Weekend Reading List

I keep returning to this five-volume novel The Story of the Stone/ The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin (it's beautifully translated by David Hawkes) and can recommend this book as a good read, a gripping page turner to be completely lost in over the Chinese New Year holidays. It's particularly appropriate as a handbook to all things Chinese (everything from feminine archetypes to food, horticulture to homosexuality is spanned), as it is a Proustian tapestry of life during the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1911).If you want to understand what being Chinese is all about (there are several chapter that dwells on the Jia family's Chinese New Year celebrations), you must read this 18th-century novel, chockfull of nuanced descriptions of greatly refined culture, and a celebration of Chinese beauty. The 'story' actually describes the tragic decline of a great feudal family (which is very moving, and I hate reading towards the end as the misery is visceral), but it is more about the nostalgia for vanished splendor. The author, Cao Xueqin, born into one of the great families of the Qing dynasty that had fallen into collapse, wrote autobiographically: He wrote this classic while living in poverty and trying to reconcile himself to the loss of the world. It may seem forbidding, but it's unflagging humour (sometimes campy) and wit will sustain you through your read, and its incandescent beauty will sustain ou through life.

"It was a tall thin youth of 18 or 19 who had spoken, with a thin handsome face and an air of great refinement. Although his face was familiar, Baoyu could not for the moment remember his name or which part of the clan he belonged to..."