Hooked on History (Zoom)


Event Details


History Lovers! This book club is for you! Each season we select a book for our first meeting to read together that covers a theme or time period of history. For our second session, the group reads from a list of books on the same topic to delve further into the theme.

The group will read Pachinko by Min Jin Lee for May’s meeting and then books focused on Korean history for June.

You can register and pick up a copy of Pachinko beginning the week of April 26 and the reading list for June’s meeting beginning on Monday, May 24 at the Reference Desk. For more information and to get the zoom link to participate in the discussions via Zoom, email Mary Bear Shannon at shannon@haverfordlibrary.org.

About Pachinko:

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.