Iโm very excited to be starting this thread for our inaugural Natively Korean book club!
As per our poll results in the interest thread, this club will be broadly โfictionโ themed and we will be taking nominations from any genre as long as it is a full length work of fiction. That means mystery, thriller, young adult, general fiction, sci-fi, short story collections, etc. โ all are accepted!
Will you be joining?
Yes
No
Iโm not sure
0voters
Iโve taken some inspiration from the existing Japanese threads for the nomination method and thread format. So, just like the Japanese club threads, you can also find a template for making a nomination below and the nominations section will be updated accordingly as they are submitted so we have an overview of current nominations.
For now Iโd say we can leave nominations open until October 7th to give our Korean learning community a chance to find this thread and make a selection, and then we can vote after that!
I look forward to reading and learning together!
Nomination template:
Simply copy and paste the below text (not quote) into a reply to nominate!
**Book**: Put a Natively link here!
**Genre**: provide genre if it's clearly stated (mystery/horror/sf/etc), otherwise "general fiction" is fine, or leave blank
**Length**: number of pages, and number of volumes if applicable
**Is there an ebook available?**: yes or no (buying options are visible on the Natively book page)
[details="Summary - Korean"]
you can copy/paste this from wherever you'd like. Please have it in a drop down like shown.
[/details]
[details="Summary - English"]
Optional! Chuck the above summary into DeepL, Google Translate, or the like. Or remove this section.
[/details]
[details="Content warnings if known"]
You can't be expected to know all the content of a book you haven't read yet, but if you know it deals with specific heavy topics, or the author is known for doing so, please include it here.
[/details]
**Why are you nominating this book:** This section is optional, but it's nice to know why someone else is interested in reading a book, and might sway others to vote for it!
Iโve updated it now! Thought I had set it to public the first time but it seems like something went wrong. Bear with me as I get this thread set up since Iโm not the most savvy discourse user.
Book: (ํ์ธํธ | L31) Genre: young adult fiction Length: 204 pages Is there an ebook available?: Yes - the ebook should be available on most Korean ebook platforms and is also available on Google books.
Taken directly from Papago so apologies for how awkward the translation is!
โIโll start the parent interview.โ
The era of choosing parents,
The future colored by my own hands
Through โPaint,โ writer Lee Hee-young demonstrates the provocative imagination that everyone would have had at least once. It depicts a future society where a โcustodial communityโ that raises children by establishing a center in the country is realized, and a unique landscape in which teenagers choose after interviewing their parents in person. Good parents are a masterpiece that asks what family means from the perspective of adolescents.
Why are you nominating this book:
Iโm nominating this book for several reasons:
Itโs for younger audiences so it should hopefully be an approachable first read for the book club
It has a short length at just over 200 pages
There is an audiobook available on Google books for anyone who wants to get some listening practice alongside reading
This is so funny. I was actually thinking about nominating this book. I found a blog that mentoned the book and it seems really interesting. https://speechling.com/blog/the-5-best-korean-ya-books-for-studying-korea/ This should give a bit more information on what the book is about. Iโm personally around high beginner/ low beginner so Iโm not sure if Iโll be able to read it though I might try it out.
That is a very funny coincidence! And thank you for sharing that link! The summary there is much better than the one on the bookโs Yes24 page that I included in my nomination.
If you end up deciding to try it out, we would be glad to have you! You are also more than welcome to come with any questions about the language. I donโt think we have too many advanced Korean readers on the site (?) so the book club will be a place for us to help each other out and learn together in addition to chatting about books.
This has been on my Google Play wish list for a while, having an audiobook available is a big plus!
I thought GP would auto-populate links for audiobooks, but I guess not. Iโll have to start adding themโฆ
The whimsically-titled Wizardโs Bakery was going to be one of my picks, but then I noticed the content warnings on namu wiki: โschool violence, suicide, child abuse, murder, arson, child sex crimes, rape, dating violence, etcโโฆ
This is the first young adult novel by Kim Eun-young, who has met readers through her childrenโs books, and adds a warm and touching story to the lives of blind people in history. Fifteen-year-old Jang-man, who lost his sight at an early age due to an illness; his younger brother, Duk-soo, who takes care of him while also taking care of the household; and their father, who fills the void left by their motherโs death. The three of them leave their hardscrabble hometown and settle in Hanyang, a city with better conditions.
But life in Hanyang is not easy. Jang-man feels sorry for his younger brother, who is always cheerful and energetic, and he is always unhappy that he is blind. The only thing he can do is weave straw shoes, and he canโt go out to earn money or find a job. Deok-soo, who knows his brotherโs heart, takes him to a government job he stumbles upon. However, a fire breaks out there, and itโs the fire that gets his brother in trouble. โฆ
Content warnings
Given the subject matter, I assume ableism rears its ugly head.
Why are you nominating this book: The premise of a young, visually-impaired boy finding his place in the world, set against the backdrop of historic Seoul sounds really interesting! Iโd like to read a historical novel, and being YA means it (hopefully) wonโt be too challenging.
One day, two people who died suddenly, meet Seo-ho just before crossing the river of oblivion. He returns to the neighborhood where he lived by changing the time of forty-nine days and a sip of hot blood that has not yet cooled down. But they are not who they used to be, and they canโt walk around outside. The man who was a hotel chef and Do-young spend forty-nine days running a Gumiho restaurant, and the man promotes the โCream Malangโ menu on SNS and waits for someone he must meet. Doyoung, who thought there was no reason to live another forty-nine days, thought he was lonely and unhappy, but he faced the truth that he almost fell without knowing. An exciting story that cannot be missed for a moment continues until the end.
This one is way too hard for me and I probably shouldnโt nominate something I canโt read together with the book club. But itโs on my wish list. The premise seems really interesting so I thought you guys might be interested. If I could somehow figure out how to get it set up so I can use yomi Chan and read with a pop up dictionary, Iโll try to read it too.
Thatโs a good question! Iโve set up a poll below to see how everyone feels about multiple nominations starting out here.
Regarding accepted submissions, the intro post has some guidelines:
we will be taking nominations from any genre as long as it is a full length work of fiction
This is flexible and open for interpretation so if you find a full length work of fiction thatโs also suitable for beginners thatโs cool and we can add it to the nominations! Due to the nature of it needing to be โfull lengthโ though, a lot of nominations may skew more towards intermediate and above it that makes sense. This is the first Korean book club on natively so I left the criteria wide so we can get more participants, but if there is a lot of appetite for a specifically beginners club then it could be set up.
Should we allow multiple nominations?
Yes
No
0voters
If multiple nominations are allowed, how many should be accepted per person?
Thanks for submitting this! It also looks like a fun read (maybe I will just add this to by TBR list myself)!
In terms of a pop up dictionary, I donโt know if there is any mouseover one for Korean like Japanese has with yomi chan (the โtechโ for Korean learners is, unfortunately, less advanced than it is for Japanese), but the ebook reading app โRIDI booksโ has a pop up dictionary built into it that lets you look up Korean words in English or your language of choice on the go. Google books also has google translate built in, so you can use machine translation on both words and longer phrases. Those are both tools Iโve used to help me read from a beginner level 'til now!
Book club admin note: Iโve now created a table with the nominations so far on the home post!
(์๋ฝ | L27)์๋ฆฌ๋ฅผ ๋ณด๋ ์๋ sounds really cool, if the book club doesnโt end up using it Iโll probably just end up reading it anyway (so thanks Biblio for sharing it lol)
Hereโs my suggestion though:
Book: [์๋ฝ | L27] Genre: family-centred story Length: 160 Pages Is there an ebook avaliable?: Yes - this can be accessed through Natively.
Why are you nominating this book: This was one of the first novels I ever read in Korean, and is still my favourite. It ignited my obsession with reading in Korean, despite my lower comprehension in the book. The book is super short, at only 23k words (at 100wpm thats just under 4 hours, and at 200 wpm thats just under 2 hours (excluding time you may look up words)), and uses a super condensed amount of words - 4k unique - that isnโt super obscure. So I believe itโs a pretty good entryway into adult fiction.
Below are the frequency of words (using a frequency list based of dramas) for anyone interested
5 stars - first 1.5k most common words
4 stars - 1.5k - 5k most common words
3 stars - 5k - 15k most common words
2 stars - 15k - 30k most common words
Thanks for the nomination! That looks super interesting and I might end up reading that if it doesnโt get chosen (along with all the other nominations- they all look great
)!
The breakdown of word frequency is also cool! How did you get the data for that?
There are Korean dictionaries available for Yomichan (if you also use it for Japanese) or Yomichan for Korean (de-inflects Korean verbs; conflicts with original Yomichan). Thereโs also Toktogi for Chrome.
Seems like all our wish lists are growingโฆ So many great suggestions!
