What are you reading?

[imron]

《兄弟》is good but it takes a while to warm up.  The second half is much better than the first half, but the second half wouldn't be nearly as good without the first half.

[xit]

Just started reading 最美遇见你 . So far it's interesting and not too hard, it feels like I'm reading at a quicker pace then usual. There is an English translation online too. Overall, it's easier than 小时代2 (which kinda got boring), more dialog and less (read: no) Shanghai-is-so-awesome-and-here's-why descriptions (these made me realize I really need to work on my vocab). I like that it also has a group of friends, so it's not just romance, and I actually find it funny. I think it's suitable for beginner or lower intermediate level, yes there are unknown words, but I feel that it doesn't disrupt the flow and the understanding of the book. It has a happy ending (yes, I checked before starting).

[Geiko]

For the last two months I've been reading 流星•蝴蝶•劍. It was my first wuxia novel, and I really liked it! It kept me interested throughout the 500 pages it lasted. 

After finishing it, I decided to change to a different genre, and I picked 《我終究是愛你的》，by 張小嫻. It's the second novel I read from this author. The first one，你總有愛我的一天，was supposed to be chick lit, but it was... a bit strange, it included some supernatural elements that didn't fit too well in the otherwise realistic story.

 

It was like a chick lit version of Dorian Gray

and it wasn't what I expected. However, language-wise was very easy, and it was a very short novel, so I've decided to give her a second chance.

As for 我終究是愛你的，the author says on the preface:

Quote

這部小說是（......）我頭一次嘗試把愛情小說和偵探小說結合起來

 

So she's mixing genres again, let's see if I enjoy it more this time! 

[Lu]

Currently reading 被月光听见 by 乔叶. I was expecting a 长篇小说, but after the first 50 or so pages it turned out it's a collection of 中篇小说. I'm on the third one and I like it. Language-wise it isn't always easy, I have the impression that she's writing in a local type of Mandarin (and my guess was North-Eastern, but she herself is from Henan, so that might be wrong), but I like the stories. Women negotiating their way through life, love and sex, basically, trying the best they can with the hand they're dealt.

 

Also read Kitchen Chinese by Ann Mah. Plot-wise it's nothing new (ABC in US hits rock bottom in career and love life, moves to Beijing, learns new things about career, self and family; there's a good guy love interest and a bad boy love interest, there's an estranged sister and some family secrets, there's a new job and a breakthrough opportunity, and all ends well) but it was fun to read about the Beijing of expats and other 漂流族. It's all a bit over the top, but still rings true. Mah's conclusion is that Beijing is full of opportunities, that there is really space to invent yourself anew, start something, and that was my impression of the city as well. Recommended for anyone who wants to read about that life.

 

And now I'm reading Children of the Pearl by one Ching Yun Bezine, because I happened upon it in a second-hand bookstore in Tainan and that was so random that I had to buy it. It's so thoroughly orientalist that I wonder how a Chinese woman, even a Chinese-American woman, can have written it. I wonder how much of it is actually her husband's. ('This book is just as much yours as it is mine', she writes in her dedication. Well, if you say so...)

[imron]

Not Chinese, but I just finished reading Worm, which is kind of like a cross between X-Men and a 金庸 novel.

 

If you start reading this, be warned, it is long.

[Lu]

'Worm (...) totals roughly 1,680,000 words; roughly 26 typical novels in length (or 10-11 very thick novels).' That is indeed long...

 

In the past week I read short stories by Xu Zechen (this one taking place in a small village rather than the big city, still a nice story); Liu Yichang (I think I've read two of his stories and I liked both, especially the way they are set up); and Mo Yan (good). Also an excerpt from Wang Anyi's 長恨歌, which I liked. It was the first few pages, introducing main character Wang Qiyao, and it gave me a good impression why Wang is considered the chroniquer of Shanghai life. Next up is a book, for a change. Just started reading The Carnal Prayer Math, translated by Patrick Hanan. Finished chapter 2 and no-one has taken off their clothes yet, but the writing is funny. This should be an enjoyable read.

[Lu]

In the past week I finished The Carnal Prayer Math and it's a fun book. Quite some sex, but much more humor and satire and making fun of everyone involved. It also often refers to other famous classical Chinese stories, which makes me want to read up on those.

[Lu]

In the past week I read a few old stories translated into Dutch, but mostly I read the Jin Ping Mei, as translated by David Tod Roy. I found it interesting how much I sympathise with Pan Jinlian. What a traumatic childhood she had: father died when she was six, when she was eight her mother sold her to a rich household, where she learned to play music, but I doubt anyone there bothered to love her or care for her. Then when she's 14 (or what was it, I don't have the book handy) her mother sells her once more, to an elderly man. The other girl musician who enters that household with her (and who might have been a friend, who knows) soon dies. The man of the house rapes 14-year-old Pan Jinlian at the first opportunity he gets, after which his wife beats her up for being raped. She is then married off to a guy she neither knows nor likes, again much older than she is, and whose character is a total mismatch with hers. In addition, it seems she's bored to the gills sitting in his house. No wonder she falls in with a bad friend and a bad boyfriend.

 

Not that any of this excuses the gruesome murder (or the way she treats Ying'er), but I think the moral of Pan Jinlian's story should be: love and care for your children (including daughters). And also, don't force people into marriages.

 

Then Wu Song, searching for Ximen Qing to avenge his brother, finds some other guy who won't say where Ximen Qing is, and Wu Song throws him out the window and kicks him to death. The book then describes how Wu Song is sentenced to death by a bad, corrupt judge, but fortunately there is a good, incorruptable judge who manages to save him and just sends him off into banishment, because Wu Song is such a good and upstanding person and it was clearly wrong to sentence him to death. And I was thinking, well he might be an upstanding guy in general and I'm not in favour of the death penalty, but dude, he just killed a guy for being in the wrong place. A guy he didn't even know and who had nothing whatsoever to do with his brother's death.

 

So yeah, I like this book. It's annotated half to death, but most of those notes one can just skip if one isn't studying the book but just reading it.

[古文奇才]

Have you read the version in Water Margin? In that one Ximen Qing is the one thrown out the window, which seems to make more sense.

[Lu]

I haven't, but I want to. Do you know which is a good translation? (Reading it in Chinese is too difficult for me, that is, I'm not willing to invest the time I'd have to spend on it.) I prefer the kind of translation that leaves nothing out and I don't mind annotations at all.

[古文奇才]

All of the translations are very old school. There is one by Sidney Shapiro entitled "Outlaws of the Marsh." That would probably be your best bet. You might want to keep in mind that it was originally a long collection of loosely-connected stories. So sometimes it can get very long-winded, or repetitious. 

[stapler]

I just started reading a translation of The Old Man and the Sea by 楊照. The translator appeared to have done a fairly good job of imitating Hemingway's 'style' insofar as he keeps it fairly simple. I'm going to keep this book as light reading for when I'm tired. After I've finished it I'll report back. I think one possibly interesting thing about this book is that it could be even easier than 活著 thus making it a great beginners book.

[艾墨本]

17 hours ago, stapler said:

this book is that it could be even easier than 活著 thus making it a great beginners book.

Duly noted!

 

I've started into 圈子圈套 and am 10 pages in. I'm already hooked. I like the writing style and the brooding, deep-in-though tone of the narrator/protagonist. More importantly, I've already encountered several words I learned while reading 活着! Very exciting. I'm just mad I missed the boat to read it with the reddit.com/r/chinesebookclub group, especially since I recommended it. 

 

I'm also casually reading a book a friend wrote who works at 北师大: 从出生到6岁. I'm finding it to be a great read because it is simply written and I can learn a lot of more emotional and sensory words. I like to talk about perspective and opinion from a more philosophical standpoint and this book is helping me pick up some of the words I need to do this.

[imron]

43 minutes ago, 艾墨本 said:

I've already encountered several words I learned while reading 活着! Very exciting.

It's great when that happens, especially when it's from two very distinct genres.

[Ori_A]

On 2017-5-29 at 3:09 PM, stapler said:

I think one possibly interesting thing about this book is that it could be even easier than 活著 thus making it a great beginners book.

 

I finished reading the old man and the sea two weeks ago, and now reading 活着. My experience is actually the opposite of yours. I find 活着 to be much more friendly and readable. I wasn't very comfortable with the 书面语 in The Old Man and the Sea, and sometimes the abstract descriptions of the ocean were just too much for me. Not to mention the names and types of sea creatures. It's a short book, but took me a lot of time to finish (wasn't as interesting as I remembered it to be..). It did improve my vocabulary quite a bit though. 

活着 proves to be much more interesting than I expected. Perhaps the reason I find 老人与海 to be harder is because my Chinese kept improving during the time I was reading it , and I started 活着 with a bit better reading skills.

[Lu]

During the past few weeks I finished the Jin Ping Mei, only to realise that it is in fact volume one of five. I kind of want to read the rest of the book as well, but at the same time it'll take quite some time. Also I read one short story by Taiwanese author Zhang Qijiang, but overall my good resolution has not been going very well in the past weeks. I'm starting again this Monday, with more Taiwanese short stories.

 

I did finish 被月光听见 by 乔叶, a collection of 中篇小说. The more stories I read the better I liked it, and by the end I loved it. In these stories, Qiao Ye discusses various social phenomena (or ills), from the fairly benign but still very thorough corruption among government officials, to the gap between city and countryside, to prostitution, and other issues, always as the background to her female characters' life. But what I liked most is how she describes the often inherent messiness of romance, love and sex. How a woman can love one person but marry another, or feels lust for someone but doesn't want to have sex with him, or feels lust and wants to have sex but for the wrong reasons, etc etc. Some of it seemed unbelievable to me, but if her story of decades-long flirt which is never consummated but never ended either is so spot-on, and the relationship of the city woman to her countryside inlaws sounds to believable, then I have to at least consider that there could be truth in the woman who gets so sexually frustrated after her divorce that she enjoys her rape at the hands of an intruder.

 

Qiao Ye's language is not particularly easy, but not particularly hard either (in my opinion, fairly advanced reader), and I thoroughly recommend her work.

 

Now reading 北港香爐人人插 by 李昂, whom I (re)discovered through a short story a while ago and bought some books by in Taiwan. Also short stories, I think, but I haven't read very far yet. She writes in a Chinese that seems a bit unfamiliar to me, I'm still getting used to it. Not sure if it's the influence of Taiwanese or just her style or something else.

[Geiko]

On 2017/3/31 at 8:47 PM, Geiko said:

As for 我終究是愛你的，the author says on the preface:

Quote

這部小說是（......）我頭一次嘗試把愛情小說和偵探小說結合起來

 

So she's mixing genres again, let's see if I enjoy it more this time! 

 

And the answer was... No, I didn't enjoy it either that novel was supposed to be a mixture of romance and mystery, but I couldn't find either of them. So after two novels, my conclusion is that 張小嫻's style is easy to read, but her plots are just nonsense. Don't waste your time! 

This couple of months I've been very lazy: I started 《三體》，but I found it a bit hard (maybe because I'm not a huge sci-fi fan?), so I've left it for later, and read 六六's 《蝸居》instead (303 pages in traditional characters). The first fifty pages were a bit boring, but then one of the characters has an affair and everything gets interesting. Really good for a chick lit novel, and the ending positively surprised me. 

And now I've just begun 王度盧《寶劍金釵》. It will be my second wuxia novel after 古龍《流星•蝴蝶•劍》, I'm loosely following A language learner's guide to wuxia novels (http://www.hackingchinese.com/a-language-learners-guide-to-wuxia-novels/). I hope I enjoy it! 

[Lu]

During the past week, I read short stories by Taiwanese authors Su Weizhen, Guo Zheng and Li Ao. I read Li Ao before, years and years ago, a few essays in some volume of 李敖有話説 which I found funny for all their 罵-ing. The two essays I read this week ('The art of survival' and 'The freedom of satire') were less interesting, I found. But it might be my perspective changing. I also read an interview with painter/poet/calligrapher Luo Qing, who had interesting holistic ideas about these various artforms.

 

And I read Lu Xun's introduction to his translation of De kleine Johannes, an allegorical Dutch book from the late 19th century. It was heartening to find that Lu Xun ran into the same issues as I sometimes do, and resolves them in similar ways (and sometimes not at all).

 

(All of this was in Dutch translation.)

[skylee]

I have just read a short story 尋找鮑爾吉.  I think it is interesting.

 

http://m.aisixiang.com/data/47634.html

[Lu]

That was kafkaesque. And very sad. I'd think Chinese people would be aware of 少數民族 names even if they've never seen one.