Reflections on a Year of Reading Research and K-dramas

Those of you who know me know that I often struggle to strike a balance between work and life. Sometimes I succeed; sometimes I fail.

In 2025, that tension played out across pages, research projects, and long evenings spent watching Korean dramas. Each offered its own kind of insight and pleasure, shaping not only how I spent my time but also how I thought about the world and my place in it. Looking back, I see how books, scholarship, and k-dramas intertwined to create a rich—if sometimes uneven—tapestry of learning and escape. What follows is a brief reflection on what I read and watched this year, and why it stayed with me.

Books That Left a Mark

Books have always been a gateway to new ideas and unfamiliar worlds. This year, my reading ranged across fiction and nonfiction that challenged my thinking and expanded my sense of place, history, and belonging.

• Fiction Highlights

I am both a mood reader and a milieu reader. Every winter, I find myself drawn to novels set in snow, during Christmas, or amid winter holidays. These seasonal choices are less about escapism than about atmosphere—about inhabiting worlds where cold, darkness, and silence shape human relationships and moral choices.

Last winter, I read Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Peter Høeg’s 1992 Danish crime novel centered on Smilla Jaspersen, a half-Greenlandic woman living in Copenhagen. When a young Greenlandic boy, Isaiah, dies under suspicious circumstances, Smilla refuses to accept the police explanation of an accident. Drawing on her intimate knowledge of snow and ice, she uncovers a conspiracy involving a powerful mining corporation—one that carries her from the city back toward the Arctic landscapes of her childhood.

While Smilla’s Sense of Snow is an engaging mystery, its appeal goes well beyond plot. The novel offers a compelling meditation on Greenlandic history, colonial entanglements, and the uneasy position of those who live between worlds. Høeg’s attention to ice, weather, and material environments resonated with my own anthropological sensibilities, reminding me how deeply knowledge is shaped by place—and how easily that knowledge is dismissed by institutions of power.

As a milieu reader, I love immersing myself in the social and cultural contexts of the places I visit. With a trip to Dublin and Belfast on the horizon, I was eager to spend time with contemporary Irish fiction. On the recommendation of a friend, I began with Claire Keegan, an acclaimed Irish writer known for her exquisitely crafted short stories and novellas. Her work is celebrated for its lyrical precision, emotional restraint, and keen observation of rural Irish life—qualities that make her writing a particular pleasure for an anthropologist. Keegan’s prose reveals entire moral and social worlds in a few carefully chosen details, reminding me how much can be conveyed through what remains unsaid.

• Nonfiction Insights

On the nonfiction side, I continued to read books about migration and education.

Among the academic literature I read this year, one book stood out in particular: Juyeon Park’s Families for Mobility: Elite Korean Students Abroad and Their Parents’ Reproduction of Privilege. Through rich, nuanced ethnography, Park examines how transnational education becomes a family strategy for securing social advantage, revealing mobility as a deeply relational and intergenerational project rather than an individual achievement. The book offers a compelling analysis of how privilege is actively produced and sustained through parental labor, sacrifice, and long-term planning, while also attending to the emotional and moral dimensions of these choices. What made this book especially resonant for me was its careful balance between structural analysis and intimate family narratives, making it both analytically rigorous and deeply human—and a valuable point of reference for my own work on migrant children and education.

"Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." --Ford Madox Ford

Here is a link to p. 99 of Park's ethnography. As she wrote "Although this page does not present the core argument of the study, it offers an important example that illustrates the diversity among my participants." If you read it, it will also give you a glimpse into P{ark's ethnographic writing. She definitely sets the bar high!

As I embarked on writing my own book on migrant children in Polish schools, I returned to a few of my favorite books about writing. Among them were Kristen Ghodsee’s From Notes to Narrative and Kirín Narayan’s Alive in the Writing.

One of the enduring challenges of ethnographic writing—for me, at least—has always been the transformation of fieldnotes into narrative. Kristen Ghodsee’s From Notes to Narrative has been especially helpful in thinking through that process. Ghodsee demystifies writing by showing how ethnographic insight emerges not only from what we observe in the field, but from how we select, organize, and frame those observations on the page. Writing, in this sense, is not something that happens after the analysis is done; it is an analytic practice in its own right.

Ghodsee encourages ethnographers to pay close attention to voice, pacing, and point of view. Which scene opens a chapter? Whose voice is brought to the foreground? What details are necessary, and which can be left unsaid? These questions are not merely stylistic. They are analytical—and ethical—choices that shape how readers come to understand the people and processes we describe.

Once writing is acknowledged as part of analysis rather than a decorative final step, narrative stops being a stylistic flourish and becomes a central methodological concern.

Kirín Narayan’s Alive in the Writing felt like another important intervention in how I think about ethnographic work. Rather than treating writing as a technical skill to be mastered, Narayan encourages ethnographers to approach it as a lived, embodied practice. She foregrounds attentiveness—to language, rhythm, and moments of surprise—and invites writers to stay with uncertainty instead of rushing to tidy conclusions.

Her reflections resonate strongly with ethnographic research, where insight rarely arrives fully formed. More often, understanding emerges slowly and unevenly, through the very act of writing. Narayan’s insistence on writing as a process of discovery mirrors the experience of fieldwork itself: drafting, revising, and rewriting are not signs that something has gone wrong, but essential ways of thinking ethnographically.

Narayan also offers a gentle but firm reminder that clarity and accessibility matter. Writing that is truly “alive” draws readers in rather than keeping them at a distance, while still engaging seriously with ideas and theory.

If writing is lived and embodied, then description becomes one of the primary ways that embodiment reaches the page—carrying not only analysis, but texture, attention, and care.

K-dramas That Captivated

If Irish fiction grounded me in place, Korean dramas offered a different kind of immersion: a welcome break from routine and a window into alternative narrative traditions and cultural sensibilities. This year’s favorites combined emotional depth, understated humor, and sharp social commentary, making them far more than background entertainment.

The Trunk, starring Gong Yoo and Seo Hyun-jin and based on the novel of the same title, stood out in particular. I enjoyed both the book and the adaptation, though the drama may have had the edge. The acting—especially by Gong Yoo and Seo Hyun-jin—was superb, and the cinematography beautifully matched the story’s restrained, melancholic tone. Told succinctly in just eight episodes, the series was dark at times, but threaded with moments of hope and quiet tenderness.

Nine Puzzles, with Son Suk-ku and Kim Da-mi, offered a very different register, combining psychological tension with an absorbing mystery. The performances carried much of the weight, keeping the narrative compelling even as it unfolded slowly.

Face Me was another highlight. A suspenseful drama centered on personal struggles and ethical dilemmas, it featured excellent performances across the board. Lee Min-ki never disappoints, but Han Ji-hyun was also outstanding; it was a pleasure to see her taking on such a complex and varied role. The ending, unexpectedly gentle, left me smiling. Highly recommended.

Taken together, these dramas reminded me why I keep returning to Korean television: its ability to weave intimate storytelling with broader social concerns. Like good ethnography—or good fiction—they combine narrative pleasure with cultural insight, making them both meaningful and deeply enjoyable companions through the year.

Final thought

Looking back, what stands out most about my 2025 reading and watching is how it reflected my ongoing struggle to balance work and life. The books and dramas I turned to weren’t just entertainment—they were ways of stepping outside the daily grind and reconnecting with curiosity, emotion, and the simple pleasure of being absorbed in another world. Whether I was immersed in Claire Keegan’s quiet, observant rural landscapes or drawn into the emotional intensity of Korean storytelling, each narrative offered a kind of restorative pause. In a year when work often demanded too much, these stories reminded me that balance isn’t a perfect state to achieve—it’s a practice of returning, again and again, to the parts of life that nourish us.