What are you reading?

[Lu]

Some people say that our concentration has worsened because of the internet. It also seems that reading e-books really isn't the same as reading actual books. Skylee, I think you're not the only one who has ten thousand books on their e-reader (computer, phone, tablet) and finds themselves never finishing anything, just sampling here and there.

[Guest realmayo]

I certainly agree it's very possible our concentration has worsened because of the internet. And maybe if you're reading a book on a screen that you usually use for the internet, you get the same problem. I think I might have experienced that. But I've never felt it to be the case on my kindle, which I use just for reading, and which isn't back-lit or anything. I find a kindle just like a book -- maybe a teeny bit better.

[ouyangjun]

I'm currently reading the book 我老婆是买的.  I clearly downloaded the book due to the interesting title  

 

It's kept me interested until about 1/2 way through, but I'm getting a bit bored with it.  The book I'd say is great for those who are just getting into reading complete novels in Chinese.  Little need for a dictionary and easy to pick up and read a bit and come back to at any time. I'm sure I'll continue to read this when I want "light" reading, but I'm looking for something new.

 

Link:  http://www.tianyabook.com/wdlpsmd/

[Allen Zhang]

I'm reading The Gay Genius:The Life and Times of Su Tungpo and Zhitang's Memoirs.

我正在读《苏东坡传》和《知堂回想录》。

 

If anyone has or konws other books or materials about Zhou Zuoren, tell me, please.

如果谁有或者知道其他关于周作人的书或者资料，请推荐给我。

[dragonboy]

Bhagavad Gita as it is original by Srila Prabhupada.

[BigMax]

I always read Nat Geo (中国地理） 

 

at present I'm reading 中国： 创新绿色发展 , I studied several environmental politics modules at uni, so it is pretty interesting to see the Chinese side of the argument.

[Kobo-Daishi]

I'm reading "The Beatles - All These Years: Volume One: Tune In" by Mark Lewisohn.

 

In my youth I was a huge Beatles fan and collected many books on them. I remember when I first entered university there was a book collection contest at the university library and one of the contestants had his huge Beatle book collection on exhibit and I remember noting that I had many of the titles.

 

I hadn't intended to read this book because I no longer buy books. What's the point when they're all online for free.

 

Anyway, I was browsing one of the numerous share sites and happened to come across the above title.

 

It's a massive effort, literally years in the making. This is the first volume in the proposed three volume biography. Volumes 2 & 3 won't be out for years. This first volume only covers up to Ringo joining the group or shortly there after.

 

I read that the American edition is an abbreviated version of the much longer UK edition. I might do a search for it.

 

Kobo.

[Kobo-Daishi]

I'm also reading "A Scholarly Review of Chinese Studies in North America" (北美中国研究综述).

It's a collection of 21 essays by some of North America's leading Sinologists. Early medieval China, Song studies, Yuan studies, Ming studies, economy, literature, linguistics, music, etc. You get the idea. On the current state of Sinology in North America.

I accidentally came across the title when I was reading the thread on the Chinese History Forum being missing. I visited the site for the first time and came across an article that referenced a book that sounded interesting. I did an Internet search to see if I could find a copy of the book when I came across "Scholarly Review" instead, at The Association for Asian Studies web site.

http://www.asian-studies.org/
 

 

The Association for Asian Studies (AAS)—the largest society of its kind, with approximately 8,000 members worldwide—is a scholarly, non-political, non-profit professional association open to all persons interested in Asia (more).

I'd never heard of the association before, but, they had the pdf for "Scholarly Review" for download

http://www.asian-studies.org/publications/A_Scholarly_Review_ePDF.pdf

I found this bit from Victor Mair's essay "Developments in the Study of Chinese Linguistics
during the Last Three Decades" quite amusing.
 

 

Donald Snow (2004) has described the development of Cantonese as a written language; if the use of written Cantonese ever became widespread, it would be of monumental significance (the same is true for any other of the topolects, such as Taiwanese) since only Literary Sinitic and Mandarin have ever developed a fully functioning written form.

It would be of monumental significance if it truly happened, but, I really doubt that written Cantonese, Taiwanese Minnan or any of the other myriad Chinese fangyan will ever truly develop a significant body of literature.

You can't even get anyone to put truly Cantonese subtitles to the numerous Cantonese media, movies, TV shows, etc. Stephen Chow movies are the exception.

I see that he had the biggest movie in the PRC last year.

Who'd have thunk that a Chinese film would rival the box office of Hollywood blockbusters. It made more than $200 million.

 

That's quite a chunk of change.  

 

Has Hollywood salivating and putting Chinese elements to their product at a breakneck pace.

Kobo.

[roddy]

Thought laurent's post about 鬼吹灯 deserved a bit more prominence in a topic of its own, so I've split it off to here
http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/43310-reading-%E9%AC%BC%E5%90%B9%E7%81%AF-pulpy-supernatural-fiction/

Hope that's ok...

 

PS. Wow, lucky Kobo got the 888th post in this topic. 

[renzhe]

It's depressing how much easier is to read books in English, compared to Chinese

Since our first ebook reader entered our house, I've read the Incident at Styles, Call of the Wild, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and I'm halfway through Dorian Gray at the moment. All in a few short days of bedtime reading.

Anna Karenina is sitting on the reader, looming... I figure either read that, or 15 pages of Water Margin ...

[Guest realmayo]

Luckily there's far more good stuff to read in English (incl. in translation) than in Chinese!

[skylee]

I am reading Dan Brown's Inferno.

[古文奇才]

I can't stand reading books translated from English into Chinese because I keep feeling like I'll get the point of the book more if I read it in the original. If it was originally in another language though that's different - I read Death Note (originally Japanese) in Chinese.

[roddy]

Just finished The Elements of Eloquence. Picked it up on Kindle when it was on sale over the holidays and it kind of snuck its way to the top of my reading list - was very readable and enjoyable. You've got 39 chapters, each covering an element of rhetoric - alliteration, anadiplosis and anaphora and all. Examples range from Shakespeare to Churchill to Bob Dylan. 

[Guest realmayo]

These days I often end up coming across interesting books simply because I see someone mention a new book alongside several that I have heard of and already enjoyed reading, so in that spirit, here's a list of Chinesey stuff I read in English over the last year, all of which was at least good. 

 

The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System

- Link, Perry

Mr Ma and Son

- Lao She (translator: William Dolby)

Lies that Bind: Chinese Truth, Other Truths: Chinese Truths, Other Truths

- Blum, Susan D.

Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768

- Philip A. Kuhn

Treason By The Book: Traitors, Conspirators and Guardians of an Emperor

- Jonathan Spence

Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China 

- Clunas, Craig

Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy

- Kraus

Way of the Virtuous: Influence of Art and Philosophy on Chinese Garden Design

- Hu Dongchu

Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History

- Alexander Woodside

An Anatomy of Chinese: rhythm, metaphor, politics

- Perry Link

Wuhan, 1938 War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China

- Mackinnon, Stephen R

The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo: How A Murder Exposed The Cracks In China's Leadership

- John Garnaut

The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy

- Edward N. Luttwak

Shock Of The Old : Technology and Global History since 1900

- David Edgerton

East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute

- David C. Kang

[OneEye]

Treason By The Book: Traitors, Conspirators and Guardians of an Emperor

- Jonathan Spence

I read that a while back, great read. Spence seems to get a lot of flack from Qing historians, but I really enjoyed that book, as well as a few others of his (the names of which escape me now).

[feihong]

Recently finished reading 她们都挺棒的 by 李师江, which was recommended by a forum member on a thread about contemporary Chinese literature. I liked the book, but found that its many comedic moments were never quite laugh-out-loud funny. However, still worth a read for the many absurd situations that the main character gets into. It's not a terribly hard book, but the main character is a journalist and author, so chengyus abound.

 

Also just finished 放学后 by famed Japanese mystery writer 东野圭吾 (Higashino Keigo). This is a pretty good entry in the whodunit genre. The translation I read is competent but stiff -- for example the dialogues sound way too formal compared to real modern spoken Chinese. However, the book is overall pretty easy to understand, and is the first novel that I read almost completely on my Kindle (I usually read novels inside Pleco reader so I can do instant dictionary lookups). Be warned that if you want to make sense of the conclusion, you need to really understand the various clues littered throughout the text.

I wonder if there would've been a better mystery novel to start with. I did find this page, at the bottom of which contains a list of famous Chinese-language mystery authors.

My next Chinese reading project is 余华's 十个词汇里的中国. A friend who read it told me this is a somewhat repetitive but overall pretty good essay collection about modern China.

[Geiko]

Well, I think it's the first time I write in this topic... After four years studying Chinese, I'm proud to announce that I've started reading novels for native speakers! 

 

I began with 穿条纹衣服的男孩, the Chinese translation of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I strongly recommend it as a first novel: it's very easy to read, not only because it's a translation, but also because it's narrated from the boy's point of view, so the vocabulary used is fairly simple. Whenever a character uses a difficult word, the boy is the first one to ask its meaning.

 

After that, I bought six novels of the 鸡皮疙瘩 Goosebumps series. When I was a teenager the tv series scared me, I never watched a whole episode, but now I'm almost 30 and I'm not afraid anymore.   I thought I wouldn't like reading those books, but the fact that I was understanding them despite being written in Chinese, kept me motivated. I've spent six weeks and have read around one million characters (1005千字).

 

Tomorrow I plan to start with my next book, which will be 饥饿游戏 (The Hunger Games). I hope it's not too hard!

[Lu]

Started reading 西西's 哀悼乳房, it was well-written but I didn't find it very interesting. If I'd be a Chinese lady with breast cancer I'd probably appreciate it a lot more, but I'm not.

I had neglected 杜拉拉 because it was getting boring, but two unfinished books in a row is not good, so I picked it up again and am determined to finish it. After that, not sure yet.

Also just finished Seven Years in Tibet. What a story. I found myself especially liking the first half, in which Harrer and his friend trek through West Tibet. They stay with nomads, learn excellent Tibetan, buy yaks and lose them again, have a hard time overall but still love the landscape. Cool read. Then they get to Lhasa where they're warmly welcomed, and laughed at (but not in a mean way) for their incredibly 土 accent in their Tibetan.

[ouyangjun]

Looking at reading a few different books and looking to see if anyone has a suggestion:

莫言 - Read any of his books?  I was looking at two, 《生死疲劳》"Life and Death are Wearing Me Out" or 《丰乳肥臀》"Big Breasts and Wide Hips"

王朔 - I've never read his books, but I feel like I'd like him based on what I've heard... hooligan writer, influence on 冯小刚's work.  Any suggestions here?

阿城 - I can't remember where, but I once saw translator Brendan O'Kane suggest the book 《棋王》.  Chinese Amazon has 阿城's whole collection on sale for 7RMB.  It consists of 《棋王》 and many others.  For that cost I'm going to buy it, the question is if I dive into that or one of the ones above.  

 

Any thoughts?