Christopher > Recent Status Updates

Easy but slowgoing. Reread every page to make sure I understand, since this is my first Chinese novel without writing down every character I don't know and their definitions and pronunciations. Not that I would need to, I've been reading several pages at a time without need to open Pleco.

Wretched. An affront to language.

It is rather annoying that the translator/editor constantly changes between Aristogeiton and Aristogiton, sometimes in the same sentence. I've always seen the former spelling in other books, as far as my memory can say. Were it not for Google, I'd probably have a hard time continuing, uncertain if these are two different people. Considering both are given alongside Harmodius, it seems likely to just be a typo.

I'm half done. Still don't know if I'll ever complete it. If I do, it will take a miracle for me to offer it more than a single star.

This book is quite dull. It has no plot, but rather consists in a series of reflections on some aspect or other of the daily lives of the indigenous inhabitants of this tropical island as told by an insufferable American whom nobody should believe understood at all that to which he had been exposed, thus leading me to write off his interminable descriptions of the local folkways as being little better than assumption

This is beautiful in a way I could hardly have imagined before. Such lyrical metaphors and allusions aplenty. This is fully deserving of a high position in world literature.

I have a serious problem on my hands. I learned Chinese to read the beautiful literature of that language, but now that I've discovered this, I'm gonna have to learn Vietnamese!

I adore this book. Probably on track to be my favorite epic. Almost makes me want to learn some Persian and Turkic languages and check out the many, many other epics the Turks wrote about a millennium ago. Highly, highly recommend.

The last chapter or two has actually been fairly pleasant. It's all starting to come together nicely. I've begun to grow accustomed to the language, so different than the other Chinese books I've thus read.

I am lucky I have such a good attitude. I bet most people would be devastated to spend thousands of hours learning a language just to read an author who you don't even like once you finally read his books.

I have high hopes still for his longer novels, 笑傲江湖，天龙八部，射雕英雄传. This, being so much shorter than his great novels, was never expected to be great. But so far it is so boring, very masochistic, and quite tiresome.

This is horribly written. The language usage is generally pleasing, but there is always such extreme ambiguity. He uses pronouns almost pathologically such that I never have any clue who is stabbing and who is being stabbed. And this isn't just my still-new Chinese skill saying this, my Chinese friends are just as uncertain by the constant ambiguity in the paragraphs I've sent them.

Hope this picks up. It looks like the stage is being set for a good story. I know from the 金庸古装戏 I've seen that they usually do. But something about his sometimes-concise-sometimes-repetitive and always arcane writing style is far less enjoyable than I had anticipated. To think I learned Chinese specifically to read 金庸武侠小说, yet I'm greatly preferring so many other authors instead.