Our little booklist

Embarrassingly, we've still seen very little of this city and its surrounds.  Our excuse: Kyobo Books has a great foreign language section with all the classics discounted by 50 percent!  (Ok, that and the fact that we'll be paying down some student debts for a while yet.)  In the first months, we were looking for anything cheap to pass the time, and have since filled a small shelf with books that one or both of us have read.  It's been a nice change to read fiction and although it will be good to have kept up our reading level, I expect that it will still be difficult to return to school and its tedious non-fiction next September ... or later.

For a while in August I thought that I might pursue an MA in postcolonial English lit, so I burned through Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Toni Morrison's Beloved.  The further I get from John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, the weaker my interest in religious symbols in literature becomes.  Yes, dad, your prediction was right again: Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis, remains unfinished.  I also finished my second book by Zadie Smith - this one the Booker Prize winner of 2005 - a satire called On Beauty.  Hilarious, although I've loaned out the book to other teachers and those who read her first novel, White Teeth, about Indian immigrants to England, preferred it to her later works.  I'm currently reading a collection of short stories Smith edited for 826 New York City (a group supporting young writers) but have not been further than five minutes south of The School. 

Jon, as you know, is a voracious reader who I can't possibly keep up with.  He's finished Australian Peter Kocan's semi-autobiographical Fresh Fields, John Hersey's Hiroshima, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (and has both Ulysses and Dubliners on the backburner), Goethe's Flight to Italy, and Huxley's Brave New World (again).  Now, thanks to grandparents John and Betty Frost, he's onto David Halberstam's popular history The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.

Our California theme persists: both Jon and I have read John Steinbeck's Cannery Row; Jon has read more Steinbeck than myself, and polished off East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath within the first two months of our arrival.  I have yet to read a full book on Korea (unless our travel guide counts?).

So, I guess this is what university has given back so far: a degree to come over here and teach, and the ability to read at a good clip.  What are we foregoing?  Apart from July's mud festival (during which an even mix of Koreans and foreigners slather themselves in 'wellness' mud), I don't think we're missing too much that we can't see during our later months.  Museum exhibits don't seem to change too frequently here.  We've got a list of festivals happening each month that our work schedule precludes us from visiting anyways.  We don't have much time for a trip out of the country now that classes have been pushed back into October and we've lost two days of manager-created 'vacation'. And I don't expect the mountains to go missing.  

All this reading has kept us from another common foreigner pitfall: drinking, be it in Korea or while traveling to smaller islands or countries on long weekends for a pint on a beach or on a mountain top.  Heck, a blogger working for The Walrus even got paid for writing about the drinking culture among foreigners in South Korea.  (In fact, he's getting paid to write a blog about Korea not dissimilar to our own, albeit a little more political, while teaching kids on Jeju Island, Korea's subtropical paradise.  The NYT also did a story on corporate binge drinking among Koreans.  So, maybe the best way to experience Korean culture is to shoot back a few bottles of soju and bear my soul to our coworkers in order to 'bond' and improve morale at work?

Or I could read a classic and remember it the next day.

Hm.  Tough call.