Book World Tour: South Korea

I'm here to start my "world tour" with one of my most recent reads and one of my favorite reads: Pachinko by Min-Jin Lee and Human Acts by Han Kang (respectively).

Pachinko was a brilliant novel, and is now being adapted into a brilliant TV series (which I cover for TV Fanatic). The novel follows Sunja and her family through multiple generations as they deal with love, loss, segregation, and other serious issues. It focuses a lot on Japanese occupation of Korea, and how it affected the daily lives of the Korean residents.

The adaptation is working quite well, but it's hard to adapt something as expansive as this book. If you check out the series, I highly suggest checking out the novel as well, because you will get a more fleshed-out experience! Both the series and the novel are worth checking out individually as well, depending on your preferred way of consuming media.

My other South Korean recommendation is Human Acts by Han Kang. It is a fictionalized account of the student uprising in Gwangju in 1980. Things escalate when a boy dies, and the story describes the tale of these brave people searching for a voice.

I learned about pieces of history I didn't know much about from these two novels, and definitely think you should give them a read!

Next stop on my book tour: Japan

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