How long does it take to read Stealing Buddha's Dinner?
A Memoir
Bich Minh Nguyen
Stealing Buddha's Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen takes about 4 hours 59 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 59 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2007. 272 pages, about 74,800 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 19 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 59 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 7 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother's traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled "delicacies" of mainstream America capture her imagination. In Stealing Buddha's Dinner, the glossy branded allure of Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House Cookies becomes an ingenious metaphor for Nguyen's struggle to become a "real" American, a distinction that brings with it the dream of the perfect school lunch, burgers and Jell- O for dinner, and a visit from the Kool-Aid man. Vivid and viscerally powerful, this remarkable memoir about growing up in the 1980s introduces an original new literary voice and an entirely new spin on the classic assimilation story.
Subjects: Biography, Food, Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Immigrants, Childhood and youth
