Hello Subscribers!

I am not much of a reader, it may surprise you to know, but I have read a few great books this year and, for this newsletter, I would like to share my absolute favourite of 2025.

A very sketchy review of Pachinko

Favourite read of 2025: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

My wife is an extremely expressive reader. She's a bit of a night owl (I am not) and reads late into the night, sometimes waking me up with gasps and occasionally a very tense, pregnant silence that means she's crying. When she read Pachinko earlier in the year, it was such a second-hand rollercoaster of emotion that I had to read it too, just to see.

Now, I'm a bit of a robot when it comes to reading; I hardly ever laugh out loud unless something is incandescently funny, and I never cry. Like, never. But I did both, whilst reading this, and I've thought about it so much since finishing it, which is unusual for me as well.

Pachinko is an epic historical fiction about a Korean woman (Sunja) and her family across several generations. The timeframe of the story takes in most of the 20th century, including the Japanese annexation of Korea, Word War II, the Korean War and life in Japan in the seventies and eighties. It depicts (mainly through Sunja's eyes) the experience of Koreans living under the brutal occupation, then living as part of an immigrant community in Japan before, during and after the wars. This is a history I knew so little about before reading this story, and one of the reasons it had such an impact. It made me confront my own laziness as as reader and as a student of history, i.e. failing to seek out points of view beyond the euro-centric ones I was handed in school, and in movies and such. This book made me want to learn more about the history of Korea.

The two things I love most about Pachinko are the characters and the writing style. Sunja is such an inspirational character; in my mind, she is definitively heroic. She is brave, resilient and practical. I unabashedly admire her, I think partly because in her I can see, or imagine, so many real-life women in the world (now and in the past) who have such strength. Sunja's character is born from the writing style, which is deceptively plain, or understated, but so evocative I felt like I could "see" everything happening in front of me. Also, or perhaps as a consequence of the clarity of the writing style, it was completely effortless to read. Min Jin Lee is able to paint characters very vividly, with so few words, that even those who aren't in the story for long leave huge impressions. Like Sunja's father Hoonie, who is kind of an angel of a man although he features only briefly.

The way the characters talk and think about love and faith is very moving. I'm not Christian and nor am I very spiritual in a free-form sense, and sometimes I find the depiction of religious belief alienating, because it's not an aspect of being that I understand instinctually. Sunja's husband, Isak, is a Christian minister, and through his perspective you get these lovely moments that speak to me of what the experience of having faith must be like. For example, there's this line from Pastor Shin who, while advising Isak about his decision to marry Sunja, reflects on how the traumatic loss of his own family has affected his faith: changing it, but not destroying it:

The book is full of quiet and beautiful moments like these. It made me think about how wonderful and tragic it is to have a family, children, people you care about. I loved the different sorts of relationships depicted in the story; the subtle romance between Sunja and Isak. The bond between parents and children, like between Sunja's son Mozasu and his son Solomon. How devoted Sunja and her sister-in-law, Kyunghee, are to each other (together I think they could hold the weight of the world).

I seriously loved this book so much, and I hope maybe I've convinced you to give it a try when there's room in your to read lists.

Thank you for reading!