There's a pretty cool Chinese book review show called '1001 Nights', filmed at night in Beijing. If you can understand Chinese you might want to check it out.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_q006uH9CvVsw_LSaeSLxttcsjoVpq8J
If not, rate this list of books. [episode number]
2015
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby [episode 1][2][3]
Primo Levi - The Drowned and the Saved [4][5]
Paul Theroux - The Old Patagonian Express [6][7]
Yang Mu - ‘Someone Asks Me About Justice and Righteousness’ [8][9]
Wang Guowei - Notes on Ci Poetry in the World [10][11][12][13]
Marguerite Duras - The Lover [14][15]
Kahil Gibran - The Prophet [16][17]
Thomas Schelling - The Strategy of Conflict [18][19]
Charles Mackay - Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds [20][21][22]
Vasily Grossman - Life and Fate [23][24][25][26][27]
Eileen Chang - Love in a Fallen City [28][29]
Aesop’s Fables [30][31][32]
Tsurumi Shunsuke - An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931-1945 [33][34]
John Dower - Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II [35][36][37]
Maruyama Masao - Japanese Thought [38][39]
Bertolt Brecht - Life of Galileo [40][41][42]
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene [43][44][45]
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness [46][47][48]
Wu Chucai, Wu Diaohou - The Ultimate Anthology of Ancient-style Chinese Prose [49][50][51]
Joseph Heller - Catch-22 [52][53][54]
Lao She - Four Generations under One Roof [55][56][57]
Friedrich Dürrenmatt - The Execution of Justice, The Judge and his Hangman [58] A Dangerous Game [59]
Friedrich Schiller - William Tell [60][61]
Gottfried Leibniz - Theodicy [62][63][64][65]
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four [66][67][68]
Wang Zengqi - Short Stories [69][70]
Günter Grass - The Tin Drum [71][72]
Qian Mu - Outline of National History [73][74][75][76]
David Carpenter - Magna Carta [77][78]
Xuanzang - Heart Sutra [79][80][81][82][83][84]
Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol [85][86]
2016
Winston Churchill - The Second World War [87][88]
Yang Jiang - A Cadre School Life [89][90]
William Shakespeare - King Lear [91][92]
Tayeb Salih - Season of Migration to the North [93][94]
Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities [95][96]
Fei Xiaotong - From the Soil [97][98]
Sándor Márai - Embers [99][100]
Kwang-chih Chang - Art, Myth and Ritual: the Path to Political Authority in Ancient China [101][102]
Pai Hsien-yung - Taipei People [103][104]
Ah Cheng - Collected Stories [105][106]
I have no idea what he's saying but the whole thing looks pretty patrish
>>7831740
Yeah. It kind of goes against the stereotype of the Chinese as brainwashed and parochial, although there's certainly plenty of that in China too. I mean, there aren't many people in any country who enjoy discussing books.
The show is financed and hosted by two of the Chinese youtube clones - Youku and Tudou. Luckily the makers also upload it to Youtube because Youku and Tudou are very slow from outside China.
11mins 15secs is cute:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W75DXeK8_c
>>7831778
>"we are taking about Leibniz, you can't help here"
Kek
Seems nice.
Too bad I don't know Chinese. I'd like to hear what he has to say about Catch 22.
>>7833239
Here are transcripts of the three episodes on Catch 22. You could put them through Google translate.
[episode 52]
http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA3MDM3NjE5NQ==&mid=209187991&idx=2&sn=663d6b892a768371a5d07360013a2f11#rd
[episode 53]
http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA3MDM3NjE5NQ==&mid=209209954&idx=1&sn=173855f434d8ae853574c75a7426e171#rd
[episode 54]
http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA3MDM3NjE5NQ==&mid=400020022&idx=2&sn=9f67ae309d5b7d3cdad784750f1e4b5b#rd
He makes a weird comment that only an American could have written this story, because American Jews invented black humour in the 1950s.
Obviously there are comedies written about the most serious subjects throughout western history. In fact several UK WW2 veterans also made absurdist and comedy about WW2 in the 1950s -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goon_Show
Otherwise it's pretty standard: Yossarian as antihero, absurdism, use of humour to uncover painful truths, the exuberant daring of the whole story, whether or not it is nihilistic...
>ywn speak chinese
>>7833435
Much appreciated.
>>7833449
Not with that attitude
This is pretty neat
Latest episode:
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea [107]
It's fine. I watched a couple. He summarizes theories/works in a fairly basic way. It's hardly "super patrish" but it's fine I guess.
>>7831652
are there channels on youtube that show NHK programming or chinese programming?
>>7835672
Sure. In fact lots of mainland Chinese TV channels seem to upload their shows on to youtube for the overseas audience.
NHK seem to have a channel too.
Chinese patricians?
>>7835784
half of /lit/ is actually chinese
>>7837557
Not quite, but I'd reckon a third are East Asian.
>>7835784
>Chinese patricians?
>not 贵族
>>7837563
What gives you that impression?
>>7837597
let's put it to the test
中国兄弟们在那里?请举手
>>7837597
He's Canadian so he just assumes everything is filled with slants.
>>7837597
Because that's the ratio constant across Goodreads, LibraryThing, etc. I doubt /lit/ is an exception.
Can't ignore the blacks, latinos, and the various but not least others.
>>7837613
Just because I keep saying sorry doesn't mean I'm Canadian.
And when I say Ayy, I really do mean Ayy, and not "Eh?".
>>7837611
Tfw ABC and don't know native language.
Can modern Chinamen read Laozi and the like real good or is it like Ye Quirky Olde Chynese to them?
>>7837634
It reads like the Bible
In that it's always has an update like the NIV.
>>7837634
It's hard to draw a comparison with European languages because the 'spelling' doesn't change across centuries, so there is no 'the old' => 'ye olde'. So a literate Chinese person can 'read' everything but not necessarily understand it.
If you show a modern Brit a medieval manuscript written in Middle English, due to orthographic changes they probably wouldn't be able to recognise or pronounce a single word.
Lots of phrases from Classical Chinese are used in modern Chinese in the same way that we might use phrases from King James Bible - 'salt of the earth', 'judge not lest ye be judged' 'ye of little faith'. The difference is the KJV is from the 17th century, Confucius is from 400 BC or something. The key is that the shape of Chinese characters is only vaguely connected to their pronunciation. As pronunciation changes over the centuries you don't need to change the 'spelling'.
>>7837681
Wow, that seems kind of retarded and the sort of thing that would retard the growth of a civilization.
Then again, it obviously hasn't, so what do I know?
>>7837630
I'm 举ing my 手。
>>7837611
我是白人但是我还能说中文B)
>>7837763
I think it must have been a great thing, actually - when your ancient language switches from pictorial to phonetic, that's a huge step in communicating ideas.
