Pachinko

I just finished Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel Pachinko, and am glad to have done so. To have read it, that is, not to have finished it. I enjoyed being there.

Maybe it's not a great, great novel from any formal perspective. Perhaps they won't be reading it in 100 years. But it's plenty good. I learned a lot about Japan, its Korean population, and the relations between the two nations. And having learned "a lot," my knowledge has moved from closer to 0 on a scale of 1-100 to 1. It will be great to keep going.

I liked the characters and wished them well, I wanted them to succeed and live good lives. In fact, I'd be happy to read a sequel. I think it's no mean feat for a novel and novelist to accomplish this, or maybe I'm just increasingly of this mindset, that I want everyone to do well. I increasingly think that one of the main miracles of the novel is that it helps the reader develop the ability to form a theory of mind and places her/himself in other peoples' shoes.

Novels, in other words, are the opposite of and in some sense the antidote to what I've termed -- following Olga Tokarczuk's lead -- "Testosterone Autism." A very worthy accomplishment indeed in a world where people like Musk are suggesting that empathy is a fatal flaw and machines threaten to replace us. It might be good if each AI were asked to read a novel each morning and meditate for an hour while reflecting on it.