Tag: Books

In Search of A Better Life

Posted in Book ReviewsLeave a comment

fullsizeoutput_10aI’m not a crier. Not necessarily by choice—I’d say it’s healthy to cry—but I’m just not brought to tears often. 

This book just about brought me to tears, which is something no other book I’ve read has done (and yes, maybe that just means I need to let my emotions out more, but that’s a topic for another post).

Pachinko is a multi-generational family saga of Korean immigrants moving to Japan, spanning from 1910 to 1989. Such a premise will surely drive away many readers—and it nearly drove me away too, as I’ve never been drawn to historical fiction. However, on a whim, I picked up Pachinko, and oh boy am I glad I did.

Pachinko starts with Yangjin, a Korean woman in a small fishing village who gives birth to Sunja, the life of much of the novel. 

Sunja grows up to be a hardworking daughter, but she is drawn to a wealthy man she spies at the fishing docks. This man slowly encroaches upon her life, until she is in youthful, misguided love. She is still just a girl when the wealthy man, Hansu (who is decades older than Sunja), impregnates her on a hidden away beach near the village. 

Hansu promises Sunja everything she might ever need, with his wealth apparently endless. However, when Sunja realizes she is pregnant, and that Hansu wishes to marry her and take her far away, she refuses. Sunja feels deceived, and her unwed pregnancy, Sunja and her mother know, will bring immense shame to the family. So instead, Sunja marries an ill minister visiting the village who hears Sunja’s plight and wishes to help. Together, Sunja and the minister set off for Japan, with Sunja leaving behind all she has ever known, including her home and her mother. 

Thus kick off the events of a family saga filled to the brim with devastating loss, enraging struggle, and empowering perseverance. Sunja and her family’s story encompass historical details from Korean immigration to Japan and the associated prejudices to the Second World War from an underrepresented perspective. 

Min Jin Lee has captured themes of just about every kind in Pachinko, ranging from the immigrant experience and the struggles to make it in a foreign land, to love, death, sacrifice, and parenthood.

Lee paints the histories and landscapes of her novel with a detailed brush, and both her characters and settings bustle with life. Pachinko reads quickly and simply, but carries a profound heft in meaning with its words. 

In the end, Pachinko is about the struggle to eek out an existence in a society blind to individual sorrows. Pachinko is about a search for meaning in a murky world, amidst arcs of history that seem to play out around oneself, in separation from oneself. 

Pachinko’s name refers to a mechanical gambling game called pachinko, which is popular in Japan. This name smartly sums up the essence of the novel:

“There could only be a few winners,” Lee writes, “and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones.”

Pachinko is the kind of book I search for, hope for, and read for. 

Do We Read Fewer Books Than We Used To? And Other Infographics

Posted in ReflectionsLeave a comment

The reading of books is changing. I’ve heard lots of remarks from people older than me that people used to read more books. I want to ignore these claims, or throw them into the bin with all of the other remarks wishing for some better past (like that one political slogan I’m not going to write). However, according to the statistics, these claims are correct.

Over the last several decades, the number of Americans that report having not read a book in the last year has steadily increased. 

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The percentage of adults who had not read a book in the last year increased from 8% in 1978, to 18% in 2002, to 23% in 2014. More recently, in 2011, 79% of U.S. adults said they had read a book in the last year, but in 2016, only 73% said so. 

Presumably, this change is largely the result of technology, which gives us other ways to spend our time besides reading: social media, video games, internet browsing, and so forth. 

Unsurprisingly, technology has not only changed how many books we read, but how we read those books. In a 2016 PEW study, 65% of U.S. adults reported having read a traditional print book in the last year, while 28% reported having read an ebook, and 14% reported having listened to an audio book. 

Types of Reading Graph

To get a better idea of who’s doing this reading, we can look at 2017 numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Simply put, older Americans read more than younger Americans, and Americans with higher levels of formal education read more than those with less. (It’s important to keep in mind that more reading doesn’t necessarily lead to more formal education—it’s also possible that more formal education leads to more free time for reading, or that those who like to read in the first place simply tend toward college and beyond).

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Globally, the United States finds itself somewhere in the middle of the pack when it comes to book reading. In the 2013 World Culture Score Index, which surveyed thirty countries around the world, the US ranked 23rd for time spent reading books per week, at 3 hours and 6 minutes. Other countries surveyed included Russia at about 7 hours, China at 8 hours, and India, which topped the list at 10 hours and 42 minutes. 

Reading Around Globe Final Graph

Thus, it’s clear that book reading is changing, and there’s no reason to believe it’s going to stop. The ways in which we read will likely keep shifting into more digital formats, and the people who read will shift to whoever seeks out the most books—which may change significantly as more countries develop their education systems and raise their literacy rates. I believe books can change lives, so I will keep my eye on just whose lives, exactly, they’re going to change.