Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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One of my year’s best already?

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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This historic drama has all the elements I love about a book – great characters and a compelling story that we follow through several generations of the same family, from Korea to Japan and beyond. In the background of Pachinko is Japan’s occupation of Korea and the experience of Koreans in Japan before, during, and after this occupation. We begin in the 1880s in Korea. Hoonie is the son of parents who run a boardinghouse for fisherman. Their lives are meager, but stable. Hoonie eventually […]

Blind Date with a Book

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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Last spring I read about something called “Blind Date With a Book” that sounded like fun. Libraries apparently do them, and it involves choosing a book, wrapped in paper so you cannot see the title, based on some descriptive words (mystery, romance, other voices, etc). It’s a fun way to change up your reading and maybe try something you wouldn’t have picked for yourself. Over on Etsy, a number of sellers offer this same service for a range of fees and I decided to give […]

A Tale as old as Time

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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At the turn of the century, a cleft-lipped, clubfooted boarding house owner in rural Korea marries fifteen year old Yangjin, the third daughter of an impoverished farmer. She is no beauty, but neither is Hoonie, her husband. They’re a good match. Together, they run a boarding house in a small, seaside town on an idyllic but poor part of the Korean coast. They try to have children, and after their first three babies die their fourth, a daughter named Sunja, is born. Hoonie dotes upon […]

Immigrants–they get the job done

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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Pachinko (2017) by Min Jin Lee is my second Cannonball Bingo entry. I am using Pachinko to fill the “Uncannon” entry–a book not written by an old, white man. Min Jin Lee is a woman who was born in South Korea before moving to the United States at age seven. Even better, her book is a four-generational story of Koreans living as immigrants in Japan before and after World War II. It certainly gave me a new perspective on the lives of people whose stories I previously knew nothing about. […]

CBRBingo – Far and Away. An epic that is truly epic.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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I have been waiting a loooooong while for this book to get into my eager hands. A work friend extolled its virtues and it is the September book club pick for one of the clubs I’m in AND I figured it would be good for any number of bingo squares. I went with Far and Away because both the geographical and cultural differences from where I’m sitting in the American Midwest to rural Korea in the 1900s are expansive. While I was reading it, I […]

When the Deck is Stacked Against You, Switch to Pachinko

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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I loved this book so much. I think it’s one of my favorites int he last couple years. It’s kind of a quiet story it’s about normal people living relatively normal lives, or at least normal for their situation, so it’s kind of a quite, slow meander of a book. There is no real climax or resolution to speak of, it’s a bit more circular in it’s plotting. This is the story of four generations in a Korean family that lived during the Japanese occupation […]



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