What are you reading?

[Lu]

Since I last posted here I've read, in English translation:

- Su Yang, 'Hands'. Young woman has a Dorian Gray-like fascination with her beautiful hands, which should never age. The ending is awesome horror. Great story.

- Chen Mengya, 'Brocade'

- Deng Yiguang, 'Shenzhen is Located at 22'27''-22'52'' N, man in big city changes slowly into a steppe horse.

And in Dutch:

- Zhang Dachun, 'Lucky is worried about his country', barely-educated poor man hopes to save his country by writing a presidential address.

- Lao She, 'Ding', impressionist story about the rise of a New China.

- Wu Ming-yi, 'Light streams like a river', one of a series of stories centered around a big shopping center in Taipei. I liked this story, it made me curious about the others in the series.

- Tsou Yung-shan, 'Three-way crossing'. Woman tries to take good pictures of a certain crossroad in Berlin, but one small thing after the other doesn't go quite how she planned it, rather spoiling her afternoon. Nothing really happened in this story, and yet it is a marvelous account of everything that doesn't happen.

- Yu Hua, 'Why there was no music'. Man steals his friend's wife, yet afterwards they're friends again.

 

I've been reading in Chinese as well (400多 pages in some six weeks!), but that was for work. I've found that I can, in fact, read 20 pages a day, 100 pages a week, but only if the book is not too difficult, I make it a priority, and I read nothing else. I can do this for about a month and then I crack and start reading the first non-Chinese book in sight.

[abcdefg]

10 hours ago, realmayo said:

Recently read Night Heron by someone called Adam Brookes: fun, fairly gritty British spy story, with a very China-heavy plot.

Without the China stuff it would still be good, readable, page-turning thriller.

 

Thanks! I just now ordered it from Amazon in Kindle format (only $2.99.) 

[DavyJonesLocker]

13 hours ago, Lu said:

 

I've been reading in Chinese as well (400多 pages in some six weeks!), but that was for work. I've found that I can, in fact, read 20 pages a day, 100 pages a week, but only if the book is not too difficult, I make it a priority, and I read nothing else. I can do this for about a month and then I crack and start reading the first non-Chinese book in sight.

 

Same here! Do you read hard copies Lu?

I'm thinking of buying a tablet/ ithingy so looking up unknown words using PLECO document reader or Ocr would be easier and not slow down the pace as compared to a hard copy.

 

[imron]

My advice would be to stick with hard copy.  Being able to look up words with a popup dictionary will give you instant gratification, but long-term it will likely hamper your ability to read texts without a dictionary because even if you know the word you'll still be tempted to look it up 'just to check', and confidence in knowing a word is one of the key parts of knowing that word.

 

If you are finding there are too many new words and that makes reading difficult or that it slows the pace down too much, the better solution is to find easier content.

 

[Lu]

7 hours ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

Do you read hard copies Lu?

Yes. (I actually went to a copy shop to have those 400多 pages printed and bound.) If I would read off a screen it would be off an e-reader, but I don't have one, I prefer paper. Reading off a tablet I wouldn't like, not good for the eyes.

I rarely look up words, only when I really have to (or if I'm not sure of the pronunciation of the name of a main character). I usually have my phone somewhere within reach when I really have to look something up.

[Luxi]

On 23/12/2017 at 11:09 AM, DavyJonesLocker said:

Do you read hard copies Lu?

 

Not Lu, but allow me to make a case for screen reading.

 

I read both, but more and more e-books. It is an individual choice, my eyesight is congenitally poor, reading Chinese print - often poor quality and in sub-optimal light locations - made it much worse. After 14 years of hard copy reading (without any choice), it had become very painful and difficult. It's one of the 3 main reasons why I abandoned Chinese completely for several years. There must be a reason why so many Chinese people (300 million) have taken to ebooks with lightning speed.

 

Besides solving my problems with print, there are several advantages to screen-reading. Price: ebooks cost a fraction of hard copy. Convenience: You can carry a staggering amount of books in a device weighing less than 200 grams that fits into your pocket, and they're always with you in case you get delayed somewhere. Synchronisation: you can have all your devices synchronised so that you can always get back to the page(s) you were reading and find all your annotations and highlights. Freebies: all ebook retailers offer free books, some are very high quality. Sound: some readers /reading apps are linked to audio-books (not all machine read). In-app or in-device dictionaries, internet links, note-taking, highlighting, bookmarking options and even social extensions. Uploading your own texts (docs, pdfs etc.) into the reader (or reading app) and use all the tools as with purchased ebooks.

 

It doesn't have to be all or nothing, you can combine both approaches and get the best of both worlds. I suggest you try for yourself. Where do you have Pleco installed? A phone? You could download the reader from Amazon.cn. Or sign in for any of the many sellers of e-books (Duokan, Dangdang, Douban, etc.). Or try all the options. Their apps are good for a trial, even in a phone.

 

 

[murrayjames]

Lu,

 

How do you format/typeset those books? 400+ pages of Chinese is a lot of text (assuming A4 paper, 1" margins, and 10-12 pt. font).

[abcdefg]

On ‎12‎/‎22‎/‎2017 at 11:41 PM, realmayo said:

Recently read Night Heron by someone called Adam Brookes: fun, fairly gritty British spy story, with a very China-heavy plot.

...

It's the first in what appears to be a three-book series, I'm onto the third now. Definitely recommend them all!

 

I hate books like Night Heron. Why? Because they go too fast. I gobbled it up in under 48 hours like a box of Belgian chocolates that I had hoped to space out and enjoy little by little over the course of a week or two or three. Just couldn't leave the book alone. Read it when I should have been doing other things; read it long into the night.

 

Now I'll have to check out his other two volumes.

[TheBigZaboon]

@abcdefg

 

I looked for an English copy of night heron here in Tokyo, couldn't find one. Bought a second hand Japanese copy for about 3¥ plus shipping. Don't expect to find a Chinese translation because of the politics until I go to Taiwan, so Japanese will have to do, for now．

 

First 20 pages or so are gratifyingly easy, but I don't expect that to last. But it leads me to  think maybe a Chinese version might not be so difficult, either. If anybody knows of a Chinese version(traditional okay), other than one from Hong Kong (afraid of Cantonese isms, but maybe I worry too much) please let me know．

 

TBZ

[Lu]

12 hours ago, murrayjames said:

How do you format/typeset those books? 400+ pages of Chinese is a lot of text (assuming A4 paper, 1" margins, and 10-12 pt. font).

I didn't do any additional formatting. The author emailed them to me as pdf's, regular text with one page per page, in about the format you assume. I had them printed double-sided and bound in a plastic ring backbone-thingy (don't know the word). It was indeed a lot of text. Fortunately they were interesting novels, pretty much pageturners. Still I'm pretty proud I managed it in six weeks :-)

[imron]

14 hours ago, Lu said:

don't know the word

Binder

[Luxi]

"2017: Best books in Chinese" selected by authors, translators and editors in Paper Republic.

 

Hard to decide where to start, but I just succumbed to temptation and bought all 4 volumes of Baku Yumemakura (梦枕貘)'s "Legend of the Demon Cat" (妖猫传)translated from the Japanese by Lin Jiaobai (林皎碧). Sounds like my kind of book, but it is a very long read.

Edited to add: link to online reading of the 1st book in Douban:

https://book.douban.com/subject/1451520/

(the DangDang screen reader is too inflexible and doesn't allow copying and pasting text)

[Lu]

Over the past week I read, again in Pathlight:

- XIao Hang, 'The Gift'. Man manages to win over femme fatale by pure selflessness, set against a science fiction-ish background. Fun story, almost like a futuristic fairy tale.

- Pan Xiangli, 'A Miraculous Sleigh Ride', very normal woman with very normal life watches very romantic Christmas movie and starts pining for her own romantic Christmas miracle. There are a million ways for such a story setup to go wrong, from an overly sappy to a needlessly cynical ending, but this story steers nicely through those Scylla and Charibdis to a very satisfactory ending, sweet yet realistic.

 

And now reading The Ark by Zhang Jie, in a Dutch translation that is unfortunately not very good (in my opinion). The content of the book is great though.

[Geiko]

1 hour ago, Lu said:

And now reading The Ark by Zhang Jie, in a Dutch translation that is unfortunately not very good (in my opinion).

 

It would seem that Zhang Jie's books are particularly difficult to translate into western languages. I bought the Spanish translation of 無字, and in the first page there's an editor's note that says that the Spanish edition is not based on the original book, but rather on a rewriting of it that Zhang herself made to make it "easier to read for the European readers". I will have to read the original story one day, and see if my European mind can understand it

[Lu]

Funny, I once read 无字 in Chinese with an Italian translation next to it, and the Italian translation was abridged here and there. (I don't know Italian, but having learned French and Latin I can make out enough to see where it differed from the Chinese.) To be honest I'm rather skeptical of Chinese authors who want to tell European readers what they will and won't understand. Apparently Han Han also believed his work is impossible to translate. It's difficult in places, sure, but far from impossible, and anyway every author is difficult in their own unique and unforeseen way.

 

That said, I've been told that the main reason Wang Anyi has barely been published in Dutch is that she is too difficult to translate. But it was a very good Chinese translator who said that, not the author.

 

My problem with this Dutch translation is not that it's inaccurate or fails to capture the meaning (I haven't read the book in Chinese), but that the Dutch is bad and you can read the Chinese through it. I kept having to forcibly silence my inner editor, which made for tiring reading. But despite all that, it is a good book. Three women, divorced or separated, live together and try to deal with various professional, social and personal hardships, from a nosy and gossipy neighbour to a handsy and annoying boss to a vengeful ex-husband. They're all simultaneously happy to be rid of their exes and sad not to have a man in their life to make life easier. The book takes place just after the Cultural Revolution (written in the early 1980s), and I wonder if things are better now. I suppose they must be, for one thing people are not dependent on their 单位 anymore for everything from housing to employment.

[murrayjames]

I finished reading 陈冠中’s《盛世—中国2013》a few days ago. The book has a fantastic premise, likable characters, and a great second act. Unfortunately, it is diminished by forced exposition and a frustrating ending. The book has its own thread:
https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/27113-the-prosperous-time-china-2013/

 

《盛世》is the first Chinese novel I read from start to finish. I tackled it in part because I was encouraged by other Chinese book readers in this thread. So, thank you to everyone who contributed here.

 

I am currently reading《毛主席语录》. Then onto 余华’s《活着》.

[Lu]

15 hours ago, murrayjames said:

I am currently reading《毛主席语录》.

That's an unusual choice for a second-ever book. Is it working for you to read it? I haven't read it in Chinese (I barely read it at all, actually), but imagine it might be a bit difficult, both because there would not be a lot of context and because the vocab might be rather specialised.

 

I read Chen Ruoxi's Mayor Yin (in Dutch translation), stories straight from the Cultural Revolution. Very good, especially 'Jingjing's birthday' (which I'd read before) made a deep impression on me. I find it interesting that authors like Chen Ruoxi, Zhang Jie and Wang Anyi, who all lived through the CR, write about the CR and life in general but with much less violence than Yu Hua or Mo Yan. They must have seen similar things, have similar experiences, but it did something different to their writing. Not sure if this is a generational thing (Zhang Jie is a generation older than Yu Hua and Mo Yan), or a male/female thing, or just a matter of who I happen to have read.

 

I also started reading a short story collection by 张楚 in Chinese, for the second time, but like the first time I didn't get ten pages in before another book came up and now 张悦然 is first. For work, hopefully. Fingers crossed.

[murrayjames]

Lu,

 

《盛世》was my first novel, but I had read books in Chinese before.

 

《毛主席语录》is not that difficult. The amount of specialized vocabulary varies by chapter. The vocabulary in a chapter like “社会主义和共产主义” is more challenging than in, say, “帝国主义和一切反动派都是纸老虎”. There is also a lot of repetition. Because the book is organized by topic, most of the challenging vocabulary clumps together. You’ll see 辩证唯物论 and 剥削阶级 ten times in two pages, then never again.

 

You wrote above about some differences between male and female modern Chinese authors. What female Chinese authors (and women-written books) do you recommend? (I want to read 张爱玲, but fear she is beyond my ability.)

[Lu]

Zhang Jie 张洁 and Wang Anyi 王安忆 if you want to read slightly older stuff (1980s, just after the Cultural Revolution). For sex, drugs and rock & roll, Mian Mian 棉棉 (don't bother with Wei Hui). Di An 笛安 and Qiao Ye 乔叶 are some very new authors that I like. 笛安 is easier to read than 乔叶, but apart from that I can't say much about the difficulty of these authors in Chinese because I read them either in translation or quite some time ago. You could also just give 张爱玲 a try, if it's too difficult you can put her away and try again later.

 

And Li Ang 李昂, but she is really difficult, so perhaps keep that for later. She's really good though.

[abcdefg]

I've gotten in the habit of picking up one of these weekly advertising sheets when I go to to the supermarket. Leave it out on the kitchen table and read it while having a glass of milk or cup of tea. 

 

 

 

The silly little game I play with myself is to look at the pictures and try to say what that item is. Usually it's easy, but sometimes I get stumped. Then I take a real close look, even using a magnifying glass on the small print. Look up unknown words in Pleco; add them to my review queue. 

 

Since many items repeat from one week to the next, this even provides a crude form of "spaced repetition review." Has the added advantage of familiarizing me with the names for different cuts of meat and helps in identifying different kinds of fish. 

 

Enlarge the picture at right above. Did you know that 琵琶腿 is the way to say "chicken drumstick?" Chinese relate it to the shape of one of their own traditional instruments. Not surprising when you think about it. 

 

冻 in the ad means that these drumsticks were previously frozen. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eventually even the pricing sort of sinks in by osmosis, even though that's not my focus. This helps when I go to the wet market where prices usually aren't marked and must be negotiated. 

 

Can I read 红楼梦 in the original? No. Can I read the weekly grocery store ad sheet? Yes. 

 

I recall @imron once admonishing a new member, "If there's something you want to be able to do well, then practice doing that thing."