Ending was expected, but I guess if you have such a long running series, pretty much ending will always be expected. Bad guy meets Reacher, bad guy loses, Reacher wins. Fun to read though, which is the main point. Going to keep reading them.

Don't think it ticked any of the Bingo boxes though.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial Book Bingo, and its Recommendation Post. Links are also present in our community sidebar.

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[–] TheFerventLion@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I just finished The Monkey and the Monk: An Abridgment of The Journey to the West, Wu Cheng'en, Anthony C. Yu (Translator), after attempting to read the primary work. Being exposed to western mythologies, I was very interested in exploring other cultural touchstones. I almost dropped it due to the enormity of the novel, but decided to switch to the abridged version. I'm glad I didz even if my heart didn't like the concept of an abridgment.

Overall, it was interesting, and I'm glad I read it but there must be some context regarding all the repetition within a single chapter that I'm missing. I can't count how many times a character explains, word for word, what has just happened to another character. I theorize two reasons. Either that the repetition is for emphasis(though this seemed inconsistent), or in Chinese there is symmetry in the placement on the page.

As a palette cleanser I just sped through The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook Matt Dinniman which was fun and easy.

[–] ZDL@lazysoci.al 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.)

[–] TheFerventLion@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Cool, appreciate the context. And this applies both to the repetition between chapters and within a particular chapter?

[–] ZDL@lazysoci.al 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] TheFerventLion@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago

Thanks for the insight!