Let's make good book friends and be friendly

Let's make good book friends and be friendly

Let's go out with books

Sit down and read correctly

Your hearts are straight

Straighten your body, too

 

These are the lyrics of a song in a music textbook when I was in the third grade of elementary school. They are telling me how to read.

 

I lived with a lot of help from reading. I have read a wide range of books related to health, geography, economics, history, philosophy, and religion, but not many have read more than three times over. I was afraid that the book, no matter how good the book was, would restrict the direction of my life. People say they are scared of someone who has read a book, but I didn't want to be that scary person.

 

The reading style of Lincoln and Mao Zedong illustrates how much reading direction affects humans. When I discovered later that President Xi Jinping was using Mao as a role model, I was very surprised and mentioned Mao Zedong's reading style several times in my column.

 

Like me, artificial intelligence knew Mao Zedong's 'Chinese-style reading style'. Mao Zedong's reading, which has intimate phrases related to power or authority, such as conquest and emperor, is related to today's Chinese atmosphere. It is important to realize that freedom of thought through reading is not the way to foster dissidents, but the way to make wise people.

Two Paths of Reading

Lincoln, Mao, and Korea's Reading Deficit

1. Two Kinds of Voracious Readers

Abraham Lincoln and Mao Zedong were both lifelong, voracious readers. Yet under the same label of 'avid reader,' their characters grew in opposite directions. One became a leader who made the epoch-defining decision to abolish slavery and preserve a union. The other became an absolute ruler whose Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution cost tens of millions of lives. The difference lies not in how much each man read, but in what.

Lincoln — The Collision of Unlike Things

Lincoln's formal schooling amounted to less than a year in total. As the U.S. National Park Service records, he recalled acquiring his education "by littles." On the Kentucky and Indiana frontier, schools were scarce and often closed for months at a time. Lincoln's real teachers were the books he borrowed.

His reading list was not a deliberately designed curriculum but an omnivorous accumulation of whatever came within reach: the Bible, Aesop's Fables, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, a biography of George Washington, Shakespeare, English history, and eventually the law books he needed to become an attorney. These texts came from different eras, different genres, and different worldviews. Scripture taught humility and human finitude; Shakespeare taught the contradictions of power and human nature; law books taught logical rigor. This friction between unlike texts kept Lincoln from surrendering completely to any single system of thought.

In a letter of advice to a young man reading for the law, Lincoln summarized his method plainly: books and the capacity to understand them matter more than a teacher or a place. He himself had studied law alone in New Salem, a village of fewer than three hundred people.

Mao — Immersion in a Single Narrative

Mao Zedong was also, from childhood, what biographers call a voracious reader. Growing up in a small village in Hunan, he was especially drawn to historical novels of rebellion and unconventional military heroes. But unlike Lincoln, his reading narrowed around a single axis: Chinese dynastic history, above all the Twenty-Four Histories, beginning with Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian.

After founding the People's Republic, the edition of the Twenty-Four Histories Mao wanted for his study was not just any copy. According to an account published by Vision Times, when his secretary brought him a Republican-era printing, Mao waved it away, saying he would rather read an edition printed under the Qianlong Emperor than one printed by the Kuomintang. He specifically sought out the Qianlong-era edition once kept in the Forbidden City's Hall of Martial Valor — not merely the text, but the very object once possessed by an emperor.

Biographical accounts describe Mao as developing, from a young age, an admiration for the strong emperors of earlier Chinese history. The texts he returned to again and again shared, without exception, the same narrative structure: a figure receiving the Mandate of Heaven to unify the realm. Absorbing one narrative repeatedly, without encountering other civilizations' thought or contrasting worldviews, left only one framework for self-understanding available from the text — the question of whether one is the next protagonist of that same story. The volume of reading was vast; its diversity was not. His worldview came to replicate the structure of the text itself.

2. The Psychology of a Narrow Diet

Placing the two cases side by side reveals a single principle: the benefit of reading comes not from how much one reads, but from how different the things read are from one another. Juxtaposing unlike texts forces a reader to continually re-examine his own first convictions. Repeating texts that share the same narrative structure, however vast the total volume, instead hardens conviction without ever subjecting it to verification.

This is where the idea meets a concept the author has developed in earlier columns: 'verification-exempt conviction.' Politicians, religious leaders, and authoritarian rulers alike share an epistemic trait — they treat their own beliefs as complete without any external system of contrast. A narrow reading diet is, in effect, a private rehearsal of that same verification-exempt state.

3. Korea's Chronic Reading Deficit

Applied to Korean society, the problem is more than a statistic about how few books Koreans read. The real problem is that Korea's reading culture itself is built on the repeated study of texts with predetermined correct answers.

Twelve years of primary and secondary schooling, followed by preparation for national examinations such as the bar exam or the civil-service exam, institutionalizes, at national scale, the same reading pattern Mao practiced. Memorizing a fixed set of past exam questions, textbooks, and prep books traps the learner inside a single narrative oriented toward conquering the exam — Korea's own version of 'unifying the realm.' Literature, religion, and the thought of other civilizations outside that narrative are treated as time wasted on material that will not appear on the test.

It is therefore unsurprising that adults formed this way keep avoiding books even after finishing school or exam preparation. Reading has already been imprinted as drudgery for memorizing correct answers, and the chance to experience voluntary, omnivorous reading — reading in Lincoln's sense — was foreclosed during the very years when it mattered most. The result is a citizenry that goes through adult life without encountering the unlike texts that might force it to re-examine its own convictions — precisely the structural soil, as the author has argued elsewhere, in which verification-exempt conviction and demagoguery take root.

4. What Proper Reading Means

The conclusion is simple. Proper reading is not reading more; it is reading differently. Reading deliberately sought out to collide with one's own field, one's own convictions, one's own camp is what puts a reader on the path Lincoln walked. Repeating a single narrative, a single system of correct answers, however vast the volume, is what converges instead on the path Mao walked.

What Korean society needs now is not more reading, but reading that collides with itself. That is the definition of proper reading this essay proposes.

 

참고자료 / Sources

Abraham Lincoln "Learning by Littles." U.S. National Park Service.

The Education of Lincoln. Monmouth College News & Events (interview with Prof. Valerie Deisinger).

The Self-Education of Abraham Lincoln: 3 Lessons on Reading and Study. Knowledge Lust / Samuel Rinko.

How Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong Handled a Treasured Edition of Ancient China's 'Twenty-Four Histories.' Vision Times, 2024.

Mao Zedong: Biographical and Political Profile. Columbia University Asia for Educators (AFE).

Mao Zedong. Wikipedia.