Thoughts from April 2025

Thoughts, New Reads, and Life Updates from April

Last Edited: May 3, 2025

April = exam season + endless grinding, but I managed to consistently distract myself from studying, so now I have a fair amount of things to write about.
Like before, let me know if you want to read the full, uncensored version - I’ll send you a link if you’re a trusted friend! A good number of people think that the uncensored version isn’t uncensored enough - do I need a 2x uncensored version of my post? It may be a useful exercise (since I don’t journal and even I don’t know what my thoughts are deep down), but right now I may be too lazy.

What Do You Look For in Fiction?

- Rules of Civility by Amor Towles was the last book on my list of 19th/20th century upper class people books, and it was honestly quite impressive. It’s the story of Katey Kontent, a young working class girl who, with her friend Eve, meets the rich banker Tinker Grey and gets introduced to the elite society of New York. The opening scene of the book was the literary version of Begin Again, the movie starring Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo. Rules of Civility has solidified my definition of ‘good’ historical and contemporary fiction. When asked the question “what do you look for in fiction”, my standard answer used to skirt around good plot, character, or writing, but these are just listing core elements, without any specificity. Now, my definition of good fiction is whatever that feels magical. Magical is perhaps an unfitting description for stories that are supposedly realistic, but it has more to do with the author’s magic. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to binge read the book in a day or two, that draws me to the characters and plot. In that sense, I think that there isn’t a universal standard for good writing - it’s whatever draws the readers to the story. And in that sense, Rules of Civility felt like a dive into an interesting person’s life, perhaps a shallow escape from reality, but I’d like to think that I got more out of it than just that.

Read The Shadow of the Wind

- I reread The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and read the sequel, The Angel’s Game. The first time I read The Shadow of the Wind was during a school trip to Busan, and funnily enough, all I remember from the trip is being glued to the book the entire time. In my defense, we spent hours in the bus (the whole grade was divided into four groups so the routing was done inefficiently), and the sightseeing wasn’t very impressive. But back to the point, that’s how good the book was. I had no idea that Spanish authors were such talented storytellers (I’ve never read Spanish literature before, not even Don Quixote), and the writing quality was flawless. A lot can get lost in translation, from what I’ve seen in Korean (Bora Chung) and Japanese (Haruki Murakami), but my guess is that Spanish and English are similar enough for unnoticeable losses. A review on Goodreads mentioned that American authors gravitate towards ‘unrealistic happy endings’ while European authors prefer ‘poignant sad ones’. The neverending tragedies of the book reminded me a bit of 20th century Korean literature, and I’m starting to see the appeal of diversifying my selection of books from different countries. There were other aspects of the book that felt different; the magical realism felt distinctly Spanish and very enjoyable, so I’ve now decided to read one of the original magical realism works: Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges.

- The second book, The Angel’s Game, had very similar vibes to season 1 of the Netflix show You. Joe Goldberg in the show works at a bookstore, has exquisite taste in books, and knows so much about old books. But you can tell that something’s off from the very beginning, and you eventually figure out why. Guinevere Beck and Cristina are quite similar as well, now that I think more.

Spotify

- What new things have I been listening to this month? I usually open Spotify to play the perfect kind of music for whatever mood I’m in, but pinpointing which genre and artist becomes a challenge. So I usually resort to the Spotify daylist, but I am not a huge fan of the daylist system itself. Apparently daylist constructions are based on pre-existing Spotify algorithms that analyze music taste on a hyper specific level (the titles of these daylists make this very clear) and tailor recommendations based on the time of the day. Honestly, while the hyper-specificty of the daylists delighted me at first, the daylists seem to have gone worse than before. Why does a jpop daylist include Blackpink and IVE? And vice versa? It also seems to reinforce current trends in listening. My daylist was stuck in the chinese rnb and cpop loop for a whole week during my peak Chinese music listening phase. Working at Spotify would actually be very fulfilling, knowing that I get to shape the music taste of millions (billions?) of people around the world; it’s a position of great power.

- Going off on a tangent, I am starting to wonder how people of the past discovered new music. This applies to everything else as well, but music is particularly interesting because of how much ‘music discovery’ is driven by streaming services. Sure, I would ask people for book recommendations every once in a while, but asking for song recommendations happens much less frequently. Maybe this has to do with how long you usually sit with one book vs one song, since I switch from one song to another much more often than books. So back to the point, Spotify is my ultimate go-to place foir new music, but what about during the pre-Spotify era? The radio, MTV, concerts, word of mouth, what else? Mostly mass media (too homogenous) and word of mouth (which has its limitations). But does this mean that practically no one had niche taste in music?

- Another tangent, but shazam is a great way to discover new music! Whenever I am in the mall, a cool store, or cafe with good music, shazam will tell me what song they’re playing right now - pretty good for finding new music.

Exams and Education

- I had eight midterm exams, five of which were ranked (I care less about the other three, getting an A is much easier than being in the 96th percentile). It may actually be over for me for calculus and English (90th percentile in English means that things are going very badly), so I have to do well in finals, and may have to do very well on the college admissions exam (Suneung).

- But this doesn’t necessarily mean I have to blame myself and suffer during the process, at least I hope that this will not be the case. I prefer to think about exams as a pretty bad indicator of true smartness, especially when the thing you care about is ranks, not scores. An analogy I use to describe my school environment to other people is a spinoff of the prisoner’s dilemma. Each student can either cooperate or defect, where cooperating is the happy 9-5 studying, and defecting comprises studying past midnight, going to private tuition (hagwons), and learning calculus in sixth grade. In a perfect educational system, everyone would cooperate - be happy and smart. But because exams are ranked and the parents are overenthusiastic about sending their kids to medical school and other top colleges, people start defecting, one by one. The toxic culture of studying past midnight and hiring a bunch of tutors to ace in exams becomes more widespread, and people who kindly decide to cooperate (like me, who gets enough sleep and doesn’t waste money in private tuition) are practically non-existent. Of course, not all schools are like this - this happens if (1) there are enough players, or people willing to study, in the game, and (2) they have the drive and parent’s support (money for private tuition) to defect. The analogy I’ve built for myself is quite fitting, but I’m still not sure whether all of this is me giving excuses for not being the top top student, or it serves as a solid bird’s eye view of the situation.

Let me know if you want to read the unabridged version of this post, I’ll probably send it to you if you’ve read this far :p
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