What a great way to start off the year, by successfully completing Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge. I even read the 3 books I originally set out to, without substituting any, and read an extra book too. Yay me!Books completed:
1. Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata
2. The Dancing Girl of Izu and other stories - Yasunari Kawabata
3. The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
4. Tales of Moonlight and Rain - Akinari Ueda
Best book(s) I read for the challenge?
I enjoyed all the books I read but I think I'll go with Tales of Moonlight and Rain simply because I found the tales fascinating. I really enjoyed Murakami's stories too so that would be a close second. Interesting how it worked out that except for Snow Country, the other 3 books were collections of stories.
Book(s) I could have done without?
None of them. They were certainly all worth reading.
Any new authors? Will I read them again?
Akinari Ueda. I'd be interested to read more of his work although it seems that not a lot of it is translated into English, at least not in book form.
Yasunari Kawabata. I'm intrigued so I'll definitely be reading more by him in the future.
Best thing about the challenge? What did I learn?
It got me motivated again to read Japanese Literature and I realised that there are so many more books out there that I want to try. I'm always interested in reading about Japan but it's so easy to get distracted by other books too. I'm obviously not going to read only JLit from now on but I'm quite eager to read more of them.
Thank you so much Bellezza for hosting this challenge!
Congrats on finishing the challenge! I'll have to look up the Ueda book, darn it. Blog-hopping is a killer.
ReplyDeleteThanks Nancy. Nice to start the year off with a successful challenge. Blog-hopping is bad for the wishlist/wallet, isn't it? :)
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on finishing the challenge, Tanabata!
ReplyDeleteThanks Literary Feline!
ReplyDelete