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A DNF Reading Blog



Tags: prosebooks

I have some reading notes, though I am not done with the books yet.

No One Writes Back (Jang Eun-Jin, 2009; translated 2013 by Jung Yewon)

I’m late to this book with over 1,800 GoodReads reviews, but am always curious to pick up some nomad lit. The Korean title is 아무도 편지하지 않다.

The main character has been wandering around Korea for three years, writing to people who he met on the road. He has found that being outside of his own apartment is the only way to cure his stuttering and seizures. He struggled to find his place in school, as a kid in his family, and now in his adult life, and assigns everyone a sequential number to remember them by.
Assigning numbers to people was a characteristic of Donald Triplett, the first person diagnosed with autism, but I don’t believe that was commonly known in 2009?

What looks like a setup for a man and dog travelogue is quickly redirected by an encounter with a quirky traveling author, and deeper dives into the character’s past. There is discussion of suicide.

There is something quaint about a travelogue set in 2009, pre-smartphone. It helps make it believable that the main character is open to wandering. The book acknowledges that the letter-writing is quaint, and payphones had become rare, but I would say a payphone sighting is near-impossible today.
There is only one GoodReads review which specifically mentions autism. There is also a mention in a 2013 review in The Guardian, which has not aged well for other reasons:

I know nothing about Korean culture. I have even managed to avoid the video for “Gangnam Style”. So for all I know, the kind of things that go on in No One Writes Back happen all the time in Korea.

Some issues: I found it jarring how quickly the traveling author, maybe based on this book’s real author, took over the nomad's routine? The title says that people never write back, but this seems natural considering that this includes people who he met briefly at a convenience store or bus stop?
Also: there are some topics which I want to avoid thinking about, and this hits almost all of them (responding to isolation with envy and jealousy, a sudden TBI that ruins someone's life).

It's a short book so I might resume.

I would compare this book to The Rosie Project, the Japanese nonfiction Rental Person Who Does Nothing, or a long Substack which I was reading about a Bay Area cult (since it is focused on self improvement and deconstructing social norms).

The author Jang Eun-Jin studied geography and won some prizes for short stories before this book. Unfortunately I didn’t find much information about her. The most recent work which I found was a 2024 volume of short stories themed on seasons, titled 가벼운 점심 (A Light Lunch). The blurb for that book suggests that solitude is a consistent theme of her writing.

Katabasis (R. F. Kuang, 2025)

Kuang’s most recent book starts out in a gory magic accident in a school, which should seem like familiar ground for readers of Babel. But this linguist is at magical 1980s Cambridge, not magical 1830s Oxford, which I’m sure must be a vast distinction for UK academics.

The main character Alice and tag-along Peter have a rivals-to-lovers arc. This is apparent early on, as his flaws are listed with more mild irritation or resentment. I also knew going into this that Peter is based on the author’s husband, so there likely wouldn’t be a “wow, this guy should FUCK OFF forever” moment for him, right?

Compare that to villains who (like in Babel) can be interesting, but never have redeeming qualities. Every time he is mentioned, it’s to remind the reader, “don’t forget that he’s ‘dark academia, the guy’ ” To build in complexity, the main character starts out not resenting the professor much… but the writing is not coy. Early on, the characters meet four people who were killed in Grimes’s lab, but our adventurers already knew about them.

There’s a point that Kuang is talking about academia as itself something which takes half of your life in exchange for being an Academic and not a nobody. And other people will say this is about hellish toil and the very few tenured jobs available, as these are the things which the characters complain about while among similarly suffering souls.
But the message which is resonating as the Big Idea of this book and Kuang's press tour, is Professor Grimes as a so-called genius. There is something going on with this still post-MeToo, people whose sins evaporate from public memory (there is a whole arc about this with the David Letterman analogue on Bojack Horseman).

Each stage is a bit slow, but I have gotten back into it recently.

At Katabasis Cambridge where there’s an obscure but known process to visit Hell, meet the dead, and offer some negotiation to return to life, how well do Pascal’s Wager and philosophy still resemble our world? Even if hell is a big mixture of religions and our characters perceive only one slice of a hyper-plane, at its core we are confirming an afterlife with punishment, reincarnation, and some deity of the underworld, so I wouldn’t feel like either atheism or standard Christianity would be a consistent belief.

When I saw Kuang’s book talk, she described how the setting became an amalgamation of religions and stories about Hell. Some recent takes on the subject which I’d highlight:

There is an early scene where the characters climb a wall, and the main character (embodying the author’s hobby) recalls ‘topping out’ on a climb at a gym. In the late 80s, Americans were just starting to design rock climbing gyms. I did a search, and luckily I am not the only sicko who noticed this.

Kuang appeared on a Christopher Nolan film podcast to discuss Tenet, saying she watched it many times and is in circles which “evangelize” the movie. Not relatable. Also she says that her short story Making Space was inspired by it; though it reminded me more of The Commons (an Australian climate crisis series from 2019).

Reddit thread on PhD students discovering that their advisors know nothing (or whether this is early stage PhD arrogance): https://www.reddit.com/r/PhD/comments/1xcfc4h/how_long_into_the_phd_did_you_realize_your_pi/

A full 40 minute video about 'dark academia' emerging from Tumblr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfUnNXq5xZ4

In a new low for BookTok, someone complained that Kuang's next book Taipei Story mentions that a performer is Israeli, before the book was even released: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1tijcb3/the_awardwinning_novelist_whos_under_fire_for/

Update to Previous Maps?

I attended Practical Cartography Day before the main NACIS conference. It was a good experience getting back in the game for the first time since , and I later wished that I submitted a talk.

Someone added onto my Kurdish ligature issues on MapLibre, and after a few false starts I've realized that they were correct. MapLibre recently moved from MapBox's old RTL plugin to their own system based on Unicode data. Both pick the wrong shapes for the letters around Kurdish letters such as the ێ in the middle ofلێر. But text-shaping is clearly possible, because I can see لێر in the browser.
My idea was to ask AI how to pick glyphs out of the original font. After a false start with OpenType, and a switch to the HarfBuzz WASM library, there was a Proof of Concept. Issues: the font either needed to be preprocessed more by the style provider, or downloaded by the client to load glyphs into HarfBuzz.

Then I did a search for a related Tamil script issue and found a recent PR had already gotten there. Their solution was to write labels one word at a time, in the browser's preferred system font instead of using the 1:1 codepoint -> glyph lookup table set up by OpenFreeMap, MapTiler, etc. If that PR stands (I can see it being controversial) we could also use this for Arabic script. It even removes the need for presentation forms, so it's net-negative LOC.

There are three negatives so far:

Everything is AI and fake now

When a post in a subreddit gets popular enough, it gets recommended outside its usual audience to people like me. Someone posted a complaint in the interviews subreddit about an otherwise-cool engineer who spent too much time describing their side project and their goal / social impact. The poster gave multiple, shallow objections to this - that it was better for 'Greenpeace', that they never talked about PM work, or that they talked too much in general. Top comments all agreed that they fumbled a great engineer with a harmless passion project.
This episode in dead internet theory… days later there were multiple LLM comments trying to post snarky comments starting with "A 10-minute tattoo-stigma rant is _". There was even one in Italian!

The 'AGI' subreddit is so bad. An Anthropic blog post where the engineers used initials instead of their last names, led to a discussion of how they must "believe mass unrest is coming soon". Actually it's easy to find newer Anthropic blog posts on job loss, Claude, etc. with all authors' names.

AskAManager recently received an update about an office where their hires are not the same people who interviewed. There are a few odd points:

YouTube has some AI widgets which suggest topics, make thumbnails, etc. Because my topics are about real places and events, it is not possible to just riff on the last popular video, or mash topics together, so this is useless to me. On Reddit, where AI thumbnails are controversial, I've seen a supposed defense that YouTube runs these thumbnails without permission. This isn't true. If you A/B test two or three thumbnails, you choose which ones and see how often they get clicked. You can easily do this with your own uploaded images.
The next defense is that YouTube favors creators who listen to their AI. The UI, A/B testing, and competitive nature of YouTube may convince creators to try it for more views, but AFAIK you are not being rewarded or penalized solely on their generator. These theories also generally ignore how often thumbnails are made with OpenAI?

Previous Reads

Spanish election video featuring the painting Guernica: https://bsky.app/profile/spaincivilwartours.bsky.social/post/3mymlh4y7lk2s

Neat use of semantic search to search for dodo accounts (sometimes without word matching, since people were not so scientific in their dodo mentions) in Dutch East India Company archives https://resobscura.substack.com/p/using-opus-55-to-discover-a-new-eyewitness

Via Wikipedia: "The word fajita is not known to have appeared in print until 1971, according to the Oxford English Dictionary"

A Chinese spacecraft is visiting and doing a sample return from an Earth quasi-moon which was mentioned in the 'Aliens of Arxiv' series as a possible alien sentinel. The photos this summer look like an asteroid so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/469219_Kamo%CA%BBoalewa 

Preet Chandi (polarpreet on social media) is a British Army officer who has done extreme solo expeditions at the North and South Poles. Sometimes an expedition ends early or with an injury, and she's open about recovery and training. Recently she posted content about learning Punjabi, and talking to her mom and grandmother about her goals as an adventurer.

Interesting post about M/F gender being added to US passports in the 1970s: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1x8r79s/were_sex_markers_added_to_american_passports_in/

I thought to check on the royal succession crisis in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia. Though the August election looked like a return to normalcy, it ended up making a surprising comeback:

Very tangential to the NACIS conference:
The conference hotel is on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, which Milwaukee renamed in 1984. But this part, the northern segment of Third Street, pushed back until 2022. In 1987 they got added to the National Register of Historic Places as North Old World Third Street (recognizing an old German neighborhood and other businesses and architecture).
On Google Maps, there are a couple of places which have their Old World Third Street address, and some online order and social media pages, though I don't know where those were directly set by the business or holdovers. One business which gave interviews critical of renaming in 1990 seems to have accepted it now on their website and social media.
Another business named "Who's on Third" kept the name, and has this sentence on their About Us page:

Who's on Third is a casual dining sports bar at 1007 N. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive - on Old World Third Street in Downtown Milwaukee

A Canadian hockey romance author had a panel cancelled over a debate about whether she can call herself indigenous. Her story vs. a Reddit discussion critical

I follow a bunch of humanities academics on social media, and two have parenting updates which are really good, breaking through my wall. Thoughtful and always reporting their kid's interactions with the world and culture as a big experiment.

Librarians reporting millennials struggling with computer basics (too old for Gen Z's unfamiliarity with email and file systems, so I wonder if these people cannot read or have just not used a desktop in 10 years) https://www.reddit.com/r/Libraries/comments/1ww2sv9/anyone_else_burning_out_with_all_the_tech_support/

I listened to The Renner Files, a 2020 podcast which investigated Jeremy Renner's persona and aspiration for a business empire. In 2017 Renner launched a dedicated app, which the podcast linked to a company which typically creates apps for Indonesian celebrities. This was widely mocked in 2019 (even though other celebrities had an app around this same timeframe) and inspired the quirky podcast. Before listening I knew that Renner = Hawkeye and was not aware of him being notably eccentric or problematic, but the podcast puts a spin on things.
In 2023 Renner almost died in a snowplow accident. This makes it unlikely that the podcast will continue.

Sikkim still has passport control at their border with India: https://www.reddit.com/r/Borderporn/comments/1wvn3a3/west_bengal_sikkim_inner_line_border/

My take on the press secretary - speaking as a dropout, if there's something weird on your CV, it's better to be clear about your certifications and own the narrative. Especially by the time that you're 30 or 40?
There are a lot of people who become lawyers and doctors, and it's normal when people fail their first try to become lawyers and doctors, to try again or to change careers. But when you're in the grey zone over this, and at least one nominee for surgeon general was in a similar situation around graduating med school but maybe not being a doctor, it's revealing that these picks come from the few people who sit in this between space?

I never read Sarma Melngailis's book after watching Bad Vegan, but she got to tell her story in a sympathetic interview by the IndoctriNation podcast.
Critically her story is still very much about how she always has great instincts to judge people's character? And that what she said in the documentary wasn't really her intent, just that she's willing to say anything to get a response.