A Book a Day: Banned Book Club

[caitri]

 I haven't done one of these in a while, because real life is crazy right now. But when I can, I'm sharing images of books I like! I recently picked up and devoured this graphic novel memoir of a "Banned Book Club" in 1983 South Korea. That was the period of the country's dictatorial Fifth Republic prior to democratization. I got this book somehow expecting something like Reading Lolita in Tehran, and instead got a story of college students coming to their own reckoning with a government that is directly controlling what information they have access to. Amongst other things, the editor of the student newspaper has regular meetings with a censor who chooses what can and can't be published; students smuggle video tapes of BBC news recordings to contrast with the news they actually get (and this is how they find out about the Gwangju Uprising, a student protest that was violently put down and whose death toll is still unknown today, but probably numbered around 2000; also, the students in the book are told this was a North Korean thwarted invasion instead); and student protestors are regularly arrested and beaten by the police regardless of their actions. Obviously, this speaks a lot to me right now. The art isn't great, and the writing is uneven, but in general this was a really interesting book to read at this specific moment, and kind of comforting in a way. People don't give up, no matter how much oppressive governments want them to. That's worth remembering.