young women. Sure, sure, we’re talking about another place, another era—1800s Korea—but the immediacy with which Hur tells this story puts it right there for me. 

She weaves exacting detail and information throughout this gripping mystery: If the premise didn’t already hook me, I’d be pulled in by the way this mystery rapidly turns personal for Seol, our heroine. 

I fall hard for novels about intense friendships and loyalty. I’ve never been to Korea, but it was easy for me to relate to the protagonist, Jung Yoon, whose personal growth is influenced by her study of European culture, much as my own immersion in Latin American culture continues to inform my life. 

Here again, a gap in most Americans’ knowledge gets filled in. Shin’s haunting and poetic novel offers a bracing account of the student protests in South Korea in the ’80s, with repression, deaths, and disappearances at the hands of the US-supported dictatorship. The politics are eye-opening, but just a backdrop to the characters’ pursuit of love, friendship, intellectual development, and the tender way they must mourn many other losses as they grow up and apart.

A couple of weeks before the 2018 Olympics opened in Pyeongchang, an unlikely women’s South Korean hockey team hastily took shape. Why unlikely? Its roster, bolstered with women of Korean descent from the United States and Canada, suddenly added players from North Korea. Like most sports books, this isn’t really about sports; it’s about identity, belonging, sisterhood, and culture. Miracles on ice can take many forms.

The Long Season of Rain (the title refers to the monsoons that afflict the Korean Peninsula at the start of summer) reminds us that in Hell Chosŏn women remain subservient to men in almost every sphere of society, and learn early on to endure silently instead of speaking out. This novel exemplifies the richness of Korean-American young-adult novels, which often focus on coming of age and the quest for identity. Especially poignant is the author’s use of a naïve narrator, the daughter of a woman who learns that her husband has taken a concubine.

I have stereo-typed Christian influence throughout history as mostly religious and for changing people’s eternal destiny.

My attitude has always been respectful but these historical accounts raised my eyebrows not only about how much one man can lift a nation without being a political leader, but it also made me reconsider what the Bible itself was commanding for “disciple the nations”.

It covers multiple men and multiple countries: India, China, Ireland, South Korea, Switzerland, and more. Uplifting to me, except the part about how much more they did than I ever will. Still incredibly inspiring.

Jenny Heijun Wills was born in South Korea and adopted by a white Canadian family. She not only had to navigate being Asian in a white world, but she also struggled to find her place within a family that sought to give her a safe home. In her twenties, she returned to Korea to meet her birth family. Told in diary form, Wills navigates her journey to find home while fighting language and cultural barriers. It is a raw and emotional story. It makes me think of my own struggles growing up in Detroit. The faces I saw at home were like my own but that also had its own set of problems.