What are you reading?

[feihong]

Currently reading the manga 四叶妹妹 (Yotsuba&!).

http://www.dm5.com/Type.aspx?id=1626

The drawings are very cute, and the stories are genuinely funny. Even though I'm not great with traditional characters, the language is really easy and I will probably finish the remaining 20 chapters within a week.

[renzhe]

The online comic you linked to is in simplified characters though?

But I support reading comics, I found them very helpful.

[feihong]

Renzhe, most of the Yotsuba chapters are in traditional, but a few are inexplicably in simplified. I think it's a good candidate for Comic of the Month, but I also feel that it would be nice to lead off with a comic that uses simplified characters.

[Lillee]

I'm just starting to read 祝福 by 鲁迅 for a uni assignment. We have to write a book review and a Chinese friend recommended this as one of her favourite 鲁迅 pieces. It's fairly short and hopefully not too difficult to get through.

Renzhe, did you enjoy reading it? I seem to recall a vocab list for 祝福 on one of these forums, but I can't find it anymore...

[gato]

Here's the vocab list for "祝福" I put together 4 years ago (wow, how time flies :mellow: ):

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/7211-book-of-month/page__view__findpost__p__57905

"祝福"

[Lillee]

Oh, fabulous! Thanks Gato, that's a huge help.

[renzhe]

It was similar to other Lu Xun stories, so relatively challenging. I did read it before going to sleep and without a dictionary, though.

[bande]

I finished reading 浮沉2 the successor to 浮沉. Although this second version ends in a cliffhanger, it was well worth reading. The use of language centered around foreign enterprises, joint ventures, state owned enterprises, and sales has been a great learning experience. It's much easier learning it through a novel than a textbook. My only complaint is that I don't understand why the central deal was done as I can see no upside, but there are some nuances that I could've missed.

[Lu]

Funny that the cuts are so blatant. I'd expect the censors to censor in a way that people wouldn't notice right away.

I'm reading 'The Fat Years', someone wrote that it's really not all that amazing, and that the only reason people are raving about it is that nothing like this has come out of China for a very long time, and I agree, I just feel that it's amazing that something like this is coming out of China now. Even if it's not the best scifi novel ever, it's still the best Chinese scifi novel in a very long time indeed. And it's refreshing to see someone write such blatant truth about China in Chinese.

[skylee]

I have finally finished "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (sort of, as I've skipped the last pages after the big mystery has been solved), and have started book 2 of the same series "The Girl who Played with Fire".

PS - has anyone seen the film? A friend told me she had seen it in Taiwan (or Singapore, not sure) and that it was quite violent.

[feihong]

Finally finished 68 chapters of Yotsuba (四叶妹妹). It was quite enjoyable, I don't think there was a single chapter that I felt was filler.

Also finished volume 1 of Doraemon Color Collection (哆啦A梦彩色作品集). I liked this more than expected, even though it was written for little kids.

Also finished volume 1 of Ranma 1/2 (乱马1/2). I saw season 1 of the anime a long time ago; it was as funny as I remembered.

[Caidanbi]

I just started a novel called 古代老公现代妻. Not far enough into it to make any judgements yet, but I'm not bored, so that's a good thing ^-^

[feihong]

Read Mouse Guard: Winter 1152. Quite a big improvement over Fall 1152 in terms of art and world-building.

Incidentally, re-read chapters 1-4 of Mouse Guard: Fall 1152, this time in Chinese.This was a fan translation, so there were some rough edges. Chapters 4-6 were difficult solely due to questionable font choices.

I went ahead and made a profile for the title, in case anyone else might want to give it a shot. Chapters 1-3 are quite enjoyable, and if you find the last three chapters too frustrating you can check the book out from your local library and finish it in English.

[roddy]

Made some headway with 1Q84 today, a good month or so after buying it. The 天...er....天whatever bits seem fairly standard fare for the author, but the 青豆 sequence is novel - can't beat

sexy young female assassins

So at the moment I'm having to force myself not to just read those chapters.

[skylee]

Murakami's novels .... can't say I like them. I have wanted to buy 1Q84 but have not yet done it - expensive, heavy, and the dread of a Murakami story.

I am still reading "The Girl who Played with Fire". I have finished about 40% of it. It is getting better.

[roddy]

I'm not quite sure why I read so much of his stuff, to be honest. I started on a collection of short stories, and just kind of got into the habit.

[feihong]

I have been busy reading French comics translated into Chinese. French comics tend to have dazzling color art, which is true of all three of these series:

Raptors - gothic vampire noir set in New York City

Tao Bang - a pretty standard pirate adventure, until the scene where the protagonists get attacked by a fleet of pterodactyl riders

Ythaq - a science fiction tale about the survivors of a spaceship crash

The last one was especially difficult for me at first, as there was so much new vocabulary I could only manage 2-3 pages a night.

I also took a break from comics reading to finish For the Win, by Cory Doctorow. This is a thinking man's thriller about online multiplayer games and economics. A large portion of the story is set in Shenzhen, as that is where a lot of "gold farming" is done in real life. Highly recommended, and you can even download it and read it for free from the author's website.

[feihong]

Finished chapter 1 of Superman: Red Son, which is an interesting spin on the Superman story in which Supes crashlands in the Ukraine rather than America's heartland.

Also just finished volume 1 of Kabu no Isaki, a slice-of-life series focusing on airplane flight. Although slight on plot, this one's a real winner. Too bad there are only two volumes of it.

[Gleaves]

I'm still working through 流浪地球 (a book of sci-fi short stories) and 多情剑客无情剑 by Gu Long. I've also recently started World War Z (檔案Z), which has been surprisingly tough. It's basically a collection of interviews from survivors following the zombie apocalypse. The breadth of vocab is more than I expected, more on par with a news magazine than your average horror novel.

[feihong]

Halfway through 饥饿游戏, which is the Chinese translation of The Hunger Games.

It's not too bad, but not nearly as violent as I had hoped.