My 2015 Readings

Well, it’s 2016. I hope I read more this year than I did last. This list is a little incomplete: there’s some more game stuff I read, some of it in part and some in full. But it’s close enough to a list of all the books I finished, so I’ll go with this. My Library at LibraryThing It’s hard to pick standouts, because there were a lot of great books. Having so little time to read, I focused on things I felt I’d really enjoy. Still, if I were to recommend a few books, I guess I’d go with …

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The Status of Fiction in Traditional Northeast Asian Literary Culture

A while back, I mentioned how, in 1632, the commoners around Shaoxing (in China) had planned to cosplay the characters from the famous wuxia novel The Outlaws of the Marsh, hoping to appease the gods into making it rain so a famine could be avoided, and some of the local literati had gotten involved, donated some cloth and lots of money, and turned the thing into a massive Harajuku-meets-Vegas stage production extravaganza. Ah, late Ming China! Ah, Zhang Dai! This mini-anecdote leaves me slightly skeptical about parts of the introduction of Peter H. Lee’s translation of the Imjin Rok, titled in English The Record of the Black Dragon Year (a Korean text roughly …

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