Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

‘Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way’

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

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I visited Seoul in March for a flash holiday and on my way back, I stopped in a bookstore at Incheon airport. In their small English section, the only books they provided were English translations of books by South Korean authors or travel guides for the country. No Tim Cook biography, no Mitch Albom, no Dan Brown or whatever else you’d typically find in an airport bookshop. I found that so clever — restricting the English-language offerings to art created by South Koreans. This capitalistically […]

Well.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

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Well, this was a thing. This book is told in three parts, from three different perspectives: Mr. Cheong, Brother-in-law, and In-hye. All three parts, told over the course of about three years, are centered around a woman named Yeong-hye. She is in what appears to be a fairly loveless marriage with Mr. Cheong, who seems to pride himself on doing as little as possible. He works a job that pays him the most without requiring him to work hard. He’s not attracted to Yeong-hye, and […]

Grim But Well Written

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

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The Vegetarian is divided into three parts, told from the perspective of three different characters. The main character, Yeong-hye, does not have a voice, although she is the one around which everything revolves. The first section is from her husband’s POV, the second from her brother-in-law and eventually lover’s POV, and the last is from her sister’s POV. The book dives right in with Yeong-hye deciding to become a vegetarian after a graphic and disturbing dream. Her vegetarianism becomes extreme and causes her to become […]

The Vegetarian

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

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Trigger warning: Sexual assault Wow. I really enjoyed this. The book took a lot of twists and turns and I love how Kang turned it into three separate parts. There were so many terrible characters in this one (Yeong-hye’s husband, her brother in law) that you felt for Yeong-hye and what causes her to turn vegan. I will say that this book maybe would have worked better as a short story. The last third of the book just drags IMHO. I think part 1 was […]

“I forgive no one, and no one forgives me.”

Human Acts by Han Kang

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The Gwangju Uprising was a popular revolt calling for the democratization of South Korea in 1980. Students who protested against the martial law government were imprisoned, tortured, raped, or executed by government troops which led to citizens taking up arms against them. The murder of fifteen-year-old Dong-Ho by soldiers is the event that loosely connects the individual stories in this book that take place during the uprising itself and then over the following 30 years. This is a book that can make a reader lose […]

There is none of us whom life regards with any partiality.

The White Book by Han Kang

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This is the third book translated into English by the Korean writer Han Kang. Her previous works are The Vegetarian and Human Acts. I thought the Vegetarian was a little too out there for me and I didn’t really engage with it particularly well, and it’s also quite off-putting by design. But I really liked Human Acts, which told a very human story through an inhuman set of tragedies. This book is somewhere in between. There’s a lot of really interesting writing going on, but […]



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