Nothing to Envy  Nothing to Envy  Posted 1.19.12  Barbara Demick
Sylvia Lee   Baltimore, MD United States  “My reading habits
this past year have been all over the map—a lot of nonfiction
and fiction, mostly contemporary. I tend to choose what to read
based on what I stumble upon through excerpts, National Public
Radio, random finds via Kindle selections, that sort of thing.
In doing so, I realized that the actual journey in finding
something good to read is what I like best about reading. I came
across Nothing to Envy (Spiegel & Grau, 2009) by Barbara Demick
as I was randomly flipping through an old issue of the New
Yorker (or was it the Paris Review—I can't remember); it
contained an excerpt, which immediately caught my attention not
in the least because I am Korean but also because the stories
were so riveting. The book quickly became my favorite because it
gives voice to so many North Koreans whose political status
often takes focus. Most ‘outsiders’ have a gross curiosity about
North Korea and its citize