Prologue: My life began on a bookshelf.

Part 1 Relationships and Love

A fight to connect without disconnecting | Declaration of Trace | Freedom comes with a cost | In the world of 'don'ts' | Green desire | The great study of love | Loose yet firm connections | Trivial hospitality | The bird that fell behind | My complete love story | The ethics of not writing | Wolf's wave | Kindness is a choice

Part 2: Wounds and Death

To my editor | A will to write for 100 years | Writing of resistance | Realization in the final years of parenting | Leaving familiar places | A life that does not harm | Her words, her songs | Weak but not weak | The countless pains of the world | Between compassion and consideration | A race ignorant of sorrow | Martial law of mourning | Fighting illness is everyone's business | One woman, many voices | Seeing my mother in Rome | A study method that is insanely delicious | Painted tears | I want to say 'yes'

Part 3: Prejudice and Inequality

Learning to live together | Reference materials for love | The certainty of ambiguity | Good enough parents | Democracy of the mind and emotions | A well-trained tool | The illusion of ability | Treating workers as workers | Rewriting the story | Our liberation journal | We need a hill to hide behind | Parents' meetings and book clubs | Inviting people to eat together

Part 4: Learning and Children

Picking up flowers in the morning and evening | You are always | A person who walks on his own two feet | Children are sleepy, teachers are in tears | Inquiries about handling potential perpetrators | Hands that serve and mouths that eat | Because the present is well | The saying that even the vested interests suffer | Words that destroy existence | What about other children? | To avoid rotting | People who do not reject others

Epilogue: A Treasure Map of Reading
Appendix List of Liberations

“The night I pick up a book is the time when thinking begins.
It is a time to restore one's existence, a time of transformation to become another self.

"Night of Liberation" explores a wide range of topics, including relationships and love, wounds and death, prejudice and inequality, learning and children, but the keyword that runs through them all is liberation.
The author says that books are an extension of the door to liberation.
Because becoming a reader is a path to freedom, breaking down fixed ideas and prejudices one by one.
Although enlightenment may bring confusion and conflict, once liberated, one cannot return to the days of ignorance and apathy.
'Reading for Liberation' made him realize that oppression and control exist everywhere in our lives, and that the liberation of others and his own liberation are closely connected, leading him to reading and learning for the freedom of all.


Why 'night'?
There are things that only become clear after the hustle and bustle of the day has passed and time has passed.
Eunyu, a new working mom, took advantage of the quiet of the night after a hard day's work to read at the dining table.
That night, the author read 'useless' books, not books to achieve her daytime goals, such as parenting or self-help books, and during that time, she was able to become a unique and anonymous being called by her own name, not 'someone's mother.'
The night, when I put down the day's work and pick up a book, becomes a time when thinking begins, a time to restore existence, a time of transformation to become a different self.

“Knowing that life has many paths is liberation.”
Metaphorical sentences that guide us to a better life

The author, who used to push a stroller to the library when she was a new working mom, now visits the library more often as a lecturer than as a borrower.
I glance at the people reading books in the reading room and think that's my seat, but I'm led to the very front center of the auditorium.
The questions he used to ask between the pillars of his books are now asked by readers.
How should I live?
What is a good life?
Where do we come from and where do we go?


Whenever he felt lost again in the face of big questions, he turned to his bookshelf again.
This book is also a belated, metaphorical response to readers, colleagues, and friends who have asked questions.
When a student who was taking a writing class with a baby complained, “Do I really have to go this far?”, she recommended Caroline Knapp’s “Desires” and gave him firm encouragement, saying, “When you feel like you have to go this far, you should go this far.” She also comforted a student who had been in a severe slump by quoting a verse by Rainer Kunze, “I know what it’s like / Not being able to keep up with others.”
In addition, the works of brilliant writers such as Woolf, Tolstoy, and Ernaux are conveyed through the author's characteristically thoughtful and touching prose.


Although the author expresses such deep affection, he does not deify or religious the book.
The author, who once put aside his love for books out of a sense that reading might not necessarily benefit life, also reveals the process of fighting with and against books in his life.
Using "The Antisocial Family" as a textbook, she declares to her children that she will "turn outside the family" and live alone. She also laments, upon reading Rebecca Solnit, whether she would have fought at home and at the dinner table if she had been a married woman with children. This reveals the process of her creating her own language by criticizing books with her own life.

"Night of Liberation" is a collection of reading notes, not a collection of reviews, written by one person about the books he or she has read.
The books mentioned in this book are far from a must-read list.
Books you stumble upon on the bookshelf, books you simply can't understand, books that don't fill your stomach or add to your specs, books that seem completely useless in a society where you're pressured to be useful all day long.
But it is said that only such books can save and revive a person from the rough and dry daily life.
It could also be said that it is not reading for the purpose of accumulating knowledge, but rather practical reading to solve life's problems.
I recommend 『Night of Liberation』 to those who often feel suffocated and wonder how they should live.


“I leave you with a ‘Treasure Map of Reading,’ a list of books and stories that have saved lives, at the top of your life.
“I earnestly hope that the books that saved me can save others as well.” (Page 359)