Book Review: Pachinko

Book cover art

Pachinko is a game of chance. Rigged each morning so that only certain machines will win, the public comes en masse to try to win big. Very few win it all.

It’s an apt metaphor for the family Min Jin Lee has created with her beautifully-crafted book, Pachinko. The story of a Korean family who moves to Japan, it primarily follows Sunja as she navigates being a poor Korean, a single mother, and an even poorer Korean expatriate. The book switches narration often between characters, but Sunja serves almost as a touchstone for the reader. She is a young Korean girl who becomes pregnant by a man who is already married. When a missionary proposes to her in exchange for saving his life, she moves to Japan with him to work in a church. Unfortunately, Japan is not the most welcoming place to those it has colonized. Sunja and her husband face endless bigotry as they try to make a living, as do Sunja’s two sons and, eventually, their sons.

This is a novel about female strength. Not in an overt way, but like its female characters, it quietly pushes and successfully shares its ideas. Sunja’s mother has a motto: “a woman’s lot is to suffer”. Continually, the women in Pachinko are the ones holding everything together and keeping the family in its varying forms afloat. When her brother-in-law forbids it, Sunja and his wife create and run a successful business that keeps the family from starving. When the family must seek shelter during World War II, the women work for their keep on a farm safe from the bombs, ensuring the continuation of their bloodline.

Continuously, these women work for the bare minimum, but do so for the benefit of their entire family. They are truly the backbone of what is outwardly a matriarchy, providing when the men fail to do so and quietly being the reason the men end up succeeding. They do all of this in a country that, quite honestly, hates them. Sunja’s sons deal with bullying and discrimination at school, leading to an exploration of identity. Noa, for example, spends most of his childhood wishing he was Japanese and feeling conflicted about his Korean ancestry.

Pachkino tells the story of one family, but it is a portrayal of a part of history that is not shared with the West. Many Korean families that were told that Japan would bring them prosperity only to be severely disappointed. Min Jin Lee has made a fantastic, moving, and important book.

Update: For the past year, Pachinko has been my go-to whenever someone has asked for a book recommendation. I’ve yet to hear someone say they’ve been anything but thrilled with it.

Author Min Jin Lee

Book Subscription Boxes: Book of the Month

Can I just say, I’ve rarely seen such a gorgeous book? I got my first book subscription box book, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, and it’s glorious. The front cover has these lovely green and blue pastels with reds and oranges in the center illustration. That’s a high quality hardback, right there. And it has BOTM printed on the front cover in a very subtle, classy symbol. The same is on the spine, and on the back is printed “I Heart BOTM” with “February 2017” in smaller letters bellow it. It just feels crisp and new.

Once you take off the dust cover, you have a hardback with the Book of the Month colors, and, again, BOTM printed in the bottom right corner. Honestly, it looks so nice. “February 2017” is reprinted, as well. Basically, this book is everything you love about hardbacks with some special nuances thrown in for nostalgia sake. I’m definitely keeping this book, and it’ll always be fun to look at it and remember where it came from. It’s almost like a bit of my own history.

Book of the Month is a really simple service. Through a link of an affiliate, I was able to get my first book for just $5.00. You may remember me saying this already, but I’m honestly just so excited to have received such a beautiful copy of a book for so little.

A significant difference between Book of the Month and other subscription boxes is that it’s just the book. Honestly, I’m very relieved not to get the little doo-dads and trinkets that come with a lot of other boxes, mostly because I’m simply not interested in them. They’ll sit on my desk and gather dust until I throw them out. Book of the Month just sends the book and a personalized bookmark with a message from one of the selectors. I know what I’m about, and all I want are books.

Image from: http://modernmrsdarcy.com/book-month-club-review/

I’m pretty sure part of the reason they can send such beautiful books for such a low price is specifically because they don’t mess around with nick knacks. I fully appreciate this. I’m a pretty simple person with simple tastes, and Book of the Month really reflected that. I paid for lovely book, got it, and am 100 pages into reading a quality work of literature.

The selectors are definitely dependable–Pachinko is a wonderful book. The storytelling is great, and there’s an excellent balance between dialogue and description—not an easy task for a writer. The family aspect of the book is key, and though the characters aren’t incredibly complex, they are refreshingly good.

I enjoyed this book box with all my nerdy, bibliophilic heart!

 

Books I’ll Be Reading Again

As I talk to other people who love books and get more involved in the book community, I notice that there are a lot of books that I’ve read and failed to appreciate. You know the feeling, when you read a book six years ago and you’re pretty sure there’s a reason everyone loved it, but you failed to catch the hype. Maybe you were too young (I often was) or maybe you were just distracted. Regardless, I want to give these books another chance to influence me.

It is entirely possible that some, if not all, of these are simply not for me. That’s fine, but they have stuck out in my head as books that I, personally, didn’t put enough effort into enjoying and deserve another go.

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre is one of those novels that is internet-popular for how important and meaningful its quotes are. And yet, somehow, when I read it in eighth grade, it failed to make an impression on me. I know for a fact that I read it cover to cover, but I also know that I took long pauses in between, saw reading the book as a chore, and generally was in a terrible mood for all of that year. This might have influenced my opinion on the book, and I want to give it another try in different circumstances.

2. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

This is a book I know I enjoyed at the time, but have zero memory of the plot (besides that famous ending). I read it back in high school for class, so it was a segmented reading process. We’d read fifty pages for class, have a discussion, and then read fifty more. It can be hard to maintain enthusiasm like that, especially for a book written by the man who invented the cliff hanger.

3. The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I absolutely love this movie, but read the book in sixth grade and have no memory of what happened. Judging from the movie, there was a lot of subtle humor that I missed or wasn’t able to appreciate at the time. It is an immensely beloved book by so many, and as someone who strongly believes in reading the book first, I’m pretty angry that the movie has stuck with me far more than the book.

Book Review: Scandalous Women

While at Heathrow Airport in London, waiting to board my flight back to the States after several fantastic months travelling and studying in Europe, I found myself in the worst situation known to any reader.

I had nothing to read.

Thankfully, there was a shop with books only a few feet away, my plane was delayed, and I had a few British pounds I needed to spend before returning to the land of the dollar. Into the shop I went.

Amongst all the bestsellers and YouTuber books was a section about history. As I’d just spent three months going to historical sites, I was drawn to this section in particular. On the shelf was a book that caught my eye: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History’s Most Notorious Women. Bingo.

Elizabeth Kerri Mahon’s short, historical book is very enjoyable. Firstly, it’s about some pretty badass women, which I will always enjoy in any capacity. Joan of Ark, Cleopatra, Calamity Jane, and Ida B. Wells are only a small selection of the historical figures covered.

Second, it tells the truth about these ladies. Cleopatra gets the reveal she deserves. After centuries of old men turning her into a sex symbol, she gets the credit she is due as a statesman and leader of her country. The woman was willing to do anything to keep Egypt independent, and she was able to succeed for quite a significant period of time. And then she was erased from history by men who were threatened by her. Ask anyone who Cleopatra is, and they’ll reply that she was the lover of Mark Antony. Ask them about her skills as a leader, and you’ll often come up with nothing.

Can you tell I’m now a big fan of Cleopatra?

Finally, the book is short. The stories are nicely condensed, which is good considering the stories start to really blend together by the end.

The ratio of white women to women of color in the book is a little staggering. The section that features the most women of color, “Amorous Artists”, takes quite a while to reach. Even the section called “Warrior Queens” has only Cleopatra listed, when in fact there are countless queens around the world whose stories could have been referenced.

The issue with this lack of diversity is not only that there are people whose stories are missing, but also that the stories we get begin to sound similar. Most of the women were born into poverty, found love and fortune, then lost it and ended up alone and desolate. There are only so many stories I can hear about the same situation in one single book. Asian and African women are completely missing. I attribute that to a lack of intense research, as a quick Google search will pull up plenty of scandalous, pioneering women who stand out from both of those continents. I feel like the book missed an opportunity to talk about women who aren’t quite as well-known in the West, but notorious in other geographic regions. I would be insanely interested in reading something like that (suggestions).

Scandalous Women is an interesting work. It covers so many periods and countries (in the West, mostly). The book is great on many accounts, but I did begin to feel the stories were repeating themselves. Beyond the stories themselves, the writing style wasn’t that sophisticated (I’m a firm believer that slang doesn’t belong in anything written in third person, especially in a historical book).

Still, I would definitely read another book by Elizabeth Mahon. She takes an interesting look at history that historians are only now bringing to light. These are women that actually had immense power and influence, but have often been pushed aside for the male figures, or to extol their sex appeal. Mahn provides a refreshing change.

Top Five TBR

Besides Anna Karenina (which I’ve already posted about), I have a lot of books I want to read this year—though hopefully this list of my top five won’t take all year. I always have such a long list of “to be read”, but I never really keep track of how well I complete it. This year seems like the perfect time, since I’ve decided to attempt the 50 Book Challenge. I obviously need to keep track of my reading

1. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

This is the book I selected from my Book of the Month subscription box, and I’m so excited to start it. The blurbs I’ve read say that it’s one of those books that span generations of a family, which is really just excellent. I love when I can really sink my teeth into a set of linked characters and see where it takes me.

The story follows a Korean family, beginning with a daughter who becomes pregnant and marries in a hurry to prevent disgrace. She moves to Japan with her new husband, and from there she and her family struggle to make this new country ‘home’.

2. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

I first heard about this book through Youtube (John Green) and I’ve had its title stuck in my head since then. I admit, it first caught my attention because the author shares a first name with me, but after doing a little research I got interested in the actual story. It’s an autobiographical account told through poetry about the author’s experiences growing up in the 60’s and 70’s.

This seems like a great meld of poetry and narrative storytelling that will both use the medium and deep-dive into a character. I’m not sophisticated enough to appreciate something for its technique alone (plot and characters are always the main appeal for me), so this seems a good way to bridge the gap.

3. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

After reading Americanah, I became very interested in African literature. It’s not something we often study in classes in the US (the focus tends to be African American authors, not African), and I’d like to work on closing that gap in my knowledge a little bit.

This story follows two half-sisters born in Ghana, one sold into slavery and another married off to a slaver. Apparently, the enslaved sister is taken to America and her future generations grow up in slavery while the married sister’s descendants deal with their history and participation in the slave trade. I seem to be very interested in generational stories. From the title, I assume that this is the story of how the future generations return home to Ghana? Not entirely sure, however. Reading two stories in such direct contrast with each other in terms of their experience should be fascinating.

4. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

This book came onto my radar while I was watching booksandquills’ latest video about her trip to Essex, in which her friend is reading this exact book (most appropriate). After looking through the Goodreads description, it seems to be a mystery covering the conflict between science and religion through two characters who “agree on absolutely nothing…[but] find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart”. I’ve heard great things about this one, and it should make a nice change-up in my reading.

5. Fig by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

I found Fig through a Pin specifically about books that deal with mental illness. The story follows a mother and daughter, both struggling with mental health problems. The mother is slowly losing her grip on reality as her schizophrenia gets worse, while her daughter struggles to take care of her mother and herself. It’s been described as a very honest portrayal of mental illness which, as someone with mental health issues, I always appreciate. I’m also desperate to know more about schizophrenia, since it is so incorrectly portrayed in most media. It is a very misunderstood illness, so reading a book that treats it appropriately should be enlightening.