Over the past couple of weeks, I've bought a few more books for my ever-growing collection of books on China and East Asia. English-language books are not too difficult to come by in the Netherlands but they can be quite expensive, so I generally tend to limit my book-buying to anything I can't find in the Amsterdam Public Library. Having said that, I often flout the rules when it comes to books on my favourite topics.
So without further ado, here are the books I bought :
The Chinese translation of
The Diary of a Young Girl might seem a little out of place in this list. I bought a copy of it at the
Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam when I went there with a friend last week. I read the English-language edition when I was about 12 or 13 so I thought it was high time to read it again, albeit in different language.
Beijing Coma has been an excellent book so far (I still have a few chapters to go). I must admit that I haven't read much Chinese literature in translation. This is mostly due to the fact that few publishers seem to be interested in spending money on translating Chinese novels into English. Much of the "Chinese literature" I have read recently has been in the form of English-language "scar literature" or memoirs, such as
Anchee Min's Red Azalea and
Li Cunxin's Mao's Last Dancer. The only other Chinese novel I have read in translation was
Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain, which I didn't particularly enjoy reading, despite its fame as Nobel Prize winning novel.
Have any of you read any Chinese novels in translation? Are there any that you would recommend reading?
New Additions to My Library
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