2026 Reading Challenges:

BOOK 01 : HUMAN ACTS BY HAN KANG
 
This year, you would like to try something different, I said to myself. I had always underestimated 'a year of reading challenges' because I would hate it if I gave myself a deadline for doing what I like, like reading a book, for example. It was merely because I didn't want to put pressure on myself. But I'd like to try something different, as I said, hence: Book 01 in 2026, Human Acts by Han Kang, translated into English from Korean by Deborah Smith. I picked up and bought Human Acts from this independent bookstore in Canggu Street, Bali, called Wonder Bookstore. I really like the place, it's relatively small but have great collection of international books. They also have a cafe area indoors and on the verandah, which looked so cozy.

Back to the book review. I feel like this was one of the fastest I finished a book. I read it in a week, and honestly, it would be faster without my 9-to-5 work every day. (I know some of you speed readers will mock me for telling you that a week is fast, but I usually finish a book in months, so pardon me, people)

 Human Acts is such a page-turner that I completely lose myself in the story. It's about the Gwangju Uprising, students' democratic movement against the martial law of the Chun Doo-Hwan regime in 1980. Coming from a country that experienced a similar historical event, these stories completely shatter my heart without even wanting to rebuild it.

The book is divided into seven chapters, each with a different first-person perspective. The boy, The boy's friend, The editor, The prisoner, The factory girl, The boy's mother, and The writer. The last chapter is a point of view from the author, Han Kang herself, whereas she cited documents from the real event, an interview with the victim's family, and learning through documentary or film about the Gwangju Uprising event as the source of facts on which she bases the book. 

I would say that I cried and was mad during my reading, I don't have a single laugh as I feel like the book itself avoid to being satirical. I was thinking that the worst kind of betrayal isn't from a partner or family, but one from your own country. Why? because I think it wasn't personal anymore. Whether you realize it or not, what you can and can't voice, how you live, how you got an education, what syllabus you learn, what you can afford to eat, to live, and to wear. All those aspects called for decent mental and physical well-being are ruled by the constitution in your country. If the system betrayed you, it crushed your bones, and you can say goodbye to living a decent life, to put it dramatically

(spoiler alert)

The Boy, 1980

In this first chapter, the dead and bereaved illustrate unapogetically, gritty and descriptive. When I read about a hundred corpses laying on the gymnasium room, waiting to be identified by families that come in and out for a check, how some of the corpses' conditions made it impossible to be recognized, I felt eerie. I love how unpretentious and non-sentimental this 'death' is pictured. This boy, Dong-Ho looking for his best friend in the university gymnasium building, where victims of police brutality are brought to and given a proper funeral by the civil militia. He lost his friend, Jeong-Ho, while both of them were protesting at the Gwangju city center. 

They accidentally split while the armies opened fire on the unarmed civil demonstrators. Not to mention snipers shooting anyone who wanted to save the wounded people from the tall buildings surrounding the city square. Driven by guilt of having left his friend unknown condition, Dong-Ho stays in the gymnasium, hoping Jeong-Ho will come as one of the wounded alive. But what he doesn't know is that his friend was dead and brought by the armies to some unknown location where the body was left to rot away and burn at last. (This was in the second chapter, The boy's friend)

What I remember the most about this chapter is when Dong-Ho describe about his deceased grandma as a reflection when he saw all the bodies in the box in the gymnasium hall.

"Her death was every bit as quiet and understated as she herself had been. Something seemed to flutter up from her face, like a bird escaping from her shuttered eyes above the oxygen mask. You stood there gaping at her wrinkled face, suddenly that of a corpse, and wondered where that fluttering, winged thing had disappeared to."

I had this paraghraph written in my journal. I once watched over how death comes and stopped my late father and grandma's breath. It's just a matter of seconds. Such a thin line between life and death.. for me, that paragraph pictures it beautifully.

My next favorite chapter is 'The Prisoner, 1990'

This chapter follows along this point of view of an ex-prisoner who was captured by the army towards the end of the Gwangju uprising. So the prisoner was once a civil militia group of young boys, organizing and protecting the demonstration around the city. They were kept in a cell where they would be tortured regularly. All torture is described in such graphic detail that it made my heart sink. I think it's been so long since the last time a book made me cry. I cried, especially while reading the part where all the prisoners are brought into the military law court, to be finally transferred anywhere else. While the court begins, they bow their head, and then suddenly one of the youngest kids, who was only fifteen and described as always stuttering whenever he speaks, singing the Korean national anthem. Despite being told that they have to be quiet and so much as squeak, they will be shot dead in their place. 

"I'd been bowing so low my chin was almost touching my chest, but that sound made me raise my head an inch, just enough so I could scan the rows in front. Someone was singing, though the sound was more like a stifled whimper. It was the opening bars of the national anthem. By the time I realized that the singer was young Yeong-chae, other voices had joined for the chorus. Almost in spite of myself, my own voice was drawn out of my throat."

The army let them finish the song- I cried on this part, the full version of the depiction is even more devastating. This is the chapter that pictures how deeply hurt you will be when your country, the one that you love, betrays you. But still, you sing the anthem so heartily anyway..

The Factory Girl has their own kind of horror. How the schoolgirl, barely even 20 years old, a union labor fighting for justice for their pay and work conditions, was punished for voicing their right and being called 'Red Bitch'. Red, I think, was in relation to communism, as a way of mocking them and labeling them as the enemy of the country. It just breaks my heart that some of the girls were shot to death while protesting. One of them is a girl with a dream to be a doctor; she took night classes and worked at the factory during the day.  

All the chapters and characters are woven together against the shared historical backdrop of the Gwangju Uprising. This felt like more than a novel—it read like a vessel of memory, carrying the voices of the victims and the bereaved. It was a passage through history, both riveting and painfully beautiful, lingering long after the final page. I give it a full 5 out of 5 stars for my first read of 2026; it has set the bar remarkably high.

See you in my next read!