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How long does it take to read Pachinko?

Min Jin Lee

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee takes about 9 hours 23 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 9 hours 23 minutes

A week or two of reading

First published 2017. 512 pages, about 140,800 words.

19 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 15 hours 39 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 9 hours 23 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 5 hours 52 minutes

The page count is the median across 17 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

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.

Content warnings (AI-checked, may be incomplete)
  • violence
  • sexual content
  • suicide
  • abuse
  • war

How these are chosen

Subjects: Fiction, Families, Literary, Cultural Heritage, Family Life, Historical

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