logo    Good Day Books (Issue #53, March 2010)
Tel: 03-5421-0957    Email: goodday@gol.com     Website: www.gooddaybooks.com
  BookNotes Speaker Series

Our BookNotes speaker on 28 March 2010 (Sunday) will be Azby Brown, the author of Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan (Kodansha International, 2010). If you read the extended excerpt from Just Enough in Issue #828 of Metropolis  (February 5, 2010), you were probably as impressed as I was by Azby Brown's superb wordsmanship and draftsmanship. Having heard Azby speak at the Press Club in Yurakucho last month, I can assure you that his speaking skill is comparable to his writing and drawing skills.
The well-researched narratives and drawings that comprise Just Enough depict vanished ways of life from the point of view of a contemporary observer. They show how people lived in Japan during the late Edo period (1603-1868), when traditional culture and technology were at their peaks, just before Japan opened itself to the West and joined the ranks of the industrialized nations. They describe a people who found solutions to problems of energy, water, materials, food, and population that confront us today. The Edo-era Japanese forged a society that was conservation-minded, waste-free, well-housed, well-fed, and economically robust and that also bequeathed to us admirable and enduring standards of design and beauty.
To attend Azby Brown's BookNotes presentation on 28 March 2010, you must buy from our shop a copy of Just Enough.

During the next few months, our BookNotes speakers will include:
James Church, the author of Bamboo and Blood (Minotaur Books, 2010). Bamboo and Blood is the third of the mystery novels set in contemporary North Korea and presented through the eyes of their chief character, Inspector O. The Inspector O mysteries, written by the former intelligence officer whose pen name is James Church, provide probably the best unclassified account of how North Korea functions and why it survived after most communist regimes collapsed. Church first visited Good Day Books and introduced himself after Mark Schreiber's 2009 BookNotes presentation on mysteries set in contemporary Asia.
To attend James Church's upcoming BookNotes presentation, you must buy from our shop a copy of Bamboo and Blood. Good Day Books now has in stock paperback copies of Bamboo and Blood, which went on sale in the US just last month, as well as paperback copies of the first two Inspector O mysteries, A Corpse in the Koryo and Hidden Moon.
Donald Keene, the author/editor of So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers  (Columbia University Press, 2010). In his 2006 and 2008 BookNotes presentations, Professor Keene impressed all members of his audiences not only with his command of the subject matter of his books, but also with his warm responses to questions. The diaries selected by Professor Keene for So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish provide illuminating personal accounts written by gifted writers, some of whom he knew well, concerning conditions in Japan during World War II and the immediate postwar years. Weaving archival materials together with personal reflections and the diaries themselves, Professor Keene has produced an entirely original portrait of wartime and postwar Japan.
To attend Donald Keene's upcoming BookNotes presentation, you must buy from our shop a copy of So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish, which will be published in April 2010.
The dates for the BookNotes presentations by James Church and Donald Keene have not yet been fixed.

On 28 February 2010, David Chester, the author of Freelancing in Tokyo: A Unique Guide to Achieving Financial Success in Japan's Most Expensive City (Shining Hour Publishing, 2010), shared with an SRO audience information indispensable to successful freelancing in Tokyo.

BookClubs

On 14 March, members of our Non-Native Speakers' BookClub will discuss One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

On 28 March, our BookClub members will discuss Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick