The Young Reader's Review

Hello and welcome to The Young Reader’s Review! It’s been a while but now we meet again to talk lit. It’s currently an early Saturday morning, the sun is timidly shining onto the idle suburban Tokyo streets, gradually melting away a thin layer of frosty dew. I am currently sitting at my desk, accompanied with an as heartwarming as warming milky cup of tea, casually flipping through the pages of the play that I will be reviewing today. Did I say “play”? For it has been a while since I have reviewed a play on this blog. Nevertheless, I will not be presenting to you just any play arbitrarily picked off the shelves of some local library (even though that is actually somewhat tempting), oh no, I will be writing about one of the cornerstones of American theater:  the one and only The Crucible by Arthur Miller. I feel that it would be morally incorrect to subject this work of art to summarization due to its extreme complexity and depth. But, in case you’ve never heard of...

Hello and welcome to The Young Reader’s Review ! It’s that time of year: summer is slowly beginning to tire, autumn is faint-heartedly stepping onto the stage and we are all starting to recalcitrantly settle back into the monotony of the passing days at work, or, in my case, at school, perhaps taking a weary and desperate look every once and a while at the calendar to count the days until we will be able to, once again, momentarily forget our daily routine. Notwithstanding this, with a couple hundreds of pages bound into a book, you can submerge yourself into any other world at any given moment. If you follow my blog on Instagram (@theyoungreadersreview), you probably noticed that, this summer, I tried to challenge myself by striving to push my limits in the matter of what I read (feel free to share what you read this summer in the comment section!) Therefore, I comprised a list of all of the books that daunted me the most and the first work that made its name on this list...

¡Bienvenidos una vez más a  The Young Readers Review para una entrada de blog en español! Espero que estés pasando un verano agradable, caliente, soleado y, por supuesto, lleno de lectura. Ahora mismo en Tokio, el calor es casi insoportable y paso el día tendido en la cama, medio muerta, en mí habitación climatizada.   No, estoy bromeando, a veces voy a la tienda a comprar helado (ahora soy experta   en helados japoneses).   Pero, el otro día, decidí aventurarme a la librería internacional Kinokuniya en Tokio. Por supuesto, me dije a mí mismo que   "solo miraría" (jajaja, esta anécdota simplemente demuestra que no tengo ningún autocontrol). Pero vi, con   el rabillo del ojo, la "Poesía completa de Federico García Lorca" y simplemente no pude resistir a la tentación. Mientras leía, el poema "Si mis manos pudieran deshojar" me conmovió en particular por su originalidad y sensibilidad, y es el poema cuya interpretación voy a compartir con ustede...

Hello and welcome to The Young Reader’s Review ! After watching many “What/How many books did I read in a year” videos on Youtube, I was very tempted to make a post of the sort myself since I enjoyed watching this content. After doing a poll on Instagram (add this blog on Instagram; link in sidebar!) where you all ever so kindly expressed your support, I decided to go through with this idea. Now, I started this list at the beginning of August last year (so pretty much a year ago) so here are the books that I read in an entire year. I hope that this might also give you some ideas to which books you could read in the near future! As a side note, I read all of the books in their original language except for those in German, Japanese and Russian since I unfortunately do not master those languages (yet). I also decided to include novellas and plays since I found that reading, for example, a Shakespearean play can be a more difficult read compared to some young adult novels. Anyw...

Hello and welcome to The Young Reader’s Review ! Summer is finally here and hopefully, wherever you are, you are lucky enough to be enjoying nice weather and to be wallowing in leisure. I am currently working on an ambitious review for this blog (like always) that will be posted within the next couple of weeks but I recently read something that just struck me as being the utmost perfect summer read: the collection of short essays A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees (1330-1332) by the Japanese Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenko ( 吉田兼好 , 1283?- 1350?) (translated to English by Donald Keene). These short essays that range from the length of a sentence to several pages long are actually extracted (by the Penguin Little Black Classics collection) from the larger work Essays in Idleness ( 徒然草 ) which is not only Kenko’s most famous oeuvre but is also considered to be one of the most important works of medieval Japanese literature. I know what you’re thinking: you saw that this was...

Hello and welcome to The Young Reader’s Review! For those of you who do not know, about five months ago, I moved to the Land of the Rising Sun. To avoid getting carried away, I am going to keep it very simple by saying that it was a cultural shock. Also, considering that I have (finally) been disenthralled from any school-related constraints and that the Japanese tsuyu rainy season is upon me, it is safe to say that you might notice a slight peak in productivity on this blog (or the reviews will be (dangerously) more analytical and in depth, or I will spend the rest of the summer lying prostate on my bed eating ice cream). Anyway. Being a literary soul, one of the first things that piqued my interest in Japan was obviously literature and I couldn’t help but compare Japanese literature with the Western literature that I had known my entire life. My impressions as a foreigner of literature’s place in the Japanese society deserves an entire blog post to itself, but I will be tod...