It’s the unabridged Anthony C Yu translation with all the poems and verse intact.
I’m not sure what the Waley version is like, but I guess this is a more direct translation that tends to put accuracy above ease of reading, so a lot of puns are a bit lost and the poems are full of daoist alchemical allegory that can be difficult to parse. It’s got notes at the back to explain those parts though, and the humour still comes through even if some of the fancy wordplay doesn’t translate.
The Waley version is focused very much on a propulsive pace with comedic dialogue and action scenes. It centers Wukong as the main character and cuts episodes where he doesn’t play a big role. Or so I hear. I’ve never read the unabridged version, so I don’t know how Wukong heavy that is.
So far the unabridged version is very Wukong-focused as well. I think the main reason for cutting the bulk of the chapters in that version is more to do with the repetitive nature of a lot of the story arcs, as a lot of them follow a very similar formula.
One thing i find funny is how many of them basically end with a kind of deus ex machina. Wukong will just decide the monster is too tricky, fly out to the south sea and bring Guanyin to win the fight for him. Or otherwise fly up to heaven to bring back some specific monster-defeating relic or deities.
I just started A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and I’m really enjoying it. It usually takes me much longer to get hooked on a book but this one had me at page 1. I just really dig Dunk’s attitude.
Finished up Against the Day. There is so much here you cannot possibly retain or see in a first read, which at times I encountered with not a whole lot of enthusiasm (I think I started googling things like “Against the Day is boring” as far back as like March). I am really satisfied by the big picture having at last seen the whole thing. It’s as sad and beautiful and bigger than any one person as Gravity’s Rainbow is, but a great deal less horrifying. It ends somewhat happily, or at least in an abundance of found families. Some of them in the 19th and early 20th centuries of our world headed exactly to where we know it all headed, but at least one of them in another world headed into something that seemed at least pretty optimistic. But who knows? And I think that’s one of the book’s great themes: just as you wake up day after day to find yourself growing further from the person you thought you were or were headed to becoming, so too does the world and the spirit of it in like pace. Unfortunately the motivators of such change are often horrible less than lovely, and in this book it’s namely capitalism.
I was supposed to be the world’s greatest anarchist bomber, but I am doing pretty alright when I look around and take stock of things. A comforting yet haunting thing to notice about yourself.
Surprised to feel so ready to jump into Shadow Ticket this October, though I did have a moment of fear that it could somehow end up being even longer than Against the Day. Amazon says that’s not the case, just 288 pages long. And I am glad. I don’t think I could trust Pynchon to write any more books this long.
i didn’t get walter mosley when i first tried to read him at age 20 but i somehow ended up with gone fishing on my e-reader and damn is this guy good at sketching characters. after just a few pages these feel like people i’ve known for years
I finished up the retranslation of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, now called End of the World and Hard-boiled Wonderland, and enjoyed it a lot. The last 50 or so pages were pretty hard to read, thinking about people I’ve known who have known they were dying, but it was good.
So now I have started in on Outlaws of the Marsh, and damn Lu Da is a funny fucking dude.
Forgot to mention this before but I got around to reading the first Earthsea book and… I guess it was alright but really didn’t do a ton for me? It may be a case of if I had come across it when I was younger it’d have done more for me or that I just don’t get along with YA stuff as much any longer, but as is just felt kinda thin in a way I don’t know how to verbalize well. Did like the scene with the dragon though.
Read the sequels, they all individually refine and thicken up the narrative in different, unique ways, often by inverting something we thought to be an assumed fact of the setting or characters
The first book is one I still love but seems less impressive now that so many works have riffed on and borrowed from it. It should be remembered that mainstream fantasy novels with bipoc protagonists were exceptionally rare as recently as 20 years ago, never mind when Earthsea was written. The qualities that made earthsea so radical back then have been thoroughly commodified by the publishing industry this past half century
I have said right here on the forum many times that the first one is Very Good and all the ones after it are Legendary. Keep going
yeah they really do get better. the even numbered books are are all my favourites
Now I am regretting not just reading a later book instead, wish I knew this beforehand (didn’t specifically search this site in depth but felt I universally heard “yeah they’re all great” previously) :\
I mean I think near everyone would have told you to read the first one first, because it is still Very Good. And it comes back around later
Last year I would not have believed the author of The Last Unicorn would have had it in him to write a Murakami novel, but The Folk of the Air (1986) is much more like the latter than the former, complete with a Murakami Teen Girl who manages to be much better than any of those by dint of wanting to do witchcraft, summon demons, and kill a god. Like all Murakami Teen Girls she is not the protagonist; that’d be the lute player living in a fantasy version of San Francisco-adjacent California that is somehow affordable, and spends his time doing odd jobs and playing for the local medieval LARP group. Propulsive this book isn’t, but Peter S. Beagle knows his way around a description, and so the story manages to keep one’s attention and become invested in the cast of nerds and weirdos, who get treated with way more empathy than you’d expect LARPers to get in 1986. While I quite liked The Last Unicorn, it had never been enough to get me interested in Beagle’s other work–probably because I think of it primarily in terms of the film–but now I want to see what else he can do.
the Folk in the Air is probably his weakest novel so you’re in for a treat when you get to the Innkeeper’s Song
Oh, that’s good to hear! Now I’ll definitely have to check what the library has.
I read the latest murakami novel and for the first third I wasa shocked at how unerotic it was compared to what I knew about the rest of this work then the EXACT moment I had that thought I turned the page and there was a paragraph long description of a woman’s ear canal.
Finished Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, summarized it a bit here:
The book’s a pretty straightforward recounting of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, where Cpt. Shackleton’s boat Endurance got caught between two ice floats, got stranded, the boat got crushed, and the 28 men had to make an 800-fucking-mile journey in three rowboats back to a whaling outpost. Absolutely incredible that nobody died.
Definitely a book that was more interesting of a read in concept than in practice, but, I’m glad I finished it. You really come to understand the daily suffering they all endured, and how constantly they were plunged into despair, and how being in a state of despair becomes almost boring, leading to spurs of hope and excitement in the bleakest of circumstances. Definitely Shackleton himself went a long way toward keeping spirits up… I think one of my big takeaways is just the necessity of kindling hope for survival. The body does as the mind wills, and if you believe there’s no hope for survival, you’re just not going to survive.
My takeaway is that I need it to be fiction and I need someone to consider the horrors for this to grab me. Might try The Wager next.
I regret to inform you that I have a slide presentation somewhere in the cloud detailing how the South Pole Expeditions of Scott, Amundsen, and Shackleton relate to modern-day project management.
