What are you reading?

[PerpetualChange]

It's been a bad year for studying Chinese, but a good year for reading China-related stuff. 

 

Reading a few things concurrently: 

 

Elegies of Chu, Translated by Nicholas Morrow Williams

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/elegies-of-chu-9780198818311?cc=us&lang=en&

 

I had the pleasure of making Nick's acquaintance when I was a student at HKBU, and know what a great scholar he is. I've been wanting to re-immerse in Sinology stuff for a bit now, but haven't had the time to do what I used to do (painfully grind through classical texts). So, I compromised to allow myself to read some translations, just wanting to get back into it. I really like the introductory notes, and the translation is very readable/interpretable and reasonably poetic. One think I don't like is, all the annotations are in the back of the book, and not marked in the text itself. So, you don't know if a line has an annotation or not, until you flip to the back. A bit of a pain. 

 

Julia Lovell - The Great Wall

This one's OK. Lovell's observations are kind of trite, and she seems to know it. But there are some interesting anecdotes. I'll keep going in hopes that it gets better. 

 

Imperial Twilight, by Stephen Platt

I'm listening to the audiobook and it is really freaking good! Very fascinating, equal amount of time and research given to "both sides" of the conflict, with plenty of interesting anecdotes and research to help "set the stage". I should be through it in a couple of weeks at the pace that I'm listening, and will likely be super eager to continue reading from there. 

 

All this has also encouraged me to start studying a bit again, so I picked up an Children's Annotated Copy of the Three Character Classic that I'd bought on a book binge a few years ago. It's really great. The poem is annotated in full, with modern language, explanatory notes, and an additional story further highlighting the wisdom of the work. All of this appears to be written at, I'd guess, the equivalent of an early primary school student's reading level. So, perfect for a foreigner. 

 

Here's the book... https://www.chinesebookonline.com/store/product/75515/白話注音三字經_二冊.html

If anyone knows anything else like this physically available... let me know! I'm very interested! 

 

 

 

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

On 4/15/2024 at 12:38 PM, 杰娃娃 said:

Another author who gripped me is 紫金陈. 无证之罪 really kept me on the edge of my seat all the way through.

Yes! It did the same for me. Thanks for the recommendation.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

 炒飯狙擊手 by 張國立 is manageable and I'm enjoying it so far, but reading on paper is always more laborious than reading on a computer. The ability to automatically insert pinyin or zhuyin only onto characters I don't recognize, and easy access dictionaries and translators, just make reading a whole lot more enjoyable and less of a chore. So to give myself some easy reading for coffee breaks I'm also reading 草房子 by 曹文軒. It's apparently well-known among jiǎntǐ-philes and I think it's been mentioned on one of the forums before. Though pretty good Traditional versions exist online, such as this one.

[Woodford]

Just completed 在工作中，看到中国. It marks the end of my goal of reading 50 books. I was actually quite surprised by this book; I thought it would be some kind of celebration of the spirit of China's hard-working people (and it is, to some extent), but it's actually really gritty, realistic, and even quite dark at times. It's a selection of online articles that were originally posted on social media, written by various authors. Almost all of the stories are overwhelmingly negative, relating accounts of hardship, difficult bosses, unrealistic expectations, grueling working conditions, etc. Below are a few examples:

--A person who worked for a TV shopping network that found itself getting replaced by the new trend of online shopping. As the business began to suffer and workers got laid off, the company resorted to selling questionable/scammy products, and the person feels conflicted.

 

--A man who works in a remote, rural "switching" station for trains, where he manages traffic so that two oncoming trains don't crash into each other. The work is extremely isolating, and there are no big towns nearby with anything to do for fun. He was promised a nice promotion to a better job, but it never seems to happen. Some fresh, young talent gets hired to work there, but they get bored and never stay long, leaving the older workers to stay and fend for themselves. He quietly accepts his fate and spends his days building traditional musical instruments and playing on them.

--A locksmith who helps people open locked doors. His skill would get him into pretty dangerous situations (like when the police need him to open the door of an armed fugitive who refuses to come out and surrender). 

 

--A woman who gets hired for what looks like a nice tech job that promises upward mobility, but it turns out to be a job where she has to review illegal/disturbing/sexual content and sensor it for a social media platform. It's psychologically damaging, and management expects the workers to process through the disturbing content at stupidly superhuman levels of speed. "You're not going fast enough! Do it faster!"

 

--A man who gets hired as a manager for a big Chinese company, where he grows frustrated with the "996" schedule there. Are people staying at work because they have a lot of actual work to do? As he discovers, no. No, they aren't. It's all about external appearances, and making it look like your team is working hard by putting in lots of extra hours. He thinks it's stupid to spend all this extra time (and make yourself available after hours via group chats on your mobile phone) for no good purpose. It's inefficient. People should just do their allotted work and go home. But then he realizes that the culture is built around this dynamic, and he gets punished for rebelling against it.

--A Russian visitor who despaired of the Russian economy and successfully worked some "white monkey" jobs in China, but then slowly comes to realize that such a lifestyle is difficult to sustain for long.

--A woman who works as an administrator over a neighborhood, who had to check in on people, deliver them food, and quarantine them during the COVID pandemic. She faced some extremely tense and dangerous emergency situations.

 

--A man who participates in a failed Chinese startup whose objective is to make an "AI Robot assistant" to teach English to Chinese kids through story books. It's a fascinating case study; the author documents all the poor decisions of the CEO/founder, the lack of foresight, the poor planning, wacky and inconsistent leadership, intellectual property theft, etc. It was amazing, to say the least.

So I suppose I've ended on a high note! I'm conflicted about how to continue. I want to read at least a little bit as I work on my listening skills. Maybe 15 minutes of news articles a day, or 15 minutes of slowly working through another book. I can see the advantages and disadvantages of each, so I'm just not sure. It's always good to maintain literacy in a language, so I'll figure out some kind of method. Whatever I do, I think I want to (for the most part) leave behind all the formal exercises of dictionary lookup and flashcards.

[lordsuso]

Congratulations on achieving your (very impressive) goal @Woodford! I'm looking forward to see how you approach listening, as it is also a weakness of mine.

[sanchuan]

On 6/10/2024 at 10:46 PM, Woodford said:

Maybe 15 minutes of news articles a day, or 15 minutes of slowly working through another book.

Why not both, and then some? Surely enough days in the week to do one or the other, as the mood strikes! You don't want to restrict your reading diet to one genre alone (all the more so if it's a daily habit...)

 

On 6/10/2024 at 10:46 PM, Woodford said:

Whatever I do, I think I want to (for the most part) leave behind all the formal exercises of dictionary lookup and flashcards.

👌

[Woodford]

On 6/11/2024 at 3:24 AM, lordsuso said:

Congratulations on achieving your (very impressive) goal @Woodford! I'm looking forward to see how you approach listening, as it is also a weakness of mine.

Thanks! I'd have to say that my listening has gotten to an "okay" level, and reading has really helped it to get there. If I hadn't read these last 50 books, then my listening would be way, way worse than it is. I think YouTube videos are going to be my best method going forward (so I can see people's faces/mouths/expressions and get visual cues, just like when I'm listening to somebody in "real life"). Though podcasts are good, too.

 

 

On 6/11/2024 at 4:49 AM, sanchuan said:

Why not both, and then some? Surely enough days in the week to do one or the other, as the mood strikes! You don't want to restrict your reading diet to one genre alone (all the more so if it's a daily habit...)

 

I think that's key, right there. Literary Chinese and journalistic/news Chinese are so different from one other that if I only focus on one, I might get a bit rusty at the other.


The mystery I'd like to solve for myself is: Now that I know how reading impacts my listening (it helps my listening), how might years of consistent listening help my reading? I might develop a more intuitive grasp of Chinese that will help me be a more natural reader. But it's just a guess so far.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

I went from having too few interesting things to read to having too many. I'm quitting 草房子 by 曹文軒 at 第八章 紅門（二）3. It's actually a very nice read, so I may take it up again later. It's also a (perfect?) intro to 起承轉合 literary structure. But as experienced as I like to imagine I am, I still find it annoying to have a plot thread feel like it's going nowhere. That's not the case, I know, but my western brain gets tired of it.

 

I've just finished 第一部 of 炒飯狙擊手 by 張國立. It's holding my interest, and I'm feeling less forced to use https://zi-hi.com/sp/uni/CJKSeeker to look up characters every page. My only nitpick so far is 國立's penchant for injecting Chinese food into European settings. He strikes me as the Taiwanese equivalent of a New Yorker abroad who only ever eats at McDonalds. 

 

I also stumbled on a mirrorfiction.com, where I'm reading 大出海秘寶 by 樂馬. So far it's an action-packed and gritty, if a little formulaic, treasure hunt.

[Pomelofruit]

After passing HSK6, I’ve started on my first book!

 

It’s a Chinese translation (rather than native text) of Good Inside by Dr. Becky Kennedy 《看见孩子》 , about parenting and parent-child relationships. I’ve also started following parenting influencers on 小红书 to complement and reinforce what I’m reading. 
 

I’ve been thinking about how to prepare for HSK7-9, and figured that I’ll try reading a wide range of books and advanced graded readers. So far, I’ve bought (and not yet started)

- A book about health 《身体由全》 (for medical related language)

- A book about Deng Xiaoping《邓小平时代》 (for historical/political related language)

- A book about marriage 《男人来自火星，女人来自金星》(for relationship/romance related language) 

- A book about Charlie Munger 《穷查理宝典》 (for finance/investing language)

- A book about stages of human life 《人生第一次》(was recommended to me by my Chinese teacher)

- Abridged graded readers of the four Chinese classics 红楼梦，三国演义，西游记，水浒传 (1,500 and 2,500 chars)

 

I’ve just added @Woodford’s recommendation of 在工作中，看到中国 to my shopping basket as it sounds very interesting, and touches on many aspects of life.

 

Just to add: my goal in learning Chinese is to connect with my heritage and pass it onto the next generation. Whilst I don’t “need” to do any HSK, I find exams to be very motivational 😄

[amytheorangutan]

I’m currently reading the Chinese translation of 解憂雜貨店 by Higashino Keigo. Been reading it in class with my teacher, I’m still doing one lesson per week to maintain my Chinese and I almost finish this book. I really enjoy it, it is different from his other detectives and crime books. Very touching and heartwarming stories that seem to intertwine with each other. Most likely will start 白夜行 next. 

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

It took way too long, but I've finally finished 炒飯狙擊手 by 張國立. I never felt that zi-hi was too slow of a dictionary for searching characters from paper text, and never was tempted to buy the ebook instead. I noticed 張國立 has a couple of free short stories on mirrorfiction.com, such as 殺手與太大隻的槍, which was a dark comedy quickie. I liked both of these works enough to buy the paperback 炒飯 sequel, 第三課子彈, which I'll be reading next.

 

 大出海秘寶 by 樂馬 is not at all disappointing for pulp action adventure. I love to hate the character you're supposed to hate, and enjoy the interactions and development of the other main characters. Only two more parts of the last chapter to go, and I think I'll see what else 樂馬 has after that. 

 

After seeing that readmoo.com has monthly free books, I'm selecting a couple of those for variety. 黑洞* is a cutely creepy Choose-your-own-adventure. As a lover of Text Adventures and Interactive Fiction, I am pleased.  努力是癮* is an anthology of introspective short stories. Not normally my kind of thing, but each kept my attention and stirred my emotions.

 

I like to read ebooks quickly, but the mandarinspot pop-up dictionary isn't right for intermediate+ readers. That's why I use these bookmarklets instead. It puts pinyin only over characters I don't yet recognized. It gives me easy access to translation, word dictionaries and character dicitonaries, but only when I really want it.

 

*You have to login and "buy" these free ebooks to use these links. 

[imron]

On 3/30/2024 at 8:59 PM, jannesan said:

I feel like really being in the middle of the places and period of time described.

I felt this also. The books really were a fantastic insight into Chinese society at the time. It’s still one of my favorite novels across any language. 
 

On 4/14/2024 at 12:28 AM, lordsuso said:

There are a couple of fantasy webnovels that interest me, but they are all so freaking long that I can't gather the courage to start one haha.

Happens with English also. Got sucked in with Worm - boy was that long 🤪

 

As for what I’m reading, I’ve picked up 金庸 again am half way through the first book of 倚天屠龍記. 

 

[jannesan]

On 3/30/2024 at 4:59 AM, jannesan said:

Probably I'll just go on reading the second one

 

I did indeed go on to read both the second and third volume of 平凡的世界 and it was a very satisfying read. I feel both happy to have finished this massive story and at the same time am sad it’s over.. I will miss it to follow all the ups and downs of the characters throughout their journeys.

[imron]

On 8/30/2024 at 2:22 PM, jannesan said:

I will miss it to follow all the ups and downs of the characters throughout their journeys.

One thing I've found with some Chinese fiction is that it doesn't follow the traditional western 3-act story narrative, rather it follows more of a "window in to the lives of the characters at a point in time" model.

 

I'm normally not a fan of that approach because when the book ends you are left with a sense of incompleteness due to a lack of resolution.  平凡的世界 was one of the first "window in to the lives" style books that I really enjoyed.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

I've finished 大出海秘寶. It was dark, action-packed, and fun until the end. It was a little strange that dharma/karma and utter nihilism are both treated as true in narrative, but what do you want from a pulpy MacGuffin hunt? Sure beats anything by 倪匡. 

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

I just finished 遺忘·刑警 by 陳浩基. That's the same author as 13·67. The traditional version is here and the simplified is here. I dropped other reading for a week because this was too exciting. It got a little wacky (as 陳浩基 is wont to) but I stayed with it and was not disappointed. 

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

《如果你有見到她》 by 四絃 is still a work-in-progress as of 10/22/2024, but it so far is up to 33 installments, and I've enjoyed each. I'm a little obsessed with Chinese detective fiction these last two years or so, but this one is a bit unique. It's presented as a series of recorded monologues given to a magazine journalist who is investigating the sudden appearance of a mysterious billboard. This billboard requests information about a person who went missing over a decade previously. It's a pretty easy read.

 

By the way, one annoying thing about mirrorfiction.com is they think disabling text-highlighting somehow protects the text. This bookmarklet gets rid of that annoyance for people who may want to use Text Analyzer or other digital tools to assist the reading.

[Lu]

On 9/20/2024 at 10:29 AM, Wei-Ming 魏明 said:

I just finished 遺忘·刑警 by 陳浩基.

Oh that looks fun. I'll keep an eye out for it.

 

I've been reading 《未婚妻》 by 阿乙, made it to a bit over a 100 pages before I gave up. It's well-written and well-told, but it's just not for me.

 

A small-town low-level policeman (named 艾国柱, just like the author) on a work assignment with some local bigwigs sees a young woman and falls hopelessly in love. He doesn't eat, can't sleep, so his dad decides that he should just marry that girl. The main character's family has worked their way up from peasant in a village to pretty succesfull wholesale trader in town, and he is after all a cop with a steady job, so he's not a bad prospect. The father invites a family friend with good local connections, to ask him to be a middleman. The family friend visits and tells the story of his life, a long tale full of woe, during which the reader (the Chinese reader probably a bit earlier than I, but still not straight away) finds out the family friend is in fact a horse. An actual horse, who can talk and read and has a pretty decent government job. The horse invites the main character to his home, where he will also invite the woman, so the two can meet. That was about the point where I stopped, so I don't know what happens next. The story progresses very slowly, there is a lot of thoughts, ideas, anecdotes and descriptions in between.

 

A friend mentioned that apparently it's ego fiction, and that seems about right: the main character has a lot (perhaps everything) in common with the person A Yi, and the book is full of thoughts and ideas and looking back, sometimes referring to things the main character/author wrote at a later point. The book is also fulll of quotes from world literature, meticulously footnoted. Most of these quotes are from A la recherche du temps perdu by Proust, but other works are quoted too.

 

I feel I'm missing not just something but quite a lot about what this book aims to be and to do, and as a result I am unable to appreciate it for what it is. I hope perhaps I'll find someone who can explain it to me a bit.

[lordsuso]

I recently read 解忧杂货店 by keigo higashino, translated from Japanese. Im pretty sure it ended up in my list because someone mentioned it here, maybe @Woodford? It's a fun and straight-forward story (nobody is secretely a horse), and although it can be a bit repetitive I think it's a very good choice for a first novel.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

While searching this month's free books on Readmoo.com, I started on  宋慈洗冤筆記. (This link is to a complete version.) After the first chapter, I got curious, and learned that 宋慈 is a real medieval Chinese forensic scientist. Actually, he invented forensic science! This completely fictitious novel isn't bad, but it's a little disappointing that only names of people and places are factual. Surely somebody must have made a novelization of 宋慈's casebook? Well, if you know of one, post it in these forums, please.