Modern Chinese Literature: What are you reading?

王朔 (Wang Shuo) is my wife's favorite author, and I've read a few of his books. Good, and kinda modern without being unreadable. 韩寒 (Han Han) is more of the modern but unreadable type, but I thought that his book 《毒》 was OK. My first "real" book was 张小娴's 《再见野鼬鼠》, and I would recommend her for anybody wanting to dip their toe into the pool of full-length novels. They're chick lit, all about touchy-feely things, but the vocabulary is pretty simple. I don't really know how many characters I knew when I first started, but I remember even the "easy" books were freaking hard. But, like everything else, it gets easier and easier. :) (BTW, though we're all against IPR violations, if you search for the name of most Chinese novels on Google or Baidu, you can find the whole text that can then be copied into your dictionary/annotator of choice).

I'm not sure what they're about. I've only glanced at them. I've just noticed that they seem to be quite popular among teens right now.

My fiend, who thinks I should work on my reading and speaking skills, gave me 鲁迅:散文/杂文(Luxun).While I appreciate his language, this is really hard read. I have recently started on something as boring as Alibaba and the forty thieves (or whatever it's called in English) 阿里巴巴与四时大盗. Very enjoyable and readable. For people who are interested in minority culture, I'd recommend Alai's "Red Poppies" (阿来，尘埃落淀. He is a Tibetan from Sichuan situating his novel in Tibetan areas of the early 20th century.

Though I love 鲁迅 and have read a lot of his works, giving him to a foreigner as a way to improve their Chinese is like giving a Chinese kid Shakespeare to improve his English. Yes, it's Chinese, but it's not really modern enough to be of every day use.

Yep, that was my gut feeling. Although as a language learner these things are hard to assess. Where would newspapers figure? Or magazines? For some reason I find it easier to read a novel than to read articles in magazines. Maybe because the context of a story helps understanding??

I've heard that to comfortably read a newspaper you need to know 3500 characters. The HSK Advanced tests (from what I've read) about that many, which equals somewhere in the ballpark of 10,000 words. I assume magazines would be about the same, and novels more.

www.readnovel.com has loads you can read online.

Online reading is annoying but the help you get with Chinese-Pera kun and such like is invaluable. Haven't tried full novels this way though but I actually find the context of the news rather helpful to understand, and you can choose small pieces too, good to keep focused. This may not be literature but I like cartoons, I'd recommend the 漫画 country series from Korean author 李元馥, translated into Chinese : 漫话日本 Japan, 漫画意大利 Italy, 漫画法国 France, 漫画瑞士 Switzerland, 漫画荷兰 Holland，漫画英国 England and 漫画韩国 Korea, not sure about others. It describes the history and culture of these particular countries in an entertaining way, stereotypes and all.

My students read a lot of what look like graphic novels. Their comics bound like novels / short stories. Any ideas on which of these are popular?

*They're not their =/

I recently read "Red Dust" by Ma Jian and "Red Sorghum" by Mo Yan (in English) and would highly recommend both. It's much older but I really liked "The Importance of Living" by Lin Yutang and to a slightly lesser degree "My Country and My People." I read a Wang Shuo book (I can't remember the name now but it was about a murder) and I didn't like it as much as I had hoped but it's pretty interesting and very unlike anything else I've read from a Chinese writer.

A friend from China lent me his 今世的五百次回眸ｂｙ毕淑敏. It's a collection of 散文 (short prose?). The topics are really interesting, but the standard of language is pretty high for me. Kyle, you mean those about fighting? I know those "fight-based" graphic novels are really popular, but I don't know much else.

LULU - I'm currently reading 陈鲁豫，心相约。It's about Luyu Chen, the Oprah Winfrey of China. I like it because it's written in first person, which makes it easier for me and is about her life and show. It helps to keep the vocabulary from being too archaic and unknown to me. I skip over a lot of hanzi that I don't know, and haven't done much looking up. When I keep seeing the same hanzi over and over, I look it up. Her style of writing is engaging and I'm just reading the book for enjoyment. If I'm not too lazy, I might 'rewrite' some of her sentences for practice, kinda like we did in high-school English with famous authors. BTW, I think the 'number of characters' metric is a misleading and deceptive item. Knowing words in context, and being able to manipulate them, that's key to acquiring more in a exponential manner.