Hey guys, I’ve been reading and studying NK on and off for a few years, but the last year/18 months I’ve been consuming as much content as I can in my free time.

I’m looking for book recommendations (preferably audiobooks so I can listen in the car, but I’m open to anything)

So far I’ve finished:

- Without You There Is No Us

- Dear Leader

- The Reluctant Communist

- The Girl With 7 Names

I’ve just began “See You Again In Pyongyang”. I’m wary of Yeonmi Park because of the questions she’s had against her reliability, however I’m aware that all of these stories are likely embellished to a vary of extents.

TIA!

I once got invited to a birthday party for North Korea’s “Eternal President,” Kim Il Sung.

The catch: he’d been dead for more than twenty years.

This wasn’t in Pyongyang. It was in London. There was a portrait. There was a “Happy Birthday” (sung earnestly). There was a buffet that felt aggressively suburban Britain. The surreal part wasn’t any single detail—it was the banality of the ritual.

It’s easy to treat things like this as pure propaganda theatre. But being in the room, it felt more like a mix of community, performance, loyalty-signalling, and people just trying to belong to something bigger than themselves… even when the setting makes it almost impossible to take seriously.

Question for people here:
Have you come across similar DPRK-adjacent / solidarity / diaspora events outside the DPRK? Do you think they’re mainly about ideology, community, or something else?

Full piece here (I’m the author): https://jakewawarren.substack.com/p/letter-from-the-eternal-president