After reading all of these books unabridged in their English I have come up with the following rankings. Last and least, The Water Margin. I expected this book to be about a band of criminals getting up to no good, robbing, looting, that sort of thing. I thought that the small scale of the group in contrast to the large armies of Romance of the Three Kingdoms would allow them to focus on a bunch of cool strategies, tricks, scenarios, raids, escapes, etc. However, the action in this book is much more straight forward than ROTK, its always just a bunch of guys lining up in head on battle. The criminals almost always fight the government force, which they almost always beat easily. The book is all about getting “the gang” together so no cool or unique missions. Just the same story told over and over again. The characters are not cool either. I remember when Wu Song was trying to aura farm with that “I am going to drink, three cups of wine at every bar I pass before I fight this dude” thing and I was just thinking to myself, this is not as cool as the author thinks it is.In third place is Journey to the West. This book lacks stakes because the MCs are extremely over powered and you know they will win in the end. Super repetitive with Sanzang about to be eaten by demons and everyone in a dire situation before they find out how to save the day. Not the most creative rescues either, always about begging the gods for some magic item.. Monkey’s powers make strategy not really necessary, and his tricks aren’t that impressive because he can literally do anything. Despite it’s flaws, it is significantly better than The Water Margin because the characters are memorable and fun. Also the language and descriptions of the larger than life magical battles is pretty awesome. So even though the plot is repetitive the imagery and classicness of the characters carry this book into actually being tolerable to read.
Coming in at second place is Romance of the Three Kingdoms which is a giant step up from the previous two. This is my personal favorite of the books. There is really no book quite like it, it’s a real action book. Battle after battle, unique and clever strategy after unique and clever strategy, act of valor after actor of valor. The book starts strong, but really amps up after about twenty chapters in. The plotlines all perfectly converge and its awesome how they all start off so small and them converge into the final behemoth kingdoms we see at the end. Despite not really having “modern novel” style writing, instead more or less just accounting happenstance, this book’s characters all have aura. When Guan Yu refused Cao Cao’s gifts it was insane. Any other book would just have a refusal of the gifts who sale, but it’s the small things like sending the concubines to wait on Liu Bei’s wife, crying with gratitude when he revieved Red Hare because he could reach Liu Bei faster, or putting Liu Bei’s tattered cloak over Cao Cao’s cloak, that just amp it up. Plenty of other characters do things which make you see them as the real deal as well. The entire book has a sense of tightness around the battles, like everyone is playing near optimally and doing everything it takes to win while also just being wacky and crazy with magic and blunders. In first place is A Dream of Red Mansions. The unlimited slice of life book, but with a level of playful depth and knowing that makes it so much more. This is an incredibly deep book with subtle double meanings and lessons from scenarios where you wouldn’t expect them. The characters are written more realistic than life and the author is really just a raw talent. He has the cast of characters do poetry battles with each other where he writes their poems in each of the characters own style in such a way that the inner insecurities and perspectives of the characters subtly come through. If ROTK characters have aura, than this book has aura, from the moment I read the foreword I knew it was something not totally like anything else in this world. Skip the chapters after chapter 80 though. All the stuff written after Cao Xueqin is not to the quality of the first 80 chapters. Even worse the “ending” is contrary to the themes established in first half of the book.
>>25286651>After reading all of these books unabridged in their English
>>25286651>After reading all of these books unabridged in their English>in their English You read fanfiction. Don't care.
You didn't read all of Journey to the West. Stop lying.
You need to have a very high IQ to understand Journey to the West. No I'm not kidding, it had 7 layers of irony and was written to mock the Ming emperors.In the novel there's a place called 比丘囯, later the country changed its name to 小子国, the monkey said that in this country, the king's successor could be a small child.比丘 is a monk, 比丘囯 is (a) monk's country; the Ming's founding emperor Zhu Yuanzhang was a monk before the uprising, and left the throne to his young nephew. 比丘囯 is contemporary China, in short.
>Skimming cliff notes is reading the whole bookYou didn't read Journey to the West
>>25286698I'm sure there are double entendres that I missed because I read a translation. Also there are some good quotes and deep stuff here and there throughout the book. The author definitely had skill. But that doesn't change the fact that this book is still repetitive and the battles and tricks are all easy to predict because of how powerful the characters are. Reading the descriptions of the epic battles is visually cool but that it.
>>25286651>>25286653Thank you Anon, I plan on undertaking a similar journey in the coming year. There have recently been new translations of the Chinese classics into my mother tongue, I believe the Chinese government is financing them somehow.Unfortunate to hear you did not enjoy The Water Margin, I also had higher expecations. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms sounds better than I would have anticipated though, something to look forward to.
>reading translations lmao
>>25286655>>25286667>>25286715You must be 18 years or older to use this site
>>25286714& something you might find interesting is How to Read the Chinese Novel, ed. David Rolston. It is a sourcebook of Chinese literary criticism from the 16th to 20th century, which I plan on selectively reading alongside the novels.
>>25286714I would just read ROTK and Red Mansions first, that way you can tap out if you aren't enjoying the other ones and wont already be too bogged down with them to not want to read another huge Chinese books.
Also forgot to mention that the ROTK author just seems much more educated than the Journey to the West Author. When the ROTK characters start warring in the South West of China they start fighting people who ride elephants and wear gold earrings. When the JTTW crew literally goes to India, there is not any description that would have you believe it is any different to China.Also that book does sound interesting.
>>25286716>t.Monolingualtard
>>25286651Interesting post anon, thx.I read Water Margin and really wasn't impressed, pretty much for the reasons you give. Every "hero" just blunders around bashing people up. There's no finesse or intrigue. Occasionally there is some dry humour in there and you get the feeling more humour is getting lost in translation but that's about it.Have just started Journey To The West and yeah Monkey is so OP it's tiresome.Might actually skip it and try one of the other two you mentioned.Of course everything might be very different if you read them in the original but I'm not going to learn Classical Chinese so they are what they are in English. (If the translations are that bad you would think SOMEONE would have done something better by now though.)
>>25286651>>25286742I read Water Margin and disagree with you guys, I thought it was fantastic: very gritty and cynical with a lot of different kinds of storytelling
This dude has a serious bee in his bonnet for Journey to the West, damn.
I really don't by that the translations are prohibitively bad. Maybe for Red Mansions because there are so many double entendres and of course poetry battles where they give a rhyme or metar the characters have to stay within which of course is impossible to translate to English propertly. Still I remember thinking the poems in red mansions were really well done and actually could see a lot of what was going on within the characters heads just based on the rough translation. The rest of the book besides these poetry battles is also great so apparently enough got through the translation to make it work.The other three are written in such an pre modern novel telling of happenstance style that I really just can't by that the translation issues are that big of a deal. Maybe when they bust out a poem as a battle description by certaintly not any of the major plot points. IDK maybe monkey sounds more funny in the originals.
>>25286726>>25286735I do plan on starting with ROTK, I might read some of the monkey book to see how it goes before Red Mansions, which is the novel I am most interested in. Not sure where Water Margin will fit in, I am still curios to at least look at it >>25286742Have either of you read or are interested in reading The Plum in the Golden Vase or The Scholars? >>25286752Were you able to compare it to any of the others? I am holding out hope for bandit shenanigans
>>25286752>very gritty and cynicalThe trouble is it's just "shit happens" mixed with "the strong do what they will, the weak endure what they must" but it's impossible to know if the author is raging against this state of affairs or is perfectly happy with it or thinks it's pretty funny or indeed has any feelings about it at all.I'm not saying I want him to preach but I do want to feel he actually has an emotional standpoint.As I said maybe that's a fault of the translator.
>>25286765>Have either of you read or are interested in reading The Plum in the Golden Vase or The Scholars?I've heard about it (it's mildly famous because of the salacious thing) but I haven't chased it up. It's called a "novel of manners" and I assumed that that will translate even less well than "novel of cutting people's heads off with swords in the marshes".
>>25286765I read 3/5 of plum in the golden vase. I stopped because it wasn't for me and as the other ones four had such mixed quality imo, I just lost interest in completing the "complete" set so to speak. However, I would say that this book is better than Water Margin and Journey to the West, not as good as ROTK or Red Mansions.Honestly this book does not really have the problems the other two books I complained about has, its just not for me so I stopped. The first part though was crazy, you have never soon such a brutal blackpill beat down of a man as what happens in the first ten or so chapters of plum. But after that there is just so much bitching between the girls in this peace of shit''s harem I am like who cares about this. At one point this one girl put on another girls shoes over her to show off how cute and small her feet were the the other girl was watching this happen from behind a curtain and started raging and I was like just shut up.
>>25286777correction 2/5 of plum
>>25286655>>25286667>Doesn't know Chinese script isn't a language and can be written in every language and therefore translation does nothing>you can learn Chinese script without ever knowing Chinese
Rotk gets boring after Liu Bei dies
If you don't know about the song dynasty water margin will be a worse experience.
Water margin only gets boring when the gang gets together and then seeks amnesty from the government. Everything up until then was great
>>25286821Yeah the next generation is lacking. To be fair that's because the author rushed through 60 years of history so there was less care put for the actual three kingdoms portion of the novel
>>25286651Translating classical Chinese texts to English is a HUGE bitch. One character will have a bunch of different meanings and this is extremely common. Two translations of one simple sentence can be wildly different as a result. Old Chinese is probably one of the absolutely worst written languages ever invented.
