What are you reading?

[Lu]

Over the past week I read, in English translation:

Xue Yiwei, 'The Taxi Driver': Taxi driver has lost his wife and daughter in a car accident, and shortly after the accident finds connection with them in everyday things.

Dung Kai-cheung, 'Windows 98' and 'South Park'. Two women who have exchanged some emails unknowingly get to know each other's ex-boyfriend, but only one of their stories ends happily; Young girl gets to know a real-life South Park group while her younger brother watches the cartoon.

And 'Heavenly Rain', a novella by Jia Pingwa. Outlaw kills a new county magistrate and takes his place (I was strongly reminded of Let the Bullets Fly here), does pretty well as a county magistrate, but a woman in the end is his downfall. Good story. Picked up Jia Pingwa because he was recommended on these forums and I realised I had never actually read anything by him.

[amytheorangutan]

I just finished Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Life Adrift and Liu Cixin’s 3 Body Problem. Just started The Dark Forest a few days ago. Unfortunately all in English as my level is too low. For my Chinese practice I’m currently reading Mandarin Companion’s - 盲人國 

[amytheorangutan]

On 22/12/2017 at 9:19 PM, Lu said:

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.

Lu do you mind letting me know where you bought this book from? I tried googling it and couldn’t find it somehow. It sounds interesting since I love Picture of Dorian Gray ? Thanks in advance.

[Lu]

I read it in the September 2014 issue of Pathlight. It appears to be from the collection 瓶中叹息. The English translation doesn't appear to exist online, I haven't searched very hard for the Chinese. Su Yang is 苏羊. I loved The Picture of Dorian Gray as well :-)

[Luxi]

I just started reading a novel by another Su: Su Wei (苏炜)  "The Invisible Valley" (迷谷), translated in English by Austin Woerner. Su Wei lives in the US and teaches Chinese language and literature at Yale. The novel is the Writing Chinese group's book of the month for April:   
https://writingchinese.leeds.ac.uk/book-club/april-2018-su-wei-苏炜/

 

The Chinese original is beyond me. I'm reading (and enjoying) the translation, while marking selected passages to read in the original.  Woerner's translation is quite extraordinary: he is fully immersed in the story, has a wonderful relation with the author and an enviable English  vocabulary. I can't remember when was the last time I had to look up English words, but he uses all sorts of weird archaic words - and has also coined a few new terms for the purposes of this novel.

Here's an interview with him:  
https://writingchinese.leeds.ac.uk/2018/04/04/talking-translation-austin-woerner/

 

And 2 excerpts of The Invisible Valley.
Chapter 1: 
http://smallbeerpress.com/free-stuff-to-read/novel-excerpts/2017/11/29/the-invisible-valley-chapter-1-ghost-bride/  

 

Chapter 3: 
http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/2018/03/30/excerpt-迷谷-the-invisible-valley/  

 

Plus a few reviews linked on the publishers' Home page:  
http://smallbeerpress.com/category/not-a-journal/

[Geiko]

Some days ago I finished 恶童, by Janne Teller. It was quite a tough book for a young adult novel. It's rough, violent, cruel and thought-provoking. It was even banned in some Norwegian schools for a while, which is shocking. I found this article about the book: Are children afraid of 'nothing'?

 

I've started a new novel, 孔雀的叫喊，by 虹影. I discovered this autor thanks to this article on the Paper Republic, I found there were six of her novels in one of the libraries I frequent, and "Peacock cries at the Three Gorges" happened to be both the easiest one and the one with the most beautiful cover (I'll add a photo in a minute). I know you don't have to judge a book by its covers, but when they are so beautiful...

 

I've read until page 70 now, and I'm enjoying the story a lot. It's about 柳璀, a married woman who lives in Beijing but decides to go to a small village near the Three Gorges dam, where she was born, to know more about her origins. I really like the way the story is written, the style is so casual that you feel you're drinking a cup of tea with the narrator, while she tells you about her ancestors. Very nice!

[Lu]

I'm all for judging books by their covers, especially when the cover is nice. I wasn't very impressed with Peacock cries when I read it, but that was quite some time ago, so perhaps I should give it another chance. I liked 饥饿的女儿.

 

Interesting, about that book Nothing. I read a few YA books/series last year and decided it's not really for me. They were all about a nice, normal kid who as the book(s) progressed got so thoroughly hurt and traumatised that there was no way back to a nice, normal life for them. Worthwhile stories, well-told, but not my taste.

[Lu]

I finished four Jia Pingwa novellas in the collection Heavenly Rain (in English). The sexism was so thick it almost left stains when I put it down (all the women are beautiful & sexy; most of them don't even have a name), but the stories in themselves were fun. Adventure stories with villains, poor peasants, robber chiefs, rich men and such archetypes, including the aforementioned beautiful women, but there was always some kind of twist that I didn't see coming which made the story more than a cookie-cutter fairy tale. So, fun reads. Topped it off with a short story, 'The Hunter', with some more modern archetypes (the beautiful woman (again), her ugly friend, the hunter (of game and women), the enchanted bear) with an even more twisty ending. Not sure yet whether I will look for more Jia Pingwa.

 

Also read Het verloren Shangri-la (The Lost Shangri-la) by Feng CHEN, Chinese dissident who after all kinds of incredible adventures ended up in Drachten, which is a small town in the rural Netherlands. A man, seeing no future in his village in Qinghai, goes to Tibet, gets involved with interesting men with not-quite-legal (or just plain illegal) business, ends up in Nepal where he sets up illegal business of his own and deals with the ups and downs of an international life of crime and human trafficking. Written like a literary novel, but the story itself could also have been written as a thriller. Probably at least partly based on the author's own experiences (or those of his friends). Interesting to read such a book about a region you usually don't read it about, from the perspective of a man who in most western books would just be a bit player.

[Bibu]

why not read some 诗经， 关关雎鸠在河之洲，窈窕淑女君子好逑。。。。。

[艾墨本]

Talking with a Chinese classmate, I learned that their graduate exam includes a culture section. Many of the points are pulled from http://product.dangdang.com/25137877.html

 

I picked it up fearing it would feel very academic and have been pleasantly surprised. It seemed well suited for the advanced Chinese learner in that it's essentially the "greatest hits" of Chinese culture, summarized with clear and precise language and filled with all the culture-based phrases that many Chinese use in daily life. I just worked through the section on 孔孟之道 and felt it helped me find the right Chinese to express a basic summary of these two thinkers and also put out a lot of crucial phrases. I assume they are the greatest hits because most can even be found in Pleco, despite being 8 characters or longer.

 

Some of my favorites:

（孔子）择其善者而从之，其不善者而改之

（孔子）己所不欲，勿施于人-->推己及人（近义成语：设身处地）

（荀子）君者，舟也；庶人者，水也；水则载舟，水则覆舟-->载舟覆舟

 

So far I've read the section on the great thinkers and the section on tea, both of which were relatively easy to read considering the content.

 

I'm hoping that learning the contents of this book will help me talk about Chinese culture in Chinese while also filling in some gaps of knowledge that is expected from a native speaker.

[Guest realmayo]

3 hours ago, 艾墨本 said:

I picked it up fearing it would feel very academic and have been pleasantly surprised

Nice one - just downloaded it from amazon.cn, thanks.

[Luxi]

On 07/05/2018 at 8:58 PM, Lu said:

The sexism was so thick it almost left stains when I put it down

 

Yes, I know what you mean! It also transpires in Jia Pingwa's 高兴 (Happy), but in that novel one can see a juxtaposition between Happy Liu's idea of women and the women themselves as portrayed by their actions, and the women show by their actions that they have the upper hand. I can't decide whether the sexism is his, or it is a clever ploy by a very clever author, have to read more to decide. 

 

I am struggling very, very hard with 古炉 (Old Kiln), even bought the French translation to see if it helped but it didn't, it's all slang and even harder for me than Chinese slang. I'm going to wait for the English translation. For the Francophones: the French translation is entitled "L'art perdu des fours anciens (Du monde entier) " and it is a masterpiece by Bernard and Li Bourrit - also a very thick book (the e-book is easier to carry around)

[Luxi]

4 hours ago, 艾墨本 said:

Many of the points are pulled from http://product.dangdang.com/25137877.html

 

Great find, it reads very easy and smoothly, and what I've seen so far is refreshingly free of slogans. I also like the way it is organised. I can leave Jia Pingwa and Japanese ghost and demon cat stories for a while and move to this book for my Summer read.

 

Downloaded from Dangdang - the ebook is 14.99 (but it is the 3rd edition)

[Lu]

59 minutes ago, Luxi said:

I can't decide whether the sexism is his, or it is a clever ploy by a very clever author, have to read more to decide. 

I agree! Actually all the characters in that book were archetypes - the men were stereotyped as well, although they had a broader array of roles - so one could argue that it is, as you say, a clever ploy. But there is so much sexism in contemporary Chinese literature that I tend not to give authors the benefit of the doubt in this. If they want to be clever, they should also be aware of the literary landscape they are operating in. And it is actually entirely possible to write a book with women who are people with their own feelings and motivations. Even male authors can in fact manage this. I think Liu Zhenyun usually does pretty well, and just read a novel by Bei Dao who also has a rounded female character.

 

That book was Golven (Waves). In the early seventies, a few people meet, adrift in a small northern town. A young man from a good family, but now sent away from Beijing; a young woman, orphaned by the Cultural Revolution and completely jaded about life; an official with some good intentions but not free of a dark past himself. The whole book is very melancholy, everything is lost, lost, lost, and even when people seem to find each other, their past means it will go wrong. Very well written, very well translated too. Bei Dao is famous as a poet, but he did great as a novelist here.

 

The woman in question is, of course, beautiful, but otherwise I don't find her portrayal sexist. After a while, we find out that

Spoiler

she has a daughter in the village where she was 'sent down' to. The young man and the young woman have by this point fallen in love. When he finds out about the little girl, he initially is understanding, but then says: you should just give her away to someone else.

The translator in his afterword interprets this as a sign that the young man was still influenced by the politics of the Cultural Revolution. That was interesting, because my immediate interpretation of that scene was that he was still old-fashioned and traditional at heart, I didn't see anything political or communist in it.

 

Anyway, good book.

[Lu]

Over the past week, I read, in English translation:

Wang Anyi, 'Dark Alley'. Children's politics in a small alley, and once the main character finally works up the courage to go into the dark side alley of the title, he finds that it actually leads to a completely normal neighbour alley.

Medrol, 'Contract with the Gods'. Tibetan tale of a man who asks a powerful but dangerous local deity for help and learns of the deity's history when alive. I enjoyed this one.

Mai Jia, 'A Voice from the Beyond'. Fifty years after his death, the main character tells what happened to him during the First World War. Both man and setting are entirely English, there's not one Chinese connection in this story. I found it interesting that a Chinese author would attempt to write a European story, and succeed too. The story is interesting and as far as I can tell, the English setting executed well.

Ge Fei, 'Mona Lisa's Smile'. Man tells about his time in university, just after the Cultural Revolution, and how the trials and tribulations of one classmate reflects on the choices all of them made in their lives.

[Lu]

Over the past week I read, in English translation:

- Zhou Daxin, 'Golden Fields of Wheat', snapshots from the life and times of a few people from a small farming village. The events of the 1950s to 1970s as seen from the perspective of a farmer who takes farming seriously.

- Fang Fang, 'Yan Wu'. The title character, a former university professor, comes out of prison after being locked up for a very long time for a crime he didn't commit (and which, unexpectedly (for me) was not political at all, but I wonder if Fang actually does mean the Cultural Revolution and just covers it up with a regular murder to keep her story out of the hands of the censors). He starts to work as a rubbish collector, rubbing his sorry fate in the faces of the people who framed him. When his fortune turns again, he is too set in his sad and poor life to step back up. OK now that I summarise it, I'm more and more sure that it is indeed about the CR and the waste of human talent it caused.

- Annie Baby, 'Qizhao: Lonely Island', about the existential loneliness of life, how we yearn for love and connection - with the past, with another person - but can never keep it. This story really spoke to me, so I found myself another one of her stories to read (in Dutch translation): 'Seven Years' ('Zeven jaar'). A man and his girlfriend love each other a lot, but she is depressed and self-destructive and eventually kills herself. Doesn't read nearly as depressing as my summary, it is again about seeking love and connection but not finding it, or finding it but not being able to give it a place in one's life. And now I want to read more Annie Baby.

[Geiko]

In May I've been reading 愛到極致是放手 , by 張德芬 . I borrowed it from the library because it was in traditional Chinese, and I try to get as much exposure to traditional characters as possible, since they are less ubiquitous (at least in my country). The book was catalogued as chick lit, but as soon as I started reading it I realised it was a mistake: it's not a novel, but a self-help book. At first I was really disappointed, I don't like self-help books, but then I decided to give it a try: since I always read novels, I feel a bit uncomfortable reading non-fiction in Chinese, so I thought this would be good practice. And it turned out to be an interesting book (kind of), and it's easy to read. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody, unless you like the genre, but I became familiar with many words about feelings: 苦恼、坎坷一生、迁就、愧疚、负面情绪……

 

[Tomsima]

I have wanted to participate in this thread for a long time, but have never finished a book in Chinese before. I habitually read articles, but have never found a book which kept me interested long enough to read to the very last page. Well I just did it, and wanted to post here, as I'm feeling really happy!

 

I hope this counts at least, I read 書譜 by 孫過庭 through a 註釋 style book, annotated and explained by 趙宏. I unintentionally appear to have improved my 文言 ability A LOT, especially as the explanations often mimicked the style of 孫過庭 (eg. frequent use of 故、矣、蓋).

 

If you are interested in 書法 I could not rate this book high enough (書譜 that is). It was a captivating read about the state of the artistic world from the critical mouth of a legendary Tang dynasty calligrapher who wasn't exactly appreciated in his time. However if you are just starting out, I would probably not recommend this book, there are famous names and terms littered throughout the book which would make for a frustrating experience.

 

It took me exactly 20 days of reading about 2 hours a day to finish. The annotated copy I read is 196 pages long. For those daunted by the task of reading in Chinese: the first chapter, along with the very last concluding page contained roughly 90% of the entire books 成語. Everything else in between was fairly straightforward reading.

 

 

[Lu]

Tomsima and other posters, please don't feel daunted by what other people post. The main requirements for posting in this thread is that 1) you are reading something (or have just read something) and 2) you wish to post about it. Personally I only post about China-related things, but if you've just delved into a Spanish article about insects and want to post that, that is fine too.

 

And @Tomsima that book sounds interesting, thanks for the short write-up!

[DavyJonesLocker]

12 minutes ago, Lu said:

Tomsima and other posters, please don't feel daunted by what other people post. The main requirements for posting in this thread is that 1) you are reading something (or have just read something) and 2) you wish to post about it. 

 

does sitting on the loo reading the back of a bottle of shampoo count?