Friday Friyay: 'Pachinko' by Min Jin Lee

Happy Friday! This weekend I am hoping to start Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. It's another one I'm reading together with my cousin. Technically it was my turn to pick a book for us, but there's been a lot going on so my mind wasn't really on it. Then she suggested Pachinko and it was exactly what I had been hoping to read next!

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant — and that her lover is married — she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.

Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters — strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis — survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.

Book Beginnings is at home on Rose City Reader, hosted by Gilion Dumas, and Friday 56 at Freda's Voice, hosted by Freda. I'll also be joining the Book Blogger Hop, hosted by Billy over at Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer.

BB:

'Yeongdo, Busan, Korea

History has failed us, but no matter.' 1%

Wow, what an opening... The directness of the first part of the sentence and then the casualness of the second part. It shouldn't work, but it really does! This really does make me want to keep reading to figure out who has this opinion and why history is such a let down for them. I can empathise though, I do feel like we haven't learned enough from our history in the West and that, as such, it is letting us down.

F56:

'Noa did not look up. He found himself writing down everything Akiko said, because it upset him to think that this could be true.' 56%

Not sure what exactly is upsetting Noa, but I completely know what it's like to keep your head down while you think about what you've just heard. That is me in a looooot of meetings! 

BBH:

This week's question was submitted by our host Billy himself:

Do you drink tea or coffee while reading?

Great question! I'm a biiiig coffee drinker, especially in the morning. So if I'm reading in the morning then I'm absolutely sipping a cup of coffee with my book. But if I'm reading in the afternoon it will either be a glass of Coke Zero or, depending on if it's autumn/winter/chilly, a cup of tea. (If I'm on holiday, it could also be a glass of wine!) My biggest problem, however, is that I get caught up in my book so by the time I remember to take a sip, it's cold... My life is very hard.

So that's it for this week! What are you reading? And what's in your mug?