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How long does it take to read The Strangeness of Beauty?

Lydia Y. Minatoya

The Strangeness of Beauty by Lydia Y. Minatoya takes about 7 hours to read at 250 words a minute.

About 7 hours

A weekend read

First published 1999. 382 pages, about 105,050 words.

14 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 11 hours 40 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 7 hours
Fast, 400 words a minute 4 hours 23 minutes

The page count is the median across 1 edition, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

"When Etsuko Sone's sister dies in childbirth in Seattle's shabby Japantown, love for the precocious child catapults Etsuko back across the Pacific and into the austere samurai household of her mysterious mother, Chie - a woman who rejected Etsuko at birth. The dubious reconciliation is for the sake of little Hanae, that she might learn her Fuji heritage and the Zen lessons of humility, dignity, self-discipline, and grace."--BOOK JACKET. "In Japan, Etsuko is the ultimate outsider: a returning emigrant in a land she left years before; a common woman thrust into a house of secrets and riches; a childless mother and a motherless daughter. As Etsuko and Hanae do their often quite comic best to adapt to life within Chie's samurai household, Japan is changing in dangerous ways. Worldwide economic strife strips Japan's people of food and clothing even as wartime preparations strip them of information and freedoms. Chie and Etsuko greet the mounting militarism with resistance, and when the imperial army cuts cruelly into Chinese Manchuria, accusations of treachery, of antipatriotism, begin to rain on the Fuji household. It is then that the women realize their separate independence is their common bond. It is then that Etsuko finds hidden strength to pursue meaning and beauty in a situation beyond her control."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects: Fiction, Mothers and daughters, Women, History, Fiction, historical, general, Japan, fiction

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