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Showing posts from July, 2018

What books did I read in a year? How can you read more?

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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...

A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees by Yoshida Kenko (吉田兼好)

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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...