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The past few Sundays have seen some great links in our Nichi-Yōbi News round-ups. I'm hoping to find a few quiet minutes to store them all on the J-Lit resources page for posterity, but for now, you can always check out all the pages for some great news, reviews and links to free online J-Lit.
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We've also been very fortunate, spoiled even, by the number of books offered for our
Golden Kin-Yōbi giveaways. So far, we've had twelve happy winners, and our final giveaway (which closes on Thursday!) will produce six more. Many thanks again to all the contributing publishing houses: PM Press, Pushkin Press, Columbia University Press, Kurodahan Press, Stone Bridge Press and Peter Owen Publishers.
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This year, we've continued every Wednesday with our J-Lit Giants series, and 2014 has seen five more greats of Japanese Literature inducted into our pantheon. This time around, we even managed to make up for some of last year's oversights - both Nobel laureates (Kenzaburo Oe and Yasunari Kawabata) were honoured, and Yoko Ogawa and Banana Yoshimoto became the first female members of our hall of fame. Many thanks to Matt Todd for his excellent contribution on Shusaku Endo too :)*****
Finally, we had a few more events happening this year. Many people have submitted their reviews (see the 2014 Book Reviews tab at the top of the page), and the linky will remain open for a week or so for you to get your late reviews in. Jacqui was kind enough to submit a guest review of Hiromi Kawakami's Strange Weather in Tokyo (AKA The Briefcase), and we also had two group readalongs. The first, Yoko Ogawa's The Diving Pool, was a great success - the second, Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood... wasn't ;)
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Thanks to everyone who has taken part over the past month, whether that entailed taking part in the readalongs, posting reviews, leaving comments or just trying to win books - it all helps make the event what it is :) But that's it for 2014; it's been a lot of fun, but pretty frenetic too (I'm due for a rest now...).
If you're lucky, I might see you all in 2015... ;)
