What are you reading?

[Meng Lelan]

棋王is what I am reading now.

Which one? Two or three different authors wrote a book with that same title.

張系國

[Baron]

I'm reading 猫城记 by 老舍. It's kind of boring as a reading experience and the main character is annoying too, but I'm curious to know what happens. Will the space traveller ever escape the clutches of the mind-altering drug addicted cat men? The rate I'm going it'll take a year to find out.

I sometimes think the cat people are supposed to represent the English.

Last book I read was 我5岁的时候，我杀了自己, a translation from a French novel. Couldn't put it down

[skylee]

I am reading Mario Puzo's The Family because I am watching the TV series The Borgias. I was quite surprised how easy it was to find a copy of the book in epub format just by googling (just as surprising was that I couldn't find it in baidu's search results).

[muirm]

Finished 神雕侠侣 yesterday. I enjoyed it, but probably not as much as the last one. Now I've started reading 生死疲劳 by 莫言.

[feihong]

I just finished 多情剑客无情剑 today. I pretty much agree with Gleaves's assessment. It starts out pretty well, and the ending is not completely horrible, but the story sags a LOT in the middle chapters. Also, nearly every character is a jerk, and you're kinda forced to root for the protagonist because he's less of a jerk than the other characters. I mentioned my disappointment to a friend, and he claims that I should've read Gu Long's 绝代双娇 instead. On the plus side, I learned a lot of new characters and idioms after reading this book.

Next up is 中国人的性格历程 by 张宏杰, which will be my first attempt at reading Chinese nonfiction.

[古文奇才]

天龍八部 - nobody gets through 天龍八部!

[skylee]

nobody gets through 天龍八部!

Untrue. It is an excellent book. Enjoy it.

[古文奇才]

It was my feeble attempt at a joke...you know, how the guy holds up a copy of 'war and peace' to defend himself from being stabbed, and, as the knife goes through, shouts 'nobody gets through war and peace!'

OK not very funny. But anyway I got two-thirds of the way through...one of these days...

[roddy]

Welcome to the site. Please pick up a joke permission form from Office 39B, humour regulation sub-section.

[古文奇才]

Tagline referencing stationery Chinglish

[edelweis]

Clive Cussler and Craig Dirgo, Golden Buddha, Penguin edition page 419:

In Beijing, General Tudeng Quing was offering President Jintao a possible solution.

(what can I say, I was bored so I finished it.)

[Lu]

In Beijing, General Tudeng Quing was offering President Jintao a possible solution.

I bought a friend a copy of Crystal Boys, the paperback edition. On the cover it said 1) 'Novel from China' and 2) a blurb from a major Dutch newspaper saying 'the way Hsien-yung paints his characters is amazing'. I was sorely tempted to buy the hardcover instead, which just has the author and the title and such. And this is a reputable publisher that publishes many translated books. Sigh.

Now reading 猫城记, it's nice to go from Han Han to 老舍. The language is completely different, sitting nicely between wenyan and present-day foreign-influenced Mandarin. It's interesting to come across words like 设若, I have no problem understanding it but I've never seen this word before, looks like some of the things they tried out in this 'let's write our spoken language' experiment never made it.

[Lu]

Finished 猫城记, that was a good read (nicely divided up in bite-sized chapters for easy digestion). It was eerie to get to the chapter on education and find that Lao She is basically describing the Red Guards, decades before they entered the scene. So this just came out in English and hasn't been translated to Dutch. Yet. Hm...

Also recently finished Shifu, you'll do anything for a laugh, which I have to confess is the first book by Mo Yan I ever finished. Shame on me. I did read most of the commentary and discussion of his work, that was published in various places, and I wasn't sure what to think of the writer but his Nobel Prize win did inspire a lot of interesting and intelligent commentary. Impression after this book: this is a really good writer and what an incredibly shitty translation. It had been translated from the English by someone who didn't know the first thing about China, resulting in things like 'since it was built by Emperor Qing'. And this is why relay translations are a bad idea.

Now reading 杜拉拉升职记, this is not exactly literature, it's closer to a how-to book than a novel, but it's a nice read (and also in mostly bite-sized chapters). I find it really interesting that this whole genre (see also 圈子圈套) exists in China, I've never heard of business novels in Dutch or English.

[feihong]

Currently working on 黑暗森林, the sequel to 三体. It loses the historical fiction aspects of the first book, but is still a really good read. This book has some annoying instances of characters doing illogical things just so the story can move forward. But 刘慈欣 still delivers on the big ideas, and there are plenty of great scenes.

UPDATE: Finished after a bit more than two months. Wasn't as great as the first book in the series, but still pretty good. The ending feels a bit contrived, but sets things up nicely for the next sequel. Taking a break from Chinese novels at the moment, but looking forward to reading the third book, 死神永生.

[skylee]

I watched the film "Night train to Lisbon" on a long-haul flight and liked it.  I have always had this book in my cell phone so I have started reading it.  I am not sure I will finish it, though.

 

PS - I am very glad that I will visit Lisbon next month.

[Lu]

From an interview with Yu Hua in the LA Review of books:

 

You’ve said China has a diversity of writers, but when we’ve discussed Chinese writers in history, we’ve primarily spoken about men. Where are the women writers? How do you view them? In the world of letters, is it important to have a balance between the sexes? Why?

This is probably because male writers outnumber female writers, so as we’ve discussed Chinese literature, we’ve mostly spoken about men. Actually, China has never had a shortage of excellent women writers, like Eileen Zhang, whom you’ve mentioned. Now there is also Wang Anyi. I think in the realm of literature, sex isn’t important. For example, in Wang Anyi’s work, it’s very difficult to tell that the writer is a woman. Excellent writers should be neutral — and be able to write men and women. And when you’re writing, you’re not writing as a man or a woman.

 

Posting here since Yu Hua has come up in this thread. So much to agree and disagree about...

 

'Male writers outnumber female writers in China'. Well indeed, would perhaps be nice to go into why that might be.

 

'China has never had a shortage of excellent woman writers'. Nicely contrasting his previous sentence. Or perhaps he means that the few woman writers China has are all excellent, preventing a shortage. He then proceeds to name only one (Zhang Ailing had already been mentioned by the interviewer), but these are quotes from a longer correspondence, so it's possible that he named more and that those names were taken out for reasons of space.

 

'Excellent writers should be neutral'. I wonder if he himself meets that criterium. I've only read his 活著, which as far as I recall was pretty much neutral in this sense. I disagree, though, I think a man writing from his own experience as a man can still be a great writer, and vice versa.

[skylee]

So I went to the library today to check if there were really no guidebooks on Portugal and/or Lisbon. On the 914 shelves there were just a few and all of them were outdated. Among them was a book called "The Moon, Come To Earth, dispatches from Lisbon" and its first essay is "I don't know why I love Lisbon". And I thought, "why not". So this is what I am reading now.

[Lu]

Reading 围城, in its excellent Dutch translation. I now have three copies of 围城, none of which I really want to throw out for various reasons :-/ Somehow I'm usually reluctant to start reading Great Classics because I have this dread that they'll be boring, even though they are usually not just great but also really enjoyable. 围城 so far is a case in point. The way Fang Hongjian stumbles through life, not really thinking anything through, just looks very true, very lifelike.

[skylee]

It is weird that while ebooks are so easily found completely free of charge on Chinese websites (recently I effortless found a new book by Bill Bryson on Baidu Cloud by simply googling the title and the author's name), I hardly complete reading any books. 

[古文奇才]

Has anybody read 文化苦旅，by 余秋雨? I've heard it mentioned by more than one person here in Taiwan, but have never gotten into it.