You're probably really sick of hearing about The Interview, but maybe all this Sony hacking hoopla has made you interested in the idea of learning more about North Korea. Good news! You don't have to watch The Interview to understand what life is like in North Korea! Instead, I'd like to recommend two books for you.

If you want to know what it's like to visit North Korea as a westerner, I'd heartily recommend Guy Delisle's comic book memoir Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea*. Delisle was sent to North Korea to oversee an animation project for a French film company, and Pyongyang is his account of that experience. Visitors to North Korea are not permitted to wander around freely, so Delisle's account is mostly of what the North Korean government wanted him to see. But even the officially endorsed sights—trips to monuments to Kim Il-Sung, displays of military strength—have a heartbreaking sadness to them. Delisle's art is perfect for this subject—the graphite grey rectangles he draws to represent the buildings of Pyongyang resonate with a kind of loneliness that prose could not. The worst of North Korea is hidden from Delisle, but he can see the desperation and sadness peeking out from around the edges of his antiseptic hotel room. It's like visiting the home of an alcoholic who puts on a brave face but who can't quite keep their decline under control. Delisle can't crack the facade, but his rendering of the facade is impressive.

If you want to know what actual North Koreans think, I'd recommend Barbara Demick's book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. I bought Nothing to Envy last year, when David Sedaris recommended it during his reading at Benaroya Hall, but I finally sat down and read it over the weekend. Demick interviews six North Korean émigrés about their experiences and weaves them together into a non-fiction account that reads like a novel. Nothing to Envy illustrates exactly the kind of slow-motion calamity that was hidden from Delisle: famine that killed millions, a police state that would whisk people away to concentration camps for saying a single word of dissent, a populace that has been misled and literally left in the dark (thanks to a lack of electricity) for decades.

These two books make for excellent companion volumes. I pictured the events of Nothing to Envy in the sparse black-and-white-and-gray style of Delisle's Pyongyang. Demick's book is full of the weird grayness of a collectivist state in decline. "The most famous stores in the country were Pyongyang's two department stores—Department Store No. 1 and Department Store No. 2, they were called—and their merchandise was about as exciting as their names." Buying anything was discouraged in North Korea: "If you wanted to make a major purchase—say, to buy a watch or a record player—you had to apply to your work unit for permission. It wasn't just a matter of having the money."

As I was reading Nothing to Envy, I kept wondering to myself, how long can this go on? The book was published a year before Kim Jong-Il's death, and Demick already describes unthinkable poverty and suffering. And there's nothing we can do to help; international aid hasn't been properly distributed in the past. North Korea maintains its stony silence. One day, when the full story is revealed, you get the sense that the stories of pain and misery Demick's handful of refugees share with us will be revealed as just the shadow of a terrible, monolithic mountain of human misery.

* After Sony caved on The Interview, an upcoming Gore Verbinski-directed, North Korea-set movie starring Steve Carrell was canceled. That movie was described as a "paranoid thriller," but it was an adaptation of Pyongyang, which is decidedly not a paranoid thriller. I don't know if they added thriller elements to the movie, or if it was misidentified.