What are you reading?

[Woodford]

On 1/31/2024 at 9:42 AM, Lu said:

Can you elaborate on 《草原动物园》? It didn't interest me when I read about it, but I'm likely wrong about that.

Oh, I don't think it's necessarily the right book for everybody. It's just a rather charming story about a British guy who wants to build a zoo way out in the Chinese countryside in the early 1900s, so he has to take a long journey across the wilderness with a bunch of different animals (elephants, snakes, lions, etc.), and he receives help from different (sometimes eccentric) characters along the way. It was much easier to read than the lychee book, for sure. But the lychee book is probably of a higher literary quality, and it certainly has better reviews on Weixin. It seems to have a common theme with the lychee book (man sets out on a difficult journey to do an absurd task), though in this case, the journey is completely voluntary and doesn't have a potential death penalty attached to it.

[lordsuso]

I quit the history book 舍不得看完的中国史 after a week. I am not ready to enjoy such a book yet, it was exhausting to follow all the dates, names, places, etc. The language itself wasn't a problem, it is written in a very accessible way, but I don't have the energy to read in Chinese and assimilate so much information simultaneously. The book narrates 12 battles from the Zhou dynasty to the Qin dynasty, so I'll probably go back to it whenever I start reading the manga Kingdom, which takes place in the same time period.

 

I picked up 金刚经说什么 by 南怀瑾 instead, an essay on the diamond sutra by a buddhist scholar. It reads like a lecture (it might be a transcription), and it's been a very relaxing read so far. It is pretty easy to follow if you ignore the original text, which he explains very thoroughly anyways. He quotes and explains many other non-buddhist texts (like poems), which is nice. As someone learning Chinese, I really like how much emphasis he puts on the language itself, like when he explains buddhist terms that are hard to translate (e.g. 境界).

 

On the flip side, it's not a short book (~180k hanzi) and it's starting to get a bit repetitive. It also throws some innecessary shade at sanskrit and India in general in the introduction.

[Luxi]

Pondering what to read next? Some inspiration from the excellent series China Book Reviews. Thankfully, the article gives the Chinese titles as well as the English translations.  

 

What China’s Reading: How Past Reflects Present  

 

Quote

Chinese literature has a long tradition of using history to discuss contemporary affairs. Our columnist picks five recent titles that do just that, from Shang sacrifices to neglected spouses.
 

 

Of the whole list, I only know Ma Boyong's 太白金星有点烦, which I've been trying to read on-and-off (more off than on tbh) and somehow can't imagine me finishing reading it. It's not the 神话 in it, I've done a couple of helpful moocs to guide me, but Ma Boyong's Chinese prose is beyond my brain's reach, takes me a long time to unravel every paragraph. Fully agree with comments by @Lu and @Woodford above, and if anything, this book is even worse than the lychees' one.
 

[Lu]

Interesting article, thanks! I'll have to remember these titles.

 

Quote

Immortal Li, a mid-level celestial bureaucrat, is one step away from being promoted to a god when he is tasked with planning Xuanzang’s famous pilgrimage. A myriad of problems follow — from onboarding the monk’s unruly companions, to orchestrating the 81 trials demanded by such trips. In order for the journey to be a success, Immortal Li has to navigate through a web of nepotism, red tape and infighting that is a feature of any Chinese government, celestial or not.

Between the lychee book, the zoo book and this description, I start to wonder if all Ma Boyong's books are about planning a difficult journey.

[Woodford]

I just finished 看见 by 柴静. It looked like a pretty popular book on Weixin, so I thought I'd check it out! Throughout the course of the book, Chai Jing tells different stories about her career as a TV journalist. Some of the stories are quite wild. She investigates criminal activity, makes a lot of people angry with her pointed questions, and pursues justice. She addresses pretty controversial topics, like domestic violence, extreme pollution, the death penalty, government corruption, etc. One of my favorite stories was the one about a man who submitted a fake picture of an endangered South China tiger (assumed to be extinct in the wild) in order to get a monetary award from the government. Pretty quickly, people were discovering that the picture was a total fake and stolen from a Chinese New Year calendar. However, the scandal expanded to epic proportions and involved the officials who (without doing due diligence and investigation) approved the picture and gave him the money. I found the whole farce to be rather amusing. Other stories were much darker, and Chai would sometimes put herself in the way of danger.

 

I'd like to say this was a smooth and casual read (I was hoping it would be), but it wasn't. It's one of those books that makes me feel a bit stupid in my Chinese skills! Vocabulary-wise, it was okay. I learned about 60 new words in a 350-page book. But the book had a lot of colloquialisms in it, and I sometimes felt like I lacked the context to know exactly what was going on. At the same time, Chai Jing seems like a really educated person, so she brings forth a lot of literary terms and chengyu. The dialogue was sometimes hard to follow. I would occasionally encounter a paragraph where I understood all the individual words, but it felt like I was reading word salad. I just couldn't piece it all together.

As I approach the completion of 50 books, I can only come to one conclusion: Easy books are still easy, and hard books are still hard. Not as climactic as I predicted!

[Lu]

On 3/12/2024 at 6:30 PM, Woodford said:

As I approach the completion of 50 books, I can only come to one conclusion: Easy books are still easy, and hard books are still hard. Not as climactic as I predicted!

There will always be hard books. Even in your native language I'm sure there are books that are a struggle for you to read. I think progress rather is measured by how the hard books from x years ago are now the medium-hard books. I'm not sure where exactly that point is (I lost count of my books-read at some point earlier in this thread), but for me it's very noticeable with Jin Yong, which in 2008 was just about almost doable with great effort, a dictionary and the help of a native speaker (and which I gave up on after 100 pages), and which now is an absolute pleasure read that I look forward to diving back into every day. Which is not to say it should take 16 years, I'm sure progress can be measured earlier than that.

[lordsuso]

I recently read 病毒 by 倪匡, a very short scifi-fantasy story that I don't particularly recommend. It probably belongs to a book series, because I got the impression that I was expected to be familiar with the main characters. The only interesting thing is that it deals with 降头术, which I didn't know existed.

[jannesan]

Finished the first volume of 平凡的世界 after almost 24 hours of reading over a period of 50 days. What an epic story! I love how interconnected all the character's lives are and the intricacies of the politics from village to city to region. I feel like really being in the middle of the places and period of time described. Probably I'll just go on reading the second one, I'm worried if I read something else in between, it'll be hard to reconnect with the multitude of characters.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

On 3/22/2024 at 6:23 PM, lordsuso said:

病毒 by 倪匡, a very short scifi-fantasy story that I don't particularly recommend. It probably belongs to a book series

Oh yeah, it's a LONG series. His writing quality feels really low to me, but he helped me slowly begin to read paper books instead of only e-books with Text Analyzer/Pleco/MandarinSpot/GoogleTranslate.

[杰娃娃]

I wrote a blog post a long time ago about the first ten Chinese books I read. I rated them by enjoyment and difficulty using a similar system to the one that Olle Linge used in this post.

 

* 《家》 巴金 - The Family by Pa Chin
Looking back, this book was probably not an ideal first book. The language wasn't particularly difficult, but a combination of its length, the length of its chapters and the fact that the author used a lot of dialect and some homonyms that are different from what is used today, make it a book that I would recommend to somebody a bit further into their reading journey.

When I was reading it, I remember thinking how amazing it must have felt to be reading it at the time it came out as it felt very revolutionary. The book was a great introspective into Chinese familial roles and it gave me a better understanding of the culture.

- Do I recommend it?  Yes
- How difficult was it?  Not difficult, but not a good first book
* 《凶画》 周浩晖 - Xiong Hua by Zhou Haohui
I saw this book recommended online and thought that I'd try it out as it was a short book, and I was interested in trying out some detective fiction. There were two POVs in the story and I found that one of them was much more interesting than the other. Also, I was not happy with how the book ended. The two detectives essentially dumped all the answers on the reader in the final chapter through lots of exposition.

In terms of language, the only thing that confused me was all the terminology related to monks and temples.

- Do I recommend it? Not particularly
- How difficult was it? Fairly easy
* 《鬼望坡》 周浩晖 - Gui Wang Po by Zhou Haohui
This was my first time listening to an audio book in Chinese and it was a good experience as far as that aspect went. Whilst being a sequel to 凶画, it could easily be treated as a standalone novel. This book only followed the story of 罗飞, who I found to be the less interesting of the two main characters in the previous instalment. Having said that, I had a much better time with this book.

It was an interesting story in which the detective helps a man suffering with amnesia solve the mysteries of his past which seem to be somehow related to several deaths on a small island.

- Do I recommend it? More than the last book
- How difficult was it? Fairly easy
* 《活着》 余华 - To Live by Yu Hua
After becoming a father, this was my first book back after a long time away from reading Chinese. This book had been recommended to me so many times and it is generally recommended as a good first novel to read in Chinese. The author, Yu Hua, is considered to be one of China's greatest living authors and as most of the characters he writes about our poorly educated, he writes in a very simple and accessible style.

This book follows the life of Xu Fugui and we see him go from a young man obsessed with gambling and prositutes and we see how the Cultural Revolution affected him and the people around him. It definitely made me want to read more from the author, although I have heard some people saying that Yu Hua's works can be too depressing for them.
- Do I recommend it? Yes
- How difficult was it? Easy
* 《撒哈拉的故事》 三毛 - The Stories of the Sahara by Echo Chan
This is another book that had been recommended to me a lot and it was also my first time reading non-fiction in Chinese. In fact, I believe that I have never read any books from this genre in English either.

That is actually my biggest problem with this book. I wouldn't have read it if it was in English. I felt the need to complete it as it was good reading practice and not because I genuinely enjoyed it. There were some chapters that I really enjoyed. The final chapter, 哭泣的骆驼 was a particular highlight, and there were also some chapters that I found dreadfully dull.

I can see the appeal of this book, but it just wasn't for me.

- Do I recommend it? If you like this sort of book, then yes
- How difficult was it? Probably the hardest so far
* 《许三观卖血记》 余华 - Chronicle of a blood merchant by Yu Hua
This was my favourite book I read all year in either English or Chinese. I had not seen this book recommended anywhere near as much as To Live, which is by the same author. I simply picked it up because I thought it had an interesting title.

The book isn't specifically about a man's experiences selling blood, it is instead about the general experiences of a man who occasionally sells his blood to the local hospital to make ends meet. This book is set in a similar time frame to Yu Hua's other book I have read. What really made this book shine for me was the characters and in particular the relationship between the main character Xu Sanguan and his wife and children.

This is a book that I will definitely read again in the future and it is a book that I have recommended to friends who have don't even have an interest in China. It had that much of an impact on me and it has stuck with me ever since I read it.

- Do I recommend it?  Absolutely
- How difficult was it?  Quite easy.
* 《龙族》 1: 火之晨曦 江南 - Dragon Raja 1: The Blazing Dawnlight by Jiang Nan
Jiang Nan is considered one of the top fantasy writers in China and the Dragon Raja series is often considered the "Chinese Harry Potter", or at least that is how it is marketed.

It wasn't bad, but I just found the novel to be a bit juvenile and boring. I am no longer at the stage of my life where I would read Harry Potter for fun and I think it is the same for this series. I researched it a bit online before starting reading and most of the people talking about it were remeniscing about how they read it in junior high. This made it seem like a good choice for me as it wouldn't be too difficult. It wasn't difficult, but I also hadn't taken into account that all of the characters would essentially act like thirteen year olds as that was the target audience.

I have heard that the series gets better, but it's still a big time investment and considering that I didn't particularly enjoy it, I can't see myself continuing with the series anytime soon.

- Do I recommend it? No
- How difficult was it? Intermediate
* 《流星- 蝴蝶- 剑》 古龙 - Meteor, Butterfly, Sword by Gu Long
I loved this book. It has been called a ripoff of The Godfather in a Wuxia setting, and that is completely true, but I still loved it. This book was my introduction to Wuxia and I am definitely going to read more books from this genre.

This was probably the first book that I read in Chinese that I could consider a real "page turner". I would often read chapters at a time and just ignore the mental fatigue that comes from reading in a foreign language.

For a language learner, Gu Long's writing style is great. He uses lots of short sentences, repetition and rhetorical questions. His writing style has also had a big impact on me and I keep wanting to go and read more of his books.
- Do I recommend it? Very much so
- How difficult was it? Not difficult
* 《紫川》 老猪 - Zichuan by Lao Zhu
This is the longest book that I have read in Chinese. In fact, as it was a long running web-novel, I am only about 20% through the novel, but as the printed version is published in ten volumes, I thought it was worth including on this list (and counting as two entries). When I finish it, it will probably be the longest book that I have read. Period.

The language was not overly difficult and the author tries to keep it light and use lots of humour, but after reading Gu Long, it took me a while to adjust to such long sentences and such a different style. The story was easy to follow and very enjoyable, but I had just watched the cartoon based on the novel before beginning.

I am definitely going to be aiming to finish this novel next year.

- Do I recommend it? Yes
- How difficult was it? Quite difficult

[lordsuso]

On 4/13/2024 at 3:09 PM, 杰娃娃 said:

For a language learner, Gu Long's writing style is great

I agree, it's simple and very addicting, his novels are the most atmospheric and engrossing I've read so far in Chinese.

 

On 4/13/2024 at 3:09 PM, 杰娃娃 said:

《紫川》 老猪 - Zichuan by Lao Zhu

There are a couple of fantasy webnovels that interest me, but they are all so freaking long that I can't gather the courage to start one haha. Why did you choose this one? Simply because you enjoyed the cartoon?

[Lu]

On 4/13/2024 at 4:28 PM, lordsuso said:

There are a couple of fantasy webnovels that interest me, but they are all so freaking long

That is what keeps me off web novels. I'd read them as guilty pleasure if it weren't so time-consuming, eating into my time for reading better things. I'd read comics if I'd know where to find good versions (complete &finished, with no spicy scenes missing, and preferably free, or payable without me needing to study how to pay).

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

I've recently been bingeing on 張系國. Anybody know why 《星雲組曲》is not considered part of his 《城》三部曲? I mean it provides the backstory of every planet and culture that shows up in 《五玉碟》. 

 

I'm finding the fluctuation in writing quality of 《五玉碟》 to be a bit jarring, but I'm genuinely enjoying it so far. For example, 

Spoiler

the absurdity of the comic relief, in chapter 7 and especially 8, is worthy of Robin Hood, Men in Tights. 

Did I just not notice this in earlier chapters?

[杰娃娃]

On 4/13/2024 at 2:28 PM, lordsuso said:

his novels are the most atmospheric and engrossing I've read so far in Chinese.

Another author who gripped me is 紫金陈. 无证之罪 really kept me on the edge of my seat all the way through. I don't normally like reading a page or two here and there when I have a few minutes, but this book had lots of short chapters and I read a little bit whenever I had a few spare minutes. I would like to get to the author's other works later this year.

 

On 4/13/2024 at 2:28 PM, lordsuso said:

Why did you choose this one? Simply because you enjoyed the cartoon?

Actually I was initially drawn to the book by its front cover while looking for book recommendations online. Later I saw that it had been made into a cartoon, and decided to check it out. I don't think I really understood the investment at the time, as I'm still only 85% trough the novel. CTA says that the whole thing is just under 2 million characters. There have definitely been parts that I've enjoyed a lot, but there have been some repetitive bits too (these can be quite useful for drilling language points).

[Woodford]

I have just finished Volume 1 of 射鵰英雄傳 by Jin Yong (and commented on it in the related "Book of the Year" thread). I think I'll finish the remaining 3 books at some point, but I don't want to slog straight through a 1200+ page book (especially one that uses a somewhat outdated, literary style of Chinese that isn't as useful for learning the contemporary language), so I'm stopping for now. I have to admit, though, that the story is really fun. I've never read Wuxia novels before, but I can now appreciate the appeal.

I am now 1/3 of the way through Liu Cixin's 球状闪电, which is about a scientist who is obsessed with researching the "ball lightning" phenomenon; on his 14th birthday, his parents were incinerated by ball lightning right in front of him, and he can't stop thinking about it. However, ball lighting is relatively rare, unpredictable, defies all known mathematical models, has no practical applications that make it profitable or attractive to investors, etc., so his research efforts seem doomed from the very beginning. This is my 5th Liu Cixin book, and I'm already noticing certain predictable aspects of his style. He has several stock phrases that he repeats a lot, his characters often don't act like real people (they just serve as vehicles for abstract ideas, and they often interrupt the flow of the story to give long academic lectures), and the way he portrays female characters can be particularly awkward (I understand that many others have commented about that fact). His earlier works seem to be precursors to the "Three Body Problem," and they share a lot of similarities. It's almost like these earlier books were rough drafts of TBP. However, Liu's writing is interesting and clear enough to hold my attention, even though it can sometimes be silly/cheesy/awkward enough to make me laugh.

Since I started reading native-level Chinese books in Fall 2019, my informal goal has been to read through 50 books, and this is my 49th. After one additional book, I'd like to focus more on my listening comprehension (which has actually already greatly improved in comparison to a few years ago!). In American health and fitness culture, we have a saying: "Don't skip leg day." If you work out your upper body and neglect your lower body, you might get a bulky upper body and pencil-thin legs. Well, in much the same way, I have unfortunately skipped "listening day." My reading skills are much better than my listening skills, so I'd like to shift my focus and read much less (though I will still read). So perhaps I will be on this thread much less often soon!