What are you reading?

[renzhe]

how come it takes you so long to read the books?

The answer is simple: I'm crap

I skip the characters and words I don't know, unless they are important, but I often have to re-read a paragraph or two just to make sure I know what's going on.

Well, 射雕 is not exactly easy, and a lot of things happen, so you can't skip too much, or you're completely lost. It also has 1200 pages, and I can read 6-7 pages an hour at the very most and I only have an hour or two in the evening to read.

But the speed is picking up, and I'm devoting much more time to it now. 150 pages in the last month and a half is not that bad.

Edited October 15, 2008 at 12:30 PM by renzhe

[L-F-J]

thats pretty good.

thats the way i do it.

i just went by the local public library where they have a chinese section and looked through their novels. found 中国式离婚 which i've heard a lot about. i think there's a tv series on it..? its discussed somewhere on these forums. have you read it or seen the show?

i've never read it or seen it, and i went for another novel instead called 玫瑰的故事. (seemed simpler) its 358 pages and divided into four sections. so there arent really chapters to it. which is fine, because its not like i have time in one sitting to get through a whole chapter. i just have to remember what was going on when i come back to it.

[L-F-J]

before i was reading/listening to 我的人渣生活 which is quite a funny story narrated by a mental guy. found the novel online and mp3s of it at www.mmmppp333.com, the speaker's mandarin is standard, kinda beijingish, and the sound quality is nice. i enjoyed that one.

[Lu]

Renzhe, you're doing a lot better than me. My reading of 书剑恩仇录 has almost come to a halt, and I wonder if I shouldn't just give up and start reading something I might actually finish. I admire your perseverance, and 加油!

Meanwhile, I am yet again reading Judge Dee, and I'll have to join the library here as soon as I can, because I'm running out of non-Chinese things to read.

[heifeng]

yeah, Renzhe keep up the good work, I'm still reading the detective novel 妖女 by 江户川乱步...which I only read a lil' each night before I fall asleep, so it's been taking me forever to finish!

By, the way, maybe this will help you after you've read something and want to listen to it again for good measure...

Edited November 1, 2008 at 08:13 PM by heifeng

[renzhe]

Thanks for the support, guys (girls ), I've reached 400 pages today, which is 1/3 of the entire novel. It's getting much better with time, I can understand it much better now than only a couple of months ago. I have to say that the perseverance really pays off, although it's painful in the beginning.

Still, it's not easy. I know the 3000 most common characters, and still I found like 100 characters I didn't recognise in 20-30 pages or so. You need a decent number of characters for this one. Words too, but since the novel often uses classical-style phrasing, single-character phrases and 4-character phrases are very common. Also archaic words, but you can usually figure those out from the characters and the context.

Thanks for the link, heifeng, as soon as I finish reading, I'll watch the TV show and maybe listen to an audio novel too. You really grow attached to some of the characters, and I can't wait to see them in a TV show or hear their voices.

[Kai13]

China Rises: How China's Astonishing Growth Will Change the World - John Farndon

Bought it myself in order to have an idea about china in general, since I'll study it at college

[Lu]

Renzhe, that's so great. I'm only at page 140 or so. Now reading only a few pages a week of Shu jian en chou lu, with my language exchange, who is enjoying it even more than I am. I mentioned giving up and reading something else, but he wouldn't hear of it :-)

Now reading Zhang Jie, her book Wu zi (without words). Am supposed to finish it asap and write a reading report for a prospective publisher. Zhang Jie is not really my writer of choice, but it's a great gig to do.

[renzhe]

About 550 pages in. I'll get to 600 by the end of the year. I'd like to reach 670, which is roughly half of the book, but I'll have to see whether this is doable.

In the meantime, I've finished the BotM (Wang Xiaobo) and I regularly read Wikipedia articles in traditional characters, to practice my traditional reading.

[skylee]

加油！！

[randall_flagg]

I finished 兄弟 a couple of months ago and have read 活着 and 我叫刘跃进 since then。

I am now getting started on 三国演义 but only sections of it in Chinese, most of it I do read in English. After trying to keep track of every character in the beginning, I am now more or less "just enjoying the ride".

Next up is 金瓶梅 . Can anyone tell me whether it is still considered pornography and thus illegal on the mainland?

Thanks,

Randall

[AdaWang]

Next up is 金瓶梅 . Can anyone tell me whether it is still considered pornography and thus illegal on the mainland?

Yes,it's pornography.But it is legal in mainland.

[bhchao]

I have started to read China Before Mao, The Age of Openness by Frank Dikotter

A review of the book: http://www.upiasia.com/Bookshelf/923/

[randall_flagg]

Yes,it's pornography.But it is legal in mainland.

Thanks! By the way, I consider some passages from 红楼梦 to be very erotic/pornographic as well. Looking forward to 金瓶梅 to see if it differs from those descriptions. If I remember correctly, there was a guy in Dream of Red Chambers that died because he couldn't keep his hands off himself and did that all day long!

[Lu]

True, somewhere in the first book. But as I recall what really sealed his fate was that he got off on Wang Xifeng :-) There is some sex in the HLM, but hardly ever explicit, and not very erotic either, so I don't think you can classify it as porn or even pornographic.

Apart from Zhang Jie I'm now reading a book on painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Interesting story, interesting style, it's literary, not just descriptive/biographic.

[wushijiao]

I have started to read China Before Mao, The Age of Openness by Frank Dikotter

I read that about two months ago. It's a great little book that succinctly sums up a lot of the current research that is being done on the Republic Era, and shows how much progress was made in terms of legal reform, political reform, governance, diplomacy, economics, fashion, freedom of the press/religion, literature and the arts, academia...etc. I think it goes a long way towards poking a holes in a lot of simple historical narratives and assumptions that are thrown about. (ie. would the 憤青 be so irrate if they knew that there was a period of time in which China and the West, broadly speaking, had a whole series of very fruitful partnerships in many different fields?, instead of the current narrative in which the West has done nothing but try to keep China down, and therefore only a strong authoritarian government has the power to successfully fight for the country's interests)

Anyway, today, I started reading 《晚年周恩來》, which looks pretty interesting.

[melissayap]

I am the fan of "Asia Weekly", I prefer reading magazine instead of booking. Content in magazine is short and easy to understand.

[Meng Lelan]

I am now reading 浪进船舱 by 周大新.

I used to only read stuff written well before the 1980s like Lu Xun and Hong Lou Meng, but have recently "discovered" contemporary Chinese literature. It is so much more enjoyable to read than the literature that was published before the 1980s.

[semantic nuance]

I'm reading 龍應台's 目送. Reading it makes me feel waves of narrator's nostalgia for the past. It's a collection of touching proses dealing with topics about life, death, letting go, etc. Here's a brief quote from www.books.com.tw:

《目送》的七十四篇散文，寫父親的逝、母親的老、兒子的離、朋友的牽掛、兄弟的攜手共行，寫失敗和脆弱、失落和放手，寫纏綿不捨和絕然的虛無。她寫盡了幽微，如燭光冷照山壁。這是一本生死筆記，深邃，憂傷，美麗。

I find her style very attractive to me. Here's the link of her first article titled as 目送 from the book.

[heifeng]

Ok, secret confession time:

I'm reading Twilight in Chinese...i.e. 暮色...It's an easy, relaxing read (much like the English version I'm sure),...but here are still plenty of chengyu and new vocab that I have been picking up out of it. I guess I'll throw it into the random word of the day thread slowly, or just make a list and post a new thread...eventually:mrgreen:

Another confession time: I bought 3 of the books...so I think I'll be set for a bit, depending on how much time I take away from watching 小花 in 暖春 (notable quote: 'snf snf 妈妈说喝水也能饱')

As a side note, (unless I missed a footnote somewhere) I am pretty sure the translators misunderstood to 'have (or give s.o.) shotgun' as really having a shotgun...but who knows maybe this has become a new Chinese expression...all of a sudden:wink: