Book Review: Pachincko by Min Jin Lee

I read this book as part of the NYT Summer Reading Challenge, but it has languished in my Kindle since 2018. I purchased it as part of following The Tournament of Books, and I intended to start reading it but each time I did I encountered its mixed reviews and selected another book instead. It’s hard to take a chance on a 500 plus page book.

I needed a book that was on the NYT Best Books of the 21st Century and Pachinko was on the list (number 15 of 100), so I decided it was high time to read it.

I am glad that I did.

Pachinko is far from a perfect book, and I definitely wouldn’t rate it as high as it was on that list. It’s a sweeping epic, covering almost a century, following a family of Koreans immigrants in Japan. It’s a historical novel and you can sense the great deal of research and care that went into crafting it. I generally enjoy reading long family sagas and the historical background was fascinating – but there’s a reason the book repeatedly receives such mixed reviews.

It seems like Lee’s writing skills didn’t match her ambition. The first thing you’ll notice is the pacing. The first part of the novel, the part set in Korea, stretches out for no good reason. It is apparent that Lee meant to show the slow and gentle pace of the idyllic Korean village life, but the result is mostly tedious. It wouldn’t have been so egregious if the rest of the novel wouldn’t have done the polar opposite: Lee rushes through the lives of the second and third generation at a breakneck pace that is dizzying and oftentimes jarring. So much happens to the family and in the world and you just swoosh by it, never getting a true sense of the impact of these events on the characters or their surroundings. Then comes the most dramatic moment of the book, and it’s just inexplicable. A main character commits suicide and you feel like someone just threw a piano on your head out of the blue. It feels like Lee was working to reach a certain page count, and having spent too many words on the (beautiful if languid) first part she has to rush through the other two thirds.

And yet… And yet this book stayed with me. It touches on so many things, the characters are so compelling and the historical background is so interesting that it has a sort of magnetic effect to it. I keep remembering scenes and moments. I keep wanting to shake sense into some characters and hug others.

Pachincko is 550 pages of fascinating imperfection. I enjoyed reading it, but I hesitate recommending it because of its flaws. It’s a good book, it’s far from a perfect book, and it opens a window to a world and a time and a group of people that you’d likely never read about otherwise. If the period and place interest you, then it’s well worth the read. If you’re into family sagas, this is an imperfect one but still one that you’ll likely enjoy.

Weekly Update: New Job

It’s been a while since my last update, and though I drafted a post in my blogging notebook over a month ago, I didn’t get to posting it here.

I got a new job! The process was much quicker than I expected both because of my excellent friends and colleagues network and because I aggressively pursued new employment opportunities. I was getting three interviews a day plus sending several applications a day despite being sick and having another “delightful” rocket round from Iran to deal with. In the end it took me two and a half weeks to find a new (and better) place, and I learned a lot from the process.

I had a little time off before I started my new job (I started two weeks ago) and I spent most of it on catching up with friends, getting on top of doctor’s appointments, decluttering and honing my technical skills. I didn’t get half of what I planned on doing done, but that’s the nature of the beast. I am very glad that I prioritised meeting friends because it was so energising and fun and fulfilling to be able to do that. It made me realise yet again just how important real life meetings with friends are.

I finished the NYT Summer Reading Challenge on the 6th of August, well before the deadline. I enjoyed the challenge and I’m glad that I participated as it got me reading books that have long been languishing on my reading list. I decided that I will review each of the ten books that I read, so expect those reviews up shortly.

I saw the new Spiderman movie (Spiderman: Brand New Day) and it’s very good. It reminded me of The Thunderbolts, which I loved. It was well written and performed, and Florence Pugh and Jon Berenthal steal every scene they’re in they are so magnetic.

I’m almost done with my Stillman and Birn pocket beta sketchbook and I might post a flip-through here. I normally take ages to finish a sketchbook because I have so many sketchbooks running in parallel, but this one took about a year, which is super fast for me. Most of it is full of cafe sketches, because I’ve put a focus on sketching people on the move. I do plan on getting back to more landscape and other sketches in my next sketchbook.

I’m still struggling with my journaling, and I also have a large pile of notebooks that I was planning to review but I’m not so sure how to go about that. Standard reviews take a lot of time and I’m not sure that they’re that enjoyable or interesting to read. I don’t want to spew a fact sheet of information on paper weight and binding types as you can find more accurate information on the manufacturer’s website these days. Even Moleksine, who had been elusive about their paper weights in the past, now publish all the relevant details on their website. I think it would be more interesting to read about why I selected a notebook, who I think would enjoy it, and who I think should steer clear of it. What do you think?

Book Review: The Odyssey, Robert Fagles Translation, Narrated by Sir Ian McKellen

This was the first audiobook that I’ve ever listened to, and if it wasn’t part of the NYT Summer Reading Challenge to listen to an audiobook, I never would have listened to it. While I listen to podcasts, I don’t listen to audiobooks because I find that my mind tends to wander while listening and thus I absorb much less of the text than I otherwise would have. Reading is exercise for my brain, a deeply enjoyable and immersive pastime and somehow listening doesn’t provide me with the same effects.

So when I saw the “listen to an audiobook” part of the NYT Summer Reading Challenge I felt daunted. Then I remembered that I had been planning to reread The Odyssey and wondered if this might be an opportunity to experience a book that I’ve read three or four times in a new way.

So I searched Kobo books and lo and behold – they had my favourite Odyssey translation read by Sir Ian McKellen, no less. I only wish that they’d also had him read The Iliad, but no luck.

The Odyssey is an epic poem. It was performed by bards for decades upon decades before it was written down, and the Fagles translation keeps the rosy fingered poetic beauty of the piece. Sir Ian McKellen is a phenomenal actor with great sensitivity to poetry and text. The combination of both is astounding. The text leapt to life, felt rich and full of nueance that I had missed before. It was like the difference between reading a Shakespeare play and seeing it performed by first class actors on stage. I felt Odysseus’s anguish, Telemachus’s frustration, Penelope’s melancholy. They became real to me.

For 13 hours I was mesmerised. It was like being in a dark theatre with just Ian McKellen on stage bringing a whole world of wonder to life. The only sour part of it all were the short musical interludes, which I found jarring. There was no need for that embellishment, and I felt that it detracted and distracted from the overall piece.

I didn’t do the dishes while listening to this book. I had read The Odyssey three or four times already, studied it in the university more than once, and yet here it was completely fresh, challenging my notions of this book. Poetry is meant to be listened to, not read, and I think that I have found a use for audiobooks in my reading life.

Book Review: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel’s “Sea of Tranquility“ is difficult to review because the less you know about it going in, the more impactful it will be when you read it.

Like “This is How You Lose the Time War” this book has time travel as major plot element. Unlike that book, “Sea of Tranquility” is less a work of sci-fi and more of an exploration of human connection, hope and dare I say it, ethics. It just happens to use time travel as a way to introduce the main ethical conflicts to the main character (and his sister).

In an ever more isolated and isolating world, where events beyond our control often tear us apart “Sea of Tranquility” asks what does it mean to care about others? To seek connections with other people despite differences of time, space and circumstance? What price would you pay to preserve that connection with humanity?

This is a beautifully written and carefully plotted novel that doesn’t sacrifice its characters on the alter of its ideas. It will leave you pondering its depths long after you’ve turned over the last page – a sublime novel if ever I read one.

The NYT Summer Reading Challenge

My reading hit a bit of a slump in May, so when the New York Times came out with their summer reading challenge I decided to use it as an excuse to not only read more books, but also to read books that have been languishing on my shelves and my Kindle.

If you’re looking for a way to boost your attention span and get back to reading books and not just 3 minute social media posts, participating in a challenge such as this one is very beneficial. Since the challenge calls for you to make your own list of ten books to read during the summer, you can easily tailor it to your tastes. That means that you have a higher chance of both completing the challenge and enjoying it than if your would have been assigned a set list of books to read.

Here is the list of books that I selected and why I chose them:

Read a book published in the last year – I selected “The Faith of Beasts” by James SA Corey. It’s the second book in their new series, The Captive’s War, and though this will be a challenging book because it’s a dystopian sci-fi novel and it isn’t particularly short, I wanted to keep following this series to its conclusion. I expect good writing, a gripping plot, and some thought provoking ideas about human beings as a species.
Read a book in a genre you don’t typically read – I struggled a bit trying to decide which book to select for this category. I never read horror or romance, but I really don’t like these genres and I wasn’t willing to subject myself to them just for the sake of this challenge (if you love horror and romance that’s great! It’s just my personal taste that makes me avoid them). The NYT selected “Yesteryear” for their choice for this category, and since I very rarely read psychological thrillers I decided to select it too. This was just one of two books that I purchased for the sake of this challenge.
Read one of The New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century – The list is long so it took me a while to go over it and select a novel. I was debating whether to select “Bel Canto” or “Pachinko” and went with “Pachinko” in the end since I had already purchased it (it was part of the Tournament of Books a few years back). It’s on the long side, but so are most of the books that I had selected.
Read a really short, or a really long, book – since I have so many long books on my list, I selected to go with a short book for a change – James Stockdale’s “Courage Under Fire“. It’s a transcript of an address that he gave, and it’s less than 30 pages long – but a very impactful set of pages they are.
Read a classic you’ve been meaning to read (or revisit) – this one was easy – I was in the middle of reading “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius so I selected it for the classic I was reading. Of course my choice for audiobook also fits this category.
Read a book that takes place during the summer – this was hard to select, because it’s not a category that is easy to filter books by (unlike genre or length). Eventually I settled on “One Summer America 1927” which is a very long book (600 pages) but one that clearly fit the bill.
Read a book in translation – I debated whether to read “Breasts and Eggs” or “When the Cranes Fly South” and selected “Breasts and Eggs” because I had a feeling that it would be a more challenging book to read.
Read a book that’s been adapted for the screen – I’ve had the book “No Picnic on Mount Kenya” gathering dust on my shelf for years. I bought it at the legendary travel bookstore Standfords in London back when the store was a giant one at the end of Long Acre (it’s now not far from there, at Mercer Walk). It’s the story of three prisoners of war who escaped their camp just to climb mount Kenya, and it turns out that it’s been made into a pretty terrible film. I have no intention of watching the film, but this seemed like a good excuse to finally read this book, thus it was chosen.
Listen to an audiobook – I don’t listen to books – I read them, which made this one a serious challenge. Eventually I purchased “The Odyssey” audiobook, read by Sir Ian McKellen. It was the first audiobook that I’ve ever listened to, a 13 hour event. The book itself could have worked for the “(Re)read a classic” category of course, but I wanted to hear Ian McKellen’s rendering of this text – especially since it’s a work of poetry.
Check out and read a book from your local library – I went to the local library and after much debate picked up “Sea of Tranquility” even though I had never heard of it before. Emily St. John Mandel has written “Station Eleven,” which I have heard about and is considered to be a very good book, so I decided to give this book a try. It turned out to a real gem, so I’m glad that I found it and that this challenge pushed me to check it out.

The challenge officially ends at the end of August, but you can set your own rules and deadlines of course. I would recommend setting a deadline though, since they are useful motivators and will encourage you to read more every day.

As of writing this I have finished reading five out of the ten books that I’ve selected, and I’m almost three quarters through the sixth one. My secondary goal is to get back to reviewing books on this blog, so I will try and post a review for each of the books that I’ve read.

What do you think? Would you join such a challenge?

Book Review: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

I picked up this book because I was supposed to go see the West End musical based on it and I wanted to know what to expect before I went.

The book is built to be a tear-jerking, moving affair, and it delivers on its promise. Joyce clearly knows the tropes that we expect, and cleverly weaves her narrative in and around them. The things that you are sure to happen to Harold on his way don’t happen, though the narrative is well aware of their possibility. What you’d expect his wife Maureen to do is also something Joyce enjoy subverting. There is something delicious about seeing a capable writer at work.

In any case, the basic plot is that Harold, a recently retired company man who lives in a village in southern England is stuck in his life. His wife Maureen lives in the same house with him, both of them recluses, and spends her days cleaning the house, finding fault with everything Harold says or does (the couple live in separate rooms and have been for years) and complaining about him to their son David. Maureen keeps expecting David to come visit, and Harold seems to have no friends, no hobbies, no prospects, no future.

This all changes when Harold gets a letter from his friend Queenie, a coworker that he hasn’t been in touch with for 20 years. She’s in a hospice, dying from cancer, and the letter is her farewell note to Harold. It moves him deeply, and he decides to write back to her. Instead of just posting the letter, he starts to aimlessly walk from one postbox to another, each time postponing sending the note – until a chance conversation with a woman at a gas station has him setting on an ill conceived pilgrimage to Queenie’s hospice, 450 miles away in the border between England and Scotland. As he meets people on the way he contemplates about his past, and we slowly piece together what happened that brought Harold, Maureen and Queenie to where they are today.

There are moving bits, frustrating bits, and one big, gut-wrenching revelation that makes you want to hug all three characters tightly. But mostly it’s a story about invisible people, people that seem dull but have huge tragedies and love stories and dreams in their lives, a story about connecting with others and about finding redemption through your feet.

Is this book perfect? No. It’s like Harold – a bit frumpy, sometimes dull, but it has a lot of heart in it, good intentions and it’s worth spending an afternoon with, preferably with some hot tea and biscuits.

Book Review: The Pine Barrens by John McPhee

John McPhee is a master creative nonfiction writer. He excels at bringing people and places to life, bringing interest and life into topics that seem at first esoteric or dull (like oranges).

The Pine Barrens is a huge near wilderness sandy pine forest in New Jersey, enclosed by suburban industrial sprawl. A handful of people live there, (“pineys”) many of them living an almost pioneer way of life, steeped in folklore and local traditions. The pine, cedar and oak forest ecosystem is also unique, tempered seasonally by fire, growing on poor sandy soil, with cranberry and blueberry bogs dispersed among them.

McPhee zigzags across the land, painting a portrait of people and places, moving between past and present, science, history, folklore and myth like the master storyteller he is. It’s clear from the elegiac tone of this book that McPhee circa 1967-68 was expecting the place to be gone within a few years. Plans for a monstrous jetport, a sprawling city, industrial estate and housing was in the works, and the ecology, history and spirit of the place was about to be utterly destroyed. McPhee was there to document the Pine Barrens, preserve what he could before they were gone. They are still there, and the development fell through, like most other Pine Barren real-estate bonanzas.

Being McPhee he also shows you the developer’s side of the story, the state’s view of the place, and the darker side of the Pine Barrens and its people.

While I understand McPhee’s deliberate choice to make this a wandering narrative, much like the sandy trails in the forest that people get lost in, I think that The Pine Barrens isn’t the best of his writing precisely because of this structural choice. The resulting charm of the piece doesn’t make for the lack of “oomph” that other McPhee pieces have. Comparing The Pine Barrens with another elegiac book of his, Looking for a Ship, and you see that the ending lacks something. Perhaps a wildfire would have brought home the fragility and resilience of this unique place.

All in all, a recommended book, well worth your time even if it isn’t McPhee’s masterpiece.

Book Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

I bought A Visit from the Goon Squad back in 2011, as it was part of that year’s Tournament of Books. It has languished on my Kindle ever since. This year, however, I have decided to read the oldest unread books on my Kindle, and so it was A Visit from the Goon Squad’s turn.

First of all, the book has a dreadful name. It’s trying to be sophisticated, it ends up being uninformative and unappealing. It’s sounds like a book about comedians, or maybe a family saga of some kind, but it’s basically a string of partially connected episodes about people that work or have worked in the music industry.

I almost gave up on this book as about 50 pages in I found myself not liking any of the characters and finding the narrative dull and bland. Then Rhea appeared, and I found myself pulled into the story. She redeemed the book, and it got better and better as I read along.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a very readable book, apart from the deliberately dreadful writing of the only writer in the novel, Jules Jones. There’s a character that didn’t redeem himself – the more I saw of him the less I liked.

The book didn’t age well, and will likely age even worse with time. It’s embedded in a certain era – pre smart phones, social media and AI – but it’s not written in a way that will allow it to be timeless. The powerpoint penultimate chapter reads as a dated gimmick, and the last, “futuristic” chapter is truly terrible. It really brings the book down, as even for its time it serves mainly as a window to Egan’s biases and anxieties more than to the true zeitgeist of the time.

Egan’s choice to build the narrative on episodic encounters with loosely connected characters was groundbreaking for the time, and the book won a Pulitzer Prize. In 2019 Bernadine Evaristo will take this concept and do it much, much better with Girl, Woman, Other thus leaving Egan’s novel in the dust.

While I don’t regret reading A Visit from the Goon Squad I wouldn’t recommend it. It didn’t stand the test of time, there are much better books to read, and it’s attempt to capture the zeitgeist of a time so fleeting it practically didn’t exist (the oughts) isn’t worth the reader’s time. Read Evaristo’s novel instead.

Book Review: Uprooted, Noami Novik

A fairy tale for grown ups, Uprooted by Noami Novik is a beguiling novel about being deeply rooted in a place, and yet also uprooted, a perpetual stranger in your homeland and community.

“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.” Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life. Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon to keep its powers at bay. But he demands a terrible price for his help: one young woman handed over to serve him for ten years, a fate almost as terrible as falling to the Wood.

The next choosing is fast approaching, and Agnieszka is afraid. She knows-everyone knows-that the Dragon will take Kasia: beautiful, graceful, brave Kasia, all the things Agnieszka isn’t, and her dearest friend in the world. And there is no way to save her. But Agnieszka fears the wrong things. For when the Dragon comes, it is not Kasia he will choose.

Like all good fairy tales and myths, Uprooted has a compelling, readable narrative that sweeps you from the first paragraph about “Our Dragon” to the very end (which like good fairy tales also ends with Agnieszka talking about the Dragon). It evokes Polish and Russian folklore, Greek mythology, and classic fairy tales in a Polish medieval setting. You can tell just how much Novik knows and loves the source material she draws on, and how much respect she has for the cultures that wove these stories of magical beings, wizardry and mythic beasts to deal with the dark terrors of their world.

Novik is a magical story teller and Uprooted manages to be both very much part of the fantasy world that she creates, and also a timeless tale about identity, belonging, and love. There is a lot of heart in this adventure, a lot of compassion for the characters within it. Novik manages to create not only a very believable world, but a cast of real, nuanced characters: heroes with flaws, villains that you understand and feel compassion for.

Naomi Novik is a phenomenally good fantasy author, and this book justifiably won awards. If you liked her Scholomance series you will love Uprooted, and I am looking forward to reading more of Novik’s work.

Weekly Update – Sketches, Film Photography and a 10K Race

A hectic week but an interesting one.

I went to see a local production of Singer, a play by Peter Flannery. It was phenomenal but it kept me up at night, which meant that the following morning I headed straight to my local cafe. I sketched the barista but something didn’t work in terms of getting her face right – she turned out sadder than she is. Sketching tired is rough.

Here’s the rather messy pencil and pen sketch. I can tell just by the line quality that I was very, very tired.

A day later I went to sketch at the nearby park and you can see the difference in the line quality in this sketch:

Initial sketch:

Later that week the film photographs that I’d had developed were returned to me. Here are a few of my favourites:

The local community cat that I feed twice a day coming to say hi

I love the atmosphere that the film gives this simple photo:

All of these photos are unedited. I’ll likely clean them up later on.

Bridge over water at a nature reserve near Haifa

There was a fire on the roof of a nearby hotel. I took this photo a day after the fire, and you can see the damage:

Cat failing to hunt a crow:

A stall at the local farmer’s market:

A stall at the local farmer’s market. You can see the see in the background.

I was supposed to run at a 10k night race on Wednesday, but I wasn’t feeling too good and I was apprehensive about dealing with the crowds so I ran the distance by myself a few hours before the official race start. It was a good decision as I was really struggling during the first 3k – but I did manage to finish, and finish strong.

I finished reading “Helmet for My Pillow” by Robert Leckie (a powerful narrative, but not as punchy as “With the Old Breed”), read “Death of a Nurse” by M.C. Beaton as a palate cleanser, and I’ve now started “The Shattering Peace”, John Scalzi’s long awaited sequel to his Old Man’s War series.

I’ve been overwhelmed with the responses to my Pelikan Hubs post. Thank you all for your kindness and for the thought and effort you put into your comments. I read them all, I just wasn’t able to respond to all of them this week.

Speaking of the Hubs, all of my pre-hubs inked pens have been written dry, which means that I currently have a 100% Pelikan rotation, plus some Platinum Preppy’s that I use for sketching.

Have a great week!

Writing at Large

Primary Menu

Tag: Reading