What are you reading?

[Lu]

Just finished a 中篇小说 titled 'In het midden van het leven' (人到中年) by Shen Rong. It takes place around 1980. A doctor has worked hard all her life, she and her husband got their share of trouble in the Cultural Revolution, and now that China is building itself up again it just means more hard work and little recognition. One day she gets a heart attack from all the stress, and while her friends and family gathers around her bed, she relives some scenes in her life in her unconciousness.

The afterword explains how the government had called for more recognition and salary for middle-aged workers such as this doctor, but that in practice it wasn't always implemented as well as the government had planned. This novella made quite some impact: there was already quite an amount of scar literature dealing with the Cultural Revolution, but a book like this, that was dealing with the aftermath as it was still happening, was new.

Good book, I enjoyed it.

[Basil]

Sounds like the film 归来

[Lu]

I haven't seen 归来 and only read the summary just now, but the story doesn't sound that similar, although the subject matter is comparable. The book itself was actually also made into a movie.

[gato]

I saw 人到中年 the movie when it first came out in the 1980s when I was a kid. It was a popular movie. Among the issues it touched on was the topic of moving abroad when one's had enough of China. It seems that there were more movies shown in China dealing with topical real life issues back then. The censorship standards are such today that most movies shown now in China are either romances or action flicks, nothing remotely controversial or dealing with real life.

[skylee]

I am reading 奎章閣之戀 online (http://tieba.baidu.com/p/1503817027). I think it is entertaining. I have not read any novels for a long time, so this is a good thing. And it is also good to know what 奎章 means.

I would prefer the Taiwan version. But since this online version is free, there is no reason to complain.

[li3wei1]

I'm reading 全解汉字 （详释1500个常用汉字的音，形，义，用）。http://book.douban.com/subject/3074775/

It comes in two volumes, and I've seen it in the local Confucius Institute for many years. A long time ago I borrowed it, and gave up reading it pretty quickly. Then later, I borrowed it again, and found it really boring. This time, I'm finding it easy enough (maybe an hour per page or even less), so the reward is worth the effort. Each character gets about a page. Sometimes they talk about the etymology, sometimes the different meanings or pronunciations, sometimes the cultural background. There's always a sprinkling of chengyu and classical quotations. It's a bit like reading a dictionary, only a very chatty, informal sort of dictionary. The vocab I'm pulling out I find easy to remember, and the characters that are the subjects of the essays I definitely have a stronger understanding of. The essays are written by a wide variety of authors, so they're not all the same. I don't think they've actually got 1500 characters, more like 600-700 across the two volumes. I believe they've published another two volumes under a different name, though, and there are also some published under 汉字全解 for some reason; I'm not sure what the difference is. If I'm going to wade through Chinese non-fiction, I'd like it to be about the language, and something that helps me remember the words and characters, and this definitely fits the bill.

If anyone has also read this book, or has any recommendations for something similar, I'd like to hear.

[Demonic_Duck]

I finished 余华's 《活着》 a couple of weeks ago, which was my long overdue "first Chinese novel I read from start to finish", and I started 萧红's 《呼兰河传》, which I'm finding considerably more difficult. I think it's mostly because of the amount of outdated vocabulary (much of which refers to things that are essentially unknown in modern China), and slightly more unusual ways of expressing things. When I'm going through what I've read to pick out words to look up, I tend to find that for words not in the dictionary and not easily guessable, even most native speakers don't really understand them.

 

All the same, it's beautifully written. I'm thinking of taking a hiatus from it and reading something a bit easier in the meantime, so I can come back to it later.

[muirm]

I finished 雪山飞狐 a while ago. Mildly enjoyable, but not very good compared to his other works so far. I'm starting to get tired of 金庸's over used tension/anxiety building plot device where there is some horrible misunderstanding between two good characters that just can't get cleared up for whatever reason. I think it's a cheap way to create conflict.

 

Now I'm reading the short stories included after 雪山飞狐 in my edition. Currently it's 鸳鸯刀, which I'm finding pretty funny. More "江湖上有言道" than you can handle. I giggle every time 盖一鸣 says "大哥料事如神，言之有理" for some reason (he says it a lot). The next short story is 白马啸西风, which I know nothing about.

[Lu]

Finally, finally finished 零地點. It's interesting in part: good criticism of Taiwan's politics and media, story is built up well. But the ending and the philosophy behind it were a bit weird, in my opinion.

Now reading Wang Anyi's 小鲍庄 (in Dutch translation). Very good book, I like it a lot. And there are some useful translation solutions in it that will come in useful for my current book...

[skylee]

I have just bought a Samsung galaxy note 4, and it comes with many gifts. One of them is one free book from kindle every month. I thought I was free to choose any book I Iiked but no, I can only pick from the "samsung deals". I am not particularly intersted in the titles offered in November (see picture). But 不要白不要, so I guess I will just pick the Summer Son. I am not sure if I will read it. I have never read an ebook on kindle.

The other samsung gifts include free subscription of NYT and WSJ. Two years ago when I bought a Note 2 I got 50GB of dropbox storage for free but I never used it at all as I didn't like something with a 2-year expiry. I hope I can make better use of the gifts this time.

[skylee]

I am going to read 我的男人 （私の男 / My Man) By 桜庭一樹 (Sakuraba Kazuki).

http://pan.baidu.com/s/1c0pgHKs

[古文奇才]

@muirm

 

Have you ever noticed how he also likes to create tension by making a bunch of bad guys attack a good guy who is temporarily too weak/injured to defend himself? Then he gets miraculously rescued at the last minute.

 

PS I just finished 笑傲江湖。

[imron]

Steer clear of 飞狐外传 also.  Worse retconning than Highlander 2.

[Lu]

Currently reading some Liu Zhenyun 刘震云. I'm translating a book by him, and thought I'd read more of his work to get some background.

Liu has a very singular style: choppy sentences with lots of commas, and lots and lots of repeating. He even does it across books, as I'm starting to notice. The same words, emotions, chengyu keep coming back, and he keeps summarising previous chapters even when we've only just read this a few pages ago. Reading one book and translating another and gradually it's starting to grate on me a bit: why is he doing this? Is there a purpose or is it laziness? Although especially at the start I really liked his style (and I still do, in a way). It's something different. I started with an older story of his, where he didn't do it yet, and it was fun to then read another story from a few years later where it did show up.

I'm reading 一句顶一万句 now, currently about one-third in. The story takes place in some unspecified period, before the revolution but after the invention of the bicycle. The protagonist lives in a small village, and the story meanders from him to his family to the people he meets to their families, and virtually every character gets their own elaborate backstory. By now the protagonist is a young man, he has tried and failed to learn various professions and as far as I've read now he's still not landed on his feet.

On one hand this book would be perfect for learners: every new word I see, I know it'll be worthwhile to look it up because it'll be repeated at least five more times in the next two pages, no matter what kind of word it is. On the other hand, the language is sometimes so compact it's getting close to 文言文, so that might be hard.

Has anyone else read anything by him, and if so what did you think of it?

[muirm]

Have you ever noticed how he also likes to create tension by making a bunch of bad guys attack a good guy who is temporarily too weak/injured to defend himself? 

Yes, that is another good one. And of course the good guy is too honorable to admit he is poisoned or whatever.

[古文奇才]

Has anybody read anything by 九把刀? He's popular in Taiwan.

[muirm]

I'm currently reading the second book in the 三体 sci-fi series by 刘慈欣. I got the English translation of the first book for xmas randomly and liked it well enough, so I bought the next two in Chinese. The author likes to get technical with astronomy, physics, and computers, so if you're interested in picking up that kind of vocab, 三体 might be a good choice.

[Geiko]

I just started reading 《好婆与李同志》, a short story by 王安忆

[renzhe]

I'm revisiting 倾城之恋 by 张爱玲, a collection of short stories which includes the titular short.

I've read a couple of these before, but I'm going through the entire book this time.

[ouyangjun]

@muirm - I was just looking at buying 《三体》 by 刘慈欣 just last night.  I decided to come here prior to my purchase, and your post is making me lean towards this one.  The other one I was looking at is 《狼图腾》 by 姜戎, this book was released in 2004 and it has been turned into a movie that was just released on the mainland on February 19, 2015.  My only conflict is that I know I'm going to see this movie in the theater in the coming weeks, and I'm worried that after seeing the movie my motivation to finish the book will be diminished.  The other book I'm thinking is one that has been at the top of my reading list for about a year now, but I somehow keep putting it to the side.  I read about a quarter of it and then got distracted...《黄金时代》by 王小波.

 

Douban rates these books as follows:

《三体》 - 8.8

《狼图腾》 - 8.4

《黄金时代》 - 8.8

 

EDIT:  I decided to go with 《黄金时代》