FIRST READING INITIATIVE

Hello there, I know it’s been a while since my last post, but I don’t have much time, and not much to talk about, but today i’d like to talk about the first readin initiative of the year: the Asian March.

This initiative pretends to approach readers to Asian writters, by reading books written by Asian writters or settled in Asian countries.

Keeping all this in mind I would like to recomend some books related to this initiative.

My first recomendation would be The carriage of women by Anita Nair, a book settled in India, that tells us the stories of a group of women during a travel by train across the country.

The second recomendation would be East Wind, West Wind by Pearl S. Buck, settled in China, the novel let the reader see the contrast between Chinese cultura and Occidental cultura at the begining of the Twentieth Century.

My last recomendatin would be the book A geek in Japan by Héctor García, in its pages the author speaks about his experience living and working in Japan and the contrast between Japanese culture and Spanish culture

In this small article I just wanted to talk about this initiative and to make some recomendations related to it.

A GEEK IN JAPAN (HÉCTOR GARCÍA)

 

For every fan of manga, anime, J – pop or anyone intrigued by these and other aspects of Japanese cultura this book is a guide to the land that is the source of it.

THE AUTHOR: HÉCTOR GARCÍA

He was born in Spain in 1981, and after earning his MS in software engineering and working for CERN in Switzerland he moved to Japan, where he worked on voice recognition software and later for Digital garaje, developing the technology needed for Silicon Valley startups like twitter.

He has been living in Tokyo since 2004 and during his free time he runs www.kirainet.com , oneof the most – read blogsin the world in Spanish language and writes books about his experiencies in Japan.

THE BOOK

Hello there, today as my first book review for this Project I bring yoy a book in which the autor tells the reader about living ad working in Japan and the cultural differences between Héctor García’s culture and Japanese Culture.

In my case I have been Reading books settled in Japan or writen by Japanese authors thanks to a Reading inititive (I might talk about it next year)  so like the book seemed quite interesting, I decided to begin to read it.

The English edition of the book is published by Tuttle, in it we can find really interesting information, since the book talks about Japanese history of the country, diferente places to visit, most of them not quite known ouside the country (for example Hector García speaks about a museum dedicated to Ramen) and his experiences living and working there, this helps to show Japanese daily life (men and women go out in separated groups, and the only mix at the nomikais, or the parties organized at work)

The most interesting thing about this book, is the way he shows the Japanese society and cultura, and the shock, he seems to suffer, as a foreginer living there (the autor was born in Spain), also is interesting the way he presents a touristic view of Japan giving advice on how to prepare everything to visit the country and what we can visit outside the most known places there.

Actually I do recomend you to read this book if you are interested in Japanese cultura ore ven if you want to travel to Japan