Reading Yu Hua's "To Live"

[daofeishi]

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Text: 余华《活着》, available online here and here, audio book available here, hard copy here, translation here

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Since there seems to be at least one other person who would like to try to get through this book, it would be great if we could get together a group of people to read Yu Hua's "To Live", that is, 余华's 活着. Many of us are very busy with work or college, and I'd therefore like to try and keep a leisurely pace. The whole book is about 180 pages, so I'd suggest to aim for about 25 pages a week. In that way, those who manage to stay on until the end will finish the book in less than 8 weeks.

Wikipedia has an article about the book for those who have not heard about it.

Yu Hua is known as one of the easier authors to read, and he is also known to be an exceptionally good writer, so I think this could be a good first novel to try to get through for those who are at an upper intermediate/advanced level and have not engaged substantially with this sort of literature before.

For those who do not have a hard copy, the book is available in full here and here (feel free to skip the preface).

For those who would like a hard copy, this is the edition I am reading. For those who would like to read the English and Chinese text in parallel, Michael Berry's translation is supposed to be very good.

What I would ideally want out of a reading group would be to have some motivation to keep reading Chinese even though I have a very busy schedule the next few months. I will try to put together a list of useful vocabulary as we go along, and it would be great if anyone would help me in doing that. I'll look into good platforms for collaborating on a vocab list.

Other than helping me with that, the only thing I'd want is that people post comments to the text in the form of grammatical questions, questions about allusions and textual references, criticism and comments to the text as they go along.

Is anyone up for it?

[jkhsu]

I'm interested.

[Gleaves]

I am in. Thanks for teeing this up, daofeishi. I am going to hunt down a hard copy and then start.

[daofeishi]

Great. I've been looking at Wikidots as a possible collaboration tool. Have a look at the example page I've created. I have opened up for anonymous editing, so you should be able to edit the document. Try to play around a bit and tell me what you think. If you want to do any fancy formatting, the syntax is explained here.

[imron]

I've read the book and may chime in with comments, but I currently have limited Internet access so won't be able to participate much.

[BertR]

I've almost finished 巴金's《家》 (still 20 pages to go). I planned to read 《空镜子》 once I've finished 《家》, but since I recently also bought 《活着》, I might as well join. I have this edition: http://www.amazon.cn/活着-余华/dp/B004A91D2G

I'm currently quite busy, so I might not be able to keep up with pace, but I'll try anyway.

When do we start?

[afriday11]

I was planning on making a lesson plan for the movie, but I'll read the first chapter and see if I have the time to keep up. Does anyone recommend anything else by this author, maybe a little shorter?

[Gleaves]

FYI for those in the U.S., you can pick up 《活着》 at bookseed.

afriday11 - for something shorter, try 《我没有自己的名字》。

BertR - I am finishing up 《家》 as well. I actually have a big chunk left, but am going to try and squeeze it in before my copy of 《活着》 arrives.

[BertR]

@Gleaves: Weren't you reading 《斗破苍穹》 yesterday?

I'm a one-book-at-the-time-man. Well at least within a certain language and ignoring technical books...

[Gleaves]

Guilty. I'm especially bad with starting different books in different genres all at the same time. I'll probably get started on 《活着》 in about two weeks, so I'll catch up if things have already kicked off.

[Peiruo]

I'm in, I don't know that I have read something at this level, and certainly haven't read anything this long before, but I would like the challenge and will try to keep up and contribute I'm going to read it online, since I'm in spain and doubt ill be able to track down a hard copy. How many pages are the copies everyone else has? If we get through 25 pages a week, how long are we looking at for the whole book? I'll try to divide the online version up the same.

peiruo

[jkhsu]

I am planning to read from the online link here that daofeishi sent. Is it correct that there are a total of 10 chapters in the book? Does it make sense to split this up by chapters instead of # of pages? It would probably be easier for those of us using the online version. I'm also planning to use Perapera-kun to assist me. I've never used the software before but without it, I wouldn't be able to participate in this challenge at this point in time. I'm pretty excited to see how it'll all work out.

[BertR]

No, there aren't any chapters in the book. From time to time there is extra whitespace between blocks of text (on pages 6, 34, 36, 67, ... in my edition) and somethings this corresponds to a new chapter on that website, but not necessary. Also notice that the 2 websites that daofeishi posted split the text up differently.

[jbradfor]

If it's anything like the movie, you can just split it into parts based on bad things happening. IIRC, that should be at least 10 chunks.....

[daofeishi]

I'm really happy to see so many people wanting to do this project.

As BertR pointed out, there are no chapters. I'll try to split the book into appropriate chunks as we go along and give good references to where the cutoffs are. Of course, everyone is welcome to read the book at their own pace, but if we want to collaborate on a word list and have a good discussion it won't hurt if we try to synchronize a bit. I suggest that we start the project the coming weekend (i.e. on Saturday Sept. 17), but since not everyone has a copy yet and other might still join, we'll monitor the progress and we can extend the time we use on the first chunk if we want. How does that sound to you?

As for the speed, I have set that to about 25 pages a week in my edition of the book, which is roughly 1/8th of the book a week. That means, if my math skills aren't completely off, that we will finish in about 8 weeks. If anyone does not think that that is a good pace, please shout out.

Has anyone had a look at the Wikidots page yet? Are you able to see it? Are you able to edit it? Do you think it will be an OK platform to use for the project? Could some of you tentatively agree to help me keeping that page alive by contributing vocabulary and insights as you go along?

[jkhsu]

@daofeishi - The wikidots page looks great. However, I probably won't have much time to contribute to a vocab word list as I'll be barely keeping up using Perapera-kun. I'm looking forward to the content discussions though. Hope that's ok with you.

[daofeishi]

That's absolutely fine. From experience I know that committing to reading a book can be difficult enough by itself, so I don't want to load people with other tasks they have to do additionally. However, if you find the time, maybe you can add some of the more interesting words that you look up in peraperakun to the vocab list?

[Gleaves]

I tend to keep my vocab lists pretty light, but I will certainly share what I collect.

[jkhsu]

However, if you find the time, maybe you can add some of the more interesting words that you look up in peraperakun to the vocab list?

Sure. My problem right now is just about every 3 character phrase or 4 character phrase/chengyu is a vocab! But definitely, if I find some interesting terms / grammar, I'll try to post it if time permits. Like I said, this will be my first time reading a book at this level and I want to see if doing something like this with a popup dictionary can help with my reading. If you know me, I'm usually really conservative with my reading as I usually try to know all the words really well but that's hindered me in terms of moving into more difficult books. So this will be a experiment for me to see how it goes.

[daofeishi]

I tend to keep my vocab lists pretty light, but I will certainly share what I collect.

Yes, it's important not to go over board with the vocab list. If we took it to the extreme, we might end up with something close to a word-for-word translation of the book in the end, and that would be pointless. The point is that there are going to be lots of low-frequency words in there that even advanced learners probably will not know (e.g. 田埂), and I can see some value in collecting those words. For those of us who prefer reading a hard copy without perapera-kun, it will also reduce the number of dictionary lookups we have to do if we can pool our words together.