My Holiday in North Korea

It was ok, I'd recommend if you are very interested in North Korea and enjoy travel books. It is very short and contains a lot of pictures, so should be a fast read. Lots of interesting tidbits about North Korean life, like people aren't allowed to own cars, that they have to bow at every statues of the great Kims.

I wish she had gone into why she wanted to vacation there, and the details of how she went about setting up the trip. I'm assuming you can't just get on Expedia and book a tour, but who knows, maybe it's that easy. She does go into why she enjoys traveling in general, and her comparisons to other trips and North Korea were heartfelt, she writes about how hard it was to connect with anyone when both parties are so carefully watching their words. I wish she had written more about herself personally too. I know she lives in New York, is a vegetarian, likes to travel, that's about it.

It also reads like she assumes the reader knows a whole bunch about North Korea, she could have added a lot more to the books by providing more historical context, similar to how Bill Bryson covers the history of the Appalachian Trail in A Walk in the Woods, instead of just writing about his long walk.

One of the main problems is that it seems like the author was bored a lot during her trip, which bleeds into her narrative. Mentions of lack of toilet paper, and the eternal search for bathrooms, reads as filler in a trip where not much happened. There were also some inconsistencies that were strange - she's a vegetarian, and has a section about how she doesn't want to hurt living things to the point that she rescues a fly from an enclosed vehicle, where in a previous chapter she describes eating a bunch of clams at a clambake? She mentions electricity rationing and how rarely lights were turned on, but also how most places she went were air conditioned ice boxes?

Also, reading this not long after Otto Warmbier's was return to the US in a fatal coma, the sort of sarcastic tone of the book can be a bit off putting. At one point the author mentions another tourist who was imprisoned for leaving a bible behind, and jokes about Bill Clinton having to rescue her for doing something similar, but the actual threat of terror the North Koreans live with doesn't really come through.

Also, the overused quotes from Lewis Carroll drove me crazy. I read the first one and then skipped the many that followed. I do like that the book included her photographs, but captioning a lot of them with whimsical quotes from Alice in Wonderland was annoying, I would have appreciated a description of what was actually in the photo.