What are you reading?

[feihong]

Recently finished 火星公主 (A Princess of Mars), by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I thought it was OK, but not as interesting or as exciting as The Hunger Games. The difficulty was about the same, though. Next up is the science fiction novel 三体.

[laurenth]

Finished 小王子 (Le petit prince, http://www.xiaowangzi.com). Very good translation, as far as I can tell. Apart from the poetry and the narrative aspects, the book is full of memorable quotes for those who are into sentence mining.

And now, comics time. I'm going to read 丁丁 - 蓝莲花 (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/蓝莲花_(漫画). This time, it's on paper, so no Pleco reader to help me.

There's a pattern in what I've been reading lately: short stories or novellas, translations of texts I've read in another language before, full versions of texts I've read in an abridged form before, texts with images, children books, etc. At this level (intermediate, I guess), I'm trying to smoothly get away from readers and textbooks but I do not feel ready to take the plunge into more complicated literature. I want to enjoy what I read.

[yialanliu]

Just finished 上下五千年

Was reading 水浒传 and got to page 2 and gave up. Now going to read the kid version of it since I am still not able to read the main version .

[linese]

props for attempting to read 水浒, it's quite a difficult piece, I tried myself and set it aside after a while.

currently I'm reading more of 韩寒's works, just finished one of his anthologies published in 06. my favorites by him are 他的国 and 三重门。

[imron]

Finished 《杜拉拉华年似水》 and am about to start on the third book in the series《杜拉拉3：我在这战斗的一年里》though after reading《杜拉拉华年似水》I'm sorely tempted not to bother. 《杜拉拉华年似水》was pretty awful. It consisted of about 1/4 actual story and 3/4 some contrived situation with a character going up to/having a meeting with Lala and saying stuff like "..but how can I be a better manager", or "...but how can I solve <insert random workplace problem here>", followed by Lala dishing out her business wisdom, in bullet points no less, for the benefit of the reader. I don't mind stories that try to teach the reader something, but this book pushed that concept too far and was too blatant and in-your-face about it for my liking. I was wanting to read a continuation of the story, not a guide to office politics 101.

To make matters even worse, for the story part of the novel, the author decided to incorporates a plot device so lame and cliched that I can't believe it even made it past an editor.

Basically the author decided to do away with the entire ending of the first novel by explaining that it was just a dream.

When it happened I had to read that section over a couple of times just to make sure I hadn't read it incorrectly, because I couldn't believe the author would do something like that.

[Lu]

From what I know there isn't all that much editing in the Chinese novel world. Although the successfull writer who goes more and more unedited as he/she grows more successfull isn't exactly unknown in the west either, see the Jean Auel prehistoric novels that got both bigger and bigger and more and more boring as the series progressed, or George Martin whose books are expanding so fast they don't even fit into a single cover anymore.

Now reading 星期一是礼拜几 by 巫昂, whom I first knew as a poet. At the beginning it seemed rather Han Han-ish: young male aspiring writer does some odd jobs, including pirate writing, then goes to work for a magazine (the magazines in this book are extremely thinly-veiled versions of actual magazines), while any women in the story are judged solely on their looks, even though 巫昂 herself is a woman. But now a story is starting to take shape, it's a nice read and also rather fast reading.

[WangYuHong]

After struggling to maintain interest in 《裸婚》 and finally finishing it up (I didn't completely hate the characters by the end, at least), I started reading 《混也是一种生活》, which is only about, oh, a million times better than 《裸婚》. I'm only a couple of chapters into it, though, so hopefully it maintains this pace throughout the entire book. It looks to be a really long book too... by character count, it's about 10x the size of the books I've previously ready.

Anyway, I ran into a question in the book. I managed to find an uncensored version, which turned out to be a good idea since it's full of cursing. I'm familiar with people sometimes using letters for their cursing instead of the actual Chinese characters (TMD, GSD, etc.). But there's one in this book that I just can't figure out:

“我说，我没听错吧？你说，让我去你家？”张少宇当然不会YY到以为赵静是要他去见家长，他大概猜出来赵静想干什么。

What characters does 'YY' represent in this case?

[gato]

YY = 意淫. Literally means to mentally masturbate, but usually has a meaning closer to daydream.

[imron]

Finished 《杜拉拉3：我在这战斗的一年里》and am about to start on 《裸婚》.

杜拉拉3 was better than the 2nd book, but worse than the first. It also ends quite abruptly without really bringing any of its story threads to much conclusion (I knew it was getting close to the end of the book, and thought maybe there were just a couple of chapters left, and then I turn the page and suddenly it's the last page of the book).

Honestly speaking, I don't think I would recommend this series to people looking for something to read. The first book is ok, but considering the author changes the ending of the first book in the later books, and that the later books aren't that great a read (with the 2nd one being quite bad), giving the whole thing a miss is not a bad option. Having said that, there is apparently also a fourth volume now, and I may end up reading that at some point in the future just to see how the author wraps up the stories from this volume.

[simplet]

I'm reading 黄金时代 and i'm quite liking it. Surprisingly I can read it relatively fast and looking up all the words I don't know is not killing my desire to keep reading. Almost finished 黄金时代 itself but there are a lot of other stories in the book so that should keep me busy for a while.

Anyone has any suggestions for similar stuff? Contemporary literature with modern vocabulary, that deals with chinese society or some important 20th century events?

[imron]

Off the top of my head: 《活着》、《许三观卖血记》、《人生》、《平凡的世界》、《圈子圈套》. Of those, the first 4 are all based in a similar time period to 《黄金时代》and the last one is set in the last few years.

[simplet]

Thanks a lot! I think I'm going to start with "活着", looks like an easy-ish read, and there's an electronic version in that thread. I think I'm going to try to read "围城" too, looks funny.

[imron]

Like 《家》I found 《围城》a much more difficult book to get into than any of the above books. I'm not sure if that's a function of the content or of the language used (it was a long time ago that I started reading it), I just remember it being hard going. This was before I was comfortable reading longer novels though so that also may have had something to do with it.

[gato]

We had a thread about 《围城》. The general consensus was that it's quite tedious. I gave up about 2/3 way into it. I'd recommend 阿城's 《棋王》. It's one of the best Chinese short stories I've read. You can also try some 王朔. He's famous for his Beijing hoodlum (北京痞子） novels. Nowadays he makes most of his money from writing screenplays. He did the screenplays for 《非诚勿扰》。

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/16538-botm-march-2008-%E3%80%8A%E5%9B%B4%E5%9F%8E%E3%80%8Bby-%E9%92%B1%E9%92%9F%E4%B9%A6/

BOTM March 2008 《围城》by 钱钟书

[Lu]

Like 《家》I found 《围城》a much more difficult book to get into than any of the above books. I'm not sure if that's a function of the content or of the language used (it was a long time ago that I started reading it), I just remember it being hard going.

I found the language in 《家》 pretty easy, perhaps there are some old-fashioned words, but I have the feeling that the vocab used is pretty limited, so once you're used to it you're good. Perhaps the story is a bit slow? I found 《春》 a lot slower though.

[imron]

In the last part of that sentence I'm talking about 《围城》rather than 《家》but I do remember having a similar experience reading《家》in that I found it difficult to get absorbed in the story and that meant that more often than not I was forcing myself to keep reading it rather than reading it for enjoyment. I agree that《春》was a lot slower and it was even worse in this regard.《秋》was my favourite of those three novels.

[Flying Pigeon]

I started re-reading 亲爱的笨笨猪 by 杨红樱 yesterday. I bought the book two years ago, tried to read it, didn't understand, gave up, moped. This time around it's smoother sailing with the occasional unknown word. My plan is to plow through it and get the main ideas of the stories, then re-read it while looking up words in the dictionary. I think this is a good book for intermediate-level readers, for people who have read all of the Chinese Breeze books and are wanting to read material written for native speakers, albeit kids. Here is a link to the book on amazon.cn

http://www.amazon.cn/亲爱的笨笨猪-杨红樱/dp/B0011CRS6K/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340450193&sr=1-2

I searched the forums for threads about the author and found this thread from 2005:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/5056-recommended-reading-for-intermediates-the-chinese-superfudge/

When I finish re-re-reading (third time's a charm) 亲爱的笨笨猪, I plan to read this book by the same author:

http://www.amazon.cn/男生日记-杨红樱/dp/B002IIDM48/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1340444955&sr=8-3

If there are enough intermediate-level learners interested, we could book-of-the-month it. Not sure about electronic copies, though.

[imron]

If there are enough intermediate-level learners interested, we could book-of-the-month it.

Sometimes the best way to get people interested is just to start something yourself. Although given the way most BoTM's seem to go, you might not get many people interested in it anyway.

[ouyangjun]

I'm about to finish reading “1988：我想和这个世界谈谈”， after this I'm thinking of picking up another 韩寒 book. This was the first book of his that I read, and I really liked it.

[skylee]

I am not reading any books at the moment, but from time to time I visit the blog 香港雜評， which presents writings by some famous HK writers like 梁文道， 陶傑，練月錚, etc. The recent writing by 練月錚： 論按「契丹／石敬瑭」模式成立的梁政府 is good.