Nope!

Well it’s a lot less brain-smashing than Laozi or Yijing… 😱

I tried to use that Fediverse book thing and couldn’t figure it out. It was badly fragmented, not very good at searches, and had a UX that I can comfortably compare to getting my eyes scooped out by a spork.

I’d love to see a good site for tracking and sharing books.

I finished the Classic of Tea, but am still struggling through The Legend of Darkness. As my backup brain-resting book I’ve now got The Thirty-Six Strategems on the side. It’s an interesting new edition that has all the strategems and classic commentary examples but also adds more modern ones from around the world and from spheres other than the military. It is, as so many of my books in this vein are, trilingual: the original text and commentary are in Classical Chinese, modern vernacular Chinese, and English. The examples are bilingual vernacular Chinse and English.

Not exactly “rare” as such, though certainly not particularly common, I do think this one qualifies instead as “weird”.

… Really? Please explain.

It’s not “Distance Raptor” or “Time Raptor” or even “Veloci Raptor”. It’s Distanceraptor. All one word. Or Timeraptor or Velociraptor.

I mean otherwise it would be:

Distanceraptor

Timeraptor

And that leaves us with:

Dstanc

Tm

I was unaware that I have to justify a preference. Silly me.

It depends on the book.

If it’s a book I will be cherishing and valuing, paper. If it’s a book I’m just going to read and toss, or if it’s a book I’m going to use for reference purposes, ebook.

Is this necessarily a bad thing?

Yes.

Yes it is.

Being a poseur has always been a bad thing and always will be a bad thing.

Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always Coming Home is an intriguing approach to novel writing. Some can’t get into it because it looks more like an ethnologist’s report, but there is a story there (and I don’t mean the segments with Stone Telling: the entire novel has a story that rewards those who pay attention).

I think of the major awards the one that matches my tastes best (and still only at an about 25% hit rate) is the Nobel Prize. After the various scandals and fiascos of Worldcon (especially the Chengdu fiasco) I will not ever trust the Hugos ever again (and even before that they maybe had a hit rate of about 10%).

I’m with some of the other posters I’ve read here, though. In general I think industry awards are essentially self-love in the grotty sense of the term.

The repetition between chapters happens because the storyteller of a given story doesn’t know if you know the origin story or not. (It’s like how every damned Superman or Spider-Man or whatever movie always has to show how Superman/Spider-Man came to be.) Within chapters it could be part of an oral recitation thing with the repetitions being vestigial choruses. There is a lot of scholarship around this novel, and I’m not really deeply involved in any of it. I’m a situation- and opportunity-driven dabbler.

It’s a little bit out of date naturally (1300 years will do that to you), but it’s actually kind of amazing how relevant it still is today. It doesn’t have information on all the different varieties of tea available today (the 2011-published tome The Classic of Chinese Tea which is increasingly the standard textbook for tea production in China corrects this), but what it does mention is still here today processed very much in similar fashions (albeit with upgrades in the equipment for picking it).

It would be a bit of a slog to read (because of some unfamiliar terminology you’d have to check up in the appendices) were it not so short. My trilingual edition is a small hardback book of 150 pages (including some opening pages with pretty pictures, two introductions, a preface, two appendices and a references list). About half that is the English text, so you’re looking at reading about 75 pages. I think you could browse it quite successfully over a weekend without strain.

The repetition is there because these are primarily oral tales that have been barely edited into something that almost, but not quite, has a coherent narrative.

The tales within Journey to the West come from a very wide period of historical storytelling and are in a wide variety of storytelling traditions. There’s very little consistency from tale to tale, and any overarching theme was added much later in forming the “novel”. (It’s a “novel” in the same way that Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a novel, right down to inconsistencies from member story to story.)

I’m splitting my attention between The Classic of Tea and The Legend of Darkness. The former is a nice little hardback with trilingual contents (Classical Chinese, Vernacular Chinese, and English) while the latter is a bilingual edition (Classical Chinese, and English).

Take your upvote, you horrible bastard!

Jesus say: Blessed are they who honour the wise of every nation, and make not mockery in their name: for they shall inherit respect among all peoples.

My dad once picked up a beautiful hitchhiker. In the course of the drive she claimed to be a witch who could turn him into anything she wanted. My father, being very skeptical, asked her to prove it. She whispered some magic words in his ear and, sure enough, he turned into a motel.

Seth who now?