Journal of a Sabbatical

December 4, 2000

reading material

Today's Reading: The Story of the Stone (a.k.a. Dream of the Red Chamber): Volume 5: The Dreamer Wakes by Cao Xueqin and Gao E, Autumn from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake, Escape from Kathmandu by Kim Stanley Robinson

Dream of the Red Chamber - greatly abridged

Academic Research and Info Center for Dream of the Red Chamber - even includes a list of all the dishes (and there a great many) served at the banquets described

Finished Dream of the Red Chamber. I've been living with these characters, 5 volumes worth, for months as I started Volume 1 on the way to China. I thought it would be entertaining to read China's great national novel while I was there, especially since a lot of it takes place in the northwest corner of the northwest corner of Beijing - the very neighborhood where I lived, Xiangshan. I suspect there were not two motorcycle repair shops and tons of concrete and barbed wire in the neighborhood when the Jia family had their adventures there though.

I loved this book. Or should I say 5 books? I found myself really caring about the characters and wanting to know how their lives turned out. It's funny but I don't remember ever feeling that way about the characters in most of the great works of English literature we had to read in high school. At least the novels. I loved Shakespeare from the first play I ever read (Julius Caesar) and still love Shakespeare, but a lot of the English canon leaves me cold. Thomas Hardy, Dickens, Jane Austen, all that stuff, I just couldn't keep reading, except, oddly, Ivanhoe. For some reason, I loved Ivanhoe and even read ahead of the assigned chapters every night because I wanted to know what happened next. And because I really liked the characters.

Even in college I avoided as much English literature as I could. I was lucky enough to be able to satisfy the literature requirement by taking French lit courses and so got to read Albert Camus and André Gide as well as Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. My French professor really wanted me to major in French. She even told my mother that years later at some event or other. I should mention that my French professor was the daughter of the woman we lived across the street from when I was a kid (ages roughly birth through 13) and our families knew each other quite well. Anyway, she never did quite get the point that the reason I was taking so many French lit courses was because I hated English lit.

I was never exposed (if that's the right word) to nonwestern literature in translation in either high school or college. On my own I discovered many Asian poets (Chinese and Japanese) and got really into them, but poetry has always been my first literary love. It's only in the past few years that I've read any nonwestern novels in translation.

My reading tastes have always been both eclectic and a little strange. Now I guess I, or at least my taste, is getting stranger.