What are you reading?

[Luxi]

On 10/30/2024 at 5:17 AM, Wei-Ming 魏明 said:

a novelization of 宋慈's casebook?

 

Not a novelization, but this edition of the Casebook might interest you 

https://read.douban.com/ebook/127420903/

The original classical text by Song Ci is followed by a modern translation, at first glance it reads like a novel. A rather macabre one, good for November reading.

 

Quick search on eBook Douban brings a few more 

https://read.douban.com/search?sort=default&page=1&q=宋慈

 

[becky82]

I just finished reading 老舍's 《猫城记》, a sci-fi political satire.  I read the whole novel aloud (~118000 characters), and it took me about 16 or 17 hours total (over 10 videos).

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

Well dang, 宋慈洗冤筆記 was gripping. I no longer care that 'the story you are about to read is a fib but the names are true to protect the innocent.' Just really enjoyed it a lot.

 

At the textual/linguistic level, there was a lot of fluctuation. On some pages I could read everything without references. There were about three pages where I shamefacedly had to go to Google Translate to figure out what in the world was going on. Just too much of a historical info dump with unfamiliar proper names, no-longer-used place names, and abbreviated sentence structures. That didn't dampen my interest in seeing what would happen in the story, and I appreciated that 巫童 needed the set the scene for events to come. 

[markhavemann]

On 11/3/2024 at 12:32 PM, becky82 said:

I read the whole novel aloud (~118000 characters), and it took me about 16 or 17 hours total (over 10 videos).

If you posted this on YouTube you should definitely post a link too. It's so nice to see (not just read) what other people are doing with their Chinese studies, and I couldn't seem to find any videos on your channel, although I admittedly didn't look past the main page.

[becky82]

On 12/5/2024 at 1:49 PM, markhavemann said:

If you posted this on YouTube you should definitely post a link too

 

There's a bit of a balance between sharing what you do, and not being a spammer.  Anyway I added the videos of me reading aloud the entirety of 猫城记 to a playlist just now and they're here.

 

This says the total length of the videos is:

 

Quote

Total length : 17 hours, 44 minutes, 43 seconds

 

[lordsuso]

hey @becky82 I have tried to read aloud from time to time to practice my pronunciation but I am never able to follow what I am saying when I do so, did that happen to you in the beginning? does it go away?

[becky82]

I usually find the opposite is true.  If I don't read aloud, my brain (or part of it) wanders off and thinks about other things.  My eyes will have looked at the content, but I'd have no idea what it says.  Reading aloud helps me stay present (in English and Chinese).

 

Was I unable to follow what I read when reading aloud in the beginning?  I actually don't recall (I've been learning Chinese for quite a while now).  I recall making lots of notes in the past, e.g., adding pinyin to characters I couldn't pronounce (you can see my annotations for Matilda in e.g. this video; the annotations were from when I was at a late-HSK4 level, but the video was made after I had passed the HSK5).

[markhavemann]

On 12/6/2024 at 9:17 AM, becky82 said:

There's a bit of a balance between sharing what you do, and not being a spammer. 

True, although for me at least, seeing you and others regularly posting stuff that you're doing is inspiring rather than annoying (and I doubt there's a financial incentive to push this kind of niche Chinese language learning content on YouTube). Also, I'd rather see a few too many posts about what people are doing with their Chinese studies instead of "what city should I go to" and "do you think I can get a scholarship" posts (not that there is anything wrong with those posts, they just aren't what keep me coming back to the site). That said, I do appreciate you being hesitant to post links to your own stuff too much.

 

On 12/6/2024 at 9:17 AM, becky82 said:

This says the total length of the videos is:

 

Quote

Total length : 17 hours, 44 minutes, 43 seconds

 

This is such a nice way of recording your reading level at a point in time in such a tangible way. I wish I'd done this for the first book that I ever read so I could compare now. I might do it for the next one I read though.

 

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

I've finished 第三顆子彈 by 張國立. Can't say that it was as good as 炒飯狙擊手, but it was a worthy sequel. It was exciting in some places and even managed to be touching in others. But in the final section it jumped the shark a little too irritatingly for me. And the theme of simple, honest people triumphing over cynical, political villains was just too cliché.  I think 國立's best writing is in dialogues and the ponderings and mutterings of his characters. And he keeps me entertained in his action sequences. All in all, this was worth reading if you already liked 炒飯狙擊手.

 

I always like to make sure I have a slightly challenging Chinese book on my computer, an easy read on my phone, and something on paper pages. So now I need a good paper reading recommendation. Anyone?

[lordsuso]

I also just finished 猫城记, and I really enjoyed it. I knew it was a satire of Chinese society, but I didn't expect it to be as direct and agressive. I definitely wouldn't describe it as science fiction, the setting is irrelevant. I will not dare say it was easy, but I read it just after Jin Yong so I actually experienced it as a pretty relaxed read. So I'm happy I tackled Jin Yong as early as I did, it was brutal but it softened the path down the road.

[liqi]

After much procrastination (and methylphenidate) I finally read beyond page 3 of 撒野! And wow... I suck at it 😆. I don't really struggle with lots of text, but I guess I never really read something literally before either, I don't really understand when the author strings a lot of ideas together in a really long sentence (like when describing an action instead of just doing it). I always knew that I was deeply lacking in grammar, but I didn't expected it to be that bad! It's not intentional, I'm just not really sure how to approach studying it.... I guess I'll just make a giant list of adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions and work from there 🫠. I have another (illegally smuggled) book I bought on 闲鱼, It's a translated Korean novel, seems much easier to read but it's also in traditional 😅. Let's just tackle one problem per time heh

[Jive Turkey]

Here are a few of the books I read over the last year:

 

黑貓中隊：七萬呎飛行紀事 by 沈麗文

 

This was written by a daughter of one of the Black Cat Squadron pilots who flew the U-2 under Project Razor back in the 1960s and 70s. Being a daughter of one of the pilots gave her insider access to survivors, and she interviewed about 10 of them.

 

Much of the broad information in this book is now available in English, and there are some Taiwanese TV documentaries on Youtube about Project Razor. Having published the book back in 2010, she gets some details wrong. For example, she claims that the ROCAF was the only foreign air force to fly the U-2 operationally over communist block countries. That has since been shown to be incorrect by journalists in the UK who’ve used FOI requests to reveal that at least one RAF pilot took the Dragon Lady over the USSR from Pakistan in December 1959.

 

This book is nevertheless worth the read. She captures the human element, and especially the sacrifices these guys made. The ROCAF Black Cats flew a lot of missions over the mainland, and then quite a few sigint missions off the coast which the PLAAF nonetheless tried to shoot down. The ROCAF crews kept doing overflights even though the PLAAF acquired enough SA-2s to down 5 airframes.

 

She tells the story of 張立義, one of the shootdown survivors who spent 17 years on the mainland before being allowed to leave. He kept his vows to his wife, who had in fact assumed he was dead. She had remarried with an ROC army officer, but under the condition that their marriage would end if her presumed KIA husband ever turned up. Zhang and his wife eventually remarried.

 

If you’re into aviation or cold war snooping stories, then this would be a good read. One gets the sense that the Black Cats really were among the best in the world at what they did, and that they had some heavy brass ones. The author is also fair and respectful to the PLAAF missile battery crews and interceptors who eventually drove the U-2s offshore. The book should be plenty readable to anybody with HSK 6ish reading ability.

 

 

生育制度 by 費孝通

 

This is by the “Father of Chinese Anthropology/Sociology” who wrote “From the Soil”. From the Soil is on the mainland senior secondary Chinese syllabus, and I thought it was a good read, so I gave 生育制度 a go. The title has been translated as “Reproduction System” or “Fertility System” in English, but it seems there is no published translation in English of the whole book.

 

I think Reproduction System has a bit less literary Chinese in it than From the Soil, so to me it was a slightly easier read, although much longer. The original version was written in 1946, but he may have revised it. Fei was really well-read by any standard of that time, and he refers to quite a lot of canonical English-language anthropology and sociology.

 

Fei writes from a few different angles to theorize about social and cultural elements that form a society or culture’s overall system of reproduction. He looks at family structures, marriage systems, the place of sex in marriage, father-son and mother-son relationships, and a lot more. Given the time he wrote the book, the examples he refers to will seem traditional to the modern reader. He also draws some observations that might rub some modern readers the wrong way – i.e., “The fundamental purpose of marriage is to provide a safe environment for the nurturing of children.”  I’d nevertheless say Fei was an enlightened realist who drew a very clear line in his head between any moral judgment on one hand, and objective observation of the way things were or will be on the other. He gives interesting examples and explanations of how pretty much all aspects of a society’s reproductive system are culturally constructed (or man-made [人為] to be more faithful to his phrasing) rather than biologically determined.

 

I’m not a demographer/sociologist/anthropologist and I have no idea how well this book would stand up for contemporary students of those disciplines. But I did find this book interesting, and I’d recommend it to anybody who would like to read a non-fiction book by a very well-informed 20th century Chinese academic. Again, I think this book should be within the range of anybody with solid HSK 6ish reading ability.

 

萬曆十五年 by 黃仁宇

 

This is the self-translated version of Ray Huang’s 1587: A Year of No Significance. It is very popular in China, and my students at the university where I teach strongly recommended it. I had high hopes for this book. It looked kind of hard for me, so I got a .txt file for it and extracted out what looked to be the harder vocabulary (for me at least) using Chinese Text Analyser. I did a bit of pre-studying of that vocab. I slogged through about 10 pages and then chucked it in. Too hard for me. The density of unknown words was just too high. I might come back to this book later, but not soon. This book might be a lot more readable by those who have studied some literary Chinese.

 

明朝那些事兒 by 當年明月

 

After I told one of my students that I found 萬曆十五年 too hard, she recommended this series of 9 books. I read the first one. I’d say the good thing about this series is that it exposes one to a lot of period vocabulary, but not at such a density that the book becomes a real chore to read. The book is in fact written in a really colloquial style. I read history for my first degree, and while I don’t mind popular history, these books are just too much in the style of a popular serialized internet novel for my liking. I learned a good bit of vocabulary, and a bit about the start of the Ming Dynasty, but I won’t be in a rush to read the second book in the series. I’d say these books are totally readable by anybody with HSK 6ish reading ability.

 

戰爭和人 by 王火

 

I mentioned to a student that I really liked 平凡的世界, and that I’d really like to read some good quality war fiction or war biography type stuff. He recommended this book, and said he thought the difficulty should be comparable to 平凡的世界. The book was the 4th winner of the Mao Dun literary prize. That didn’t really matter to me as I have read a couple of other winners of that prize that were pretty underwhelming. But my student liked it, so I’ve started reading it.

 

The book is in 3 volumes of about 700 pages each, and it tells the story of a high-level KMT member and his son before, during and after WWII. I have only gotten about 50 pages in. So far it is readable and interesting, and I’d say my student judged it correctly as being of similar difficulty to 平凡的世界. I’ll write more on this book if and when I finish the first volume.

[Jive Turkey]

On 3/13/2024 at 1:30 AM, Woodford said:

 

I just finished 看见 by 柴静. It looked like a pretty popular book on Weixin, so I thought I'd check it out! Throughout the course of the book, Chai Jing tells different stories about her career as a TV journalist.

 

She has a YouTube channel with a lot of very interesting videos on it:

https://youtube.com/@chaijing2023?si=HmGvjF9ILQqAYkdi
 

Although her upload frequency is not super high, her subscriber base is still pretty big. 
 

I think she’s a pretty good interviewer, but it (strangely) had not occurred to me that she has published books. Might have to check out 看見.