How long does it take to read Hunger?
Lan Samantha Chang
Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang takes about 3 hours 31 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 31 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1998. 192 pages, about 52,800 words.
8 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 52 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 31 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 12 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
These stories reveal the lives of immigrant families haunted by lost loves. The characters, whose culture and families have been lost to the forces of history, mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment. Lan Samantha Chang shows how history impinges upon family love, as she explores the profound and painful ties between husband and wife, parent and child, sister and sister. A ghost seduces a young girl into a flooded river. A mother commands a daughter to avenge her father's death. The title novella is told by a woman whose love for an exiled musician compels her into a tragic marriage: her husband's unfulfilled desires nearly destroy their children. Again and again, Chang asks the question: Is ordinary love not a kind of burden, stifling and terrifying in the choices and responsibilities it forces on us? And yet we yearn for it, suffer for it, define ourselves by our experience of it, cannot live without it.
Subjects: Chinese Americans, Fiction, Social life and customs, Chinese American families, Immigrants, Fiction, sagas
