This will be the first book I’ll cover in a series that will look at the wealth of material available for free at Google Books.

Korea and Her Neighbors by Isabella Lucy Bird

This book will be familiar to many readers in the K-blogs.

It is one of the better known books about Korea prior to the modern era.  Written in the once popular travelogue style, it is very readable.

A quick look for some bio information on the author turned up this Wikipedia entry.

The author did an amazing amount of traveling around the world – especially for that time period – but  like Mark Twain – this style of excursion coupled with descriptive letters published in magazines and compiled for books was popular before mass transportation made the world smaller– this book is an example of a world in which backwoods dimwits like myself could never dream of hopping on a jet plane to fly halfway around the world to teach English for a few years — or — stop over for a week to visit your wife’s family.

The bio entry shows that the book on her Korea travels happened near the end of her life – which would tend to mean the book displays her at her best after years of polishing the craft.  It is a very readable book.

For people interested in Korea, Korean history, and traditional culture, it is well worth a look.  The detailed descriptions of Korean society in the early days of the 20th Century paint a picture of everyday life throughout the nation as the author travels across it.

The Korea described is one hard to imagine for many of us who have only known it firsthand from experience after the industrial revolution fundamentally altered the living conditions for the whole society.  Most of us know a South Korea teeming with skyscrapers, subways, heavy traffic, a plethora of taxis and buses and passenger trains crisscrossing everywhere.  That isn’t the world this book describes.  Far, far from it…

(It might be interesting if we could compare North Korea (outside of Pyongyang) with what this lady describes…)

This is Korea before the Korean War and before colonization.

The Japanese were just in the process of gaining full control.  It has been some time since I read the book, but I believe it is just before the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 that cemented Tokyo’s hold on Korea.

But, the Korea of this era was already in deep throes of despair.  Its long period of self-isolation had been torn apart just a couple of decades prior to the time of the book.  One war for it had already been fought on Korean soil by Japan and China.

The Korea of this era was poor and in peril — which is another reason why a travelogue written by a competent writer and storyteller is worth reading…

The book also has some wonderful illustrations and photographs of early 20th century Korea.  Even if you don’t read the book, you should go over to google books and look at the illustration list and take a gander at them.

Now a note on Google Books:  if you like to read and like history, this is an amazing source.  Material printed before about 1925 is available for free.  Large college and national libraries around the world have been archiving these books on the internet.

It’s a treasure trove…

For example, if you’re interested in Asian philosophy, you can read the translation of the Confucian classics by James Legge.  A fairly well-known scholar on Neo-Confucianism I had the chance to attend classes under said Legge’s work is still probably the best translation of the works to date – and you can read them for free online.

Whatever topic — prior to the middle of the 20th Century — you’d like to read about — you can find it at Google Books….   I’ve recently been looking up best sellers in fiction from the turn of the century….