Mammoths on the March: My Immediate Fiction Reading Plans (Focusing on Chinese and Asian Literature) 

Love the Yoshitomo Nara prints in the back! So tasteful

The moment you answered your cat with „I know“ I knew I had to subscribe to your channel. Besides being a lover of mammoths myself, obviously. The Miserables is also high on my list. Greetings from Germany!

Those pictures on the wall are cool! 💞

I've been an avid reader my whole life but you have introduced me to quite a few books I've never heard of and I'm adding a few of them to my ever-growing list of books I want to read. I will also say that there is something so comforting and endearing about your video that I just love. I wish you luck in accomplishing these mammoths!

I loved hearing about your experience working at that tax company. So neat! And so lucky you were able to read while getting paid! And I love your plan of making this year the year of the mammoths. I might copy you! 😊 Lastly, your kitty was so precious! 🐈

What a great collection! I'm glad to hear you like Plum in the Golden Vase as it's high on my list to buy. I'll probably get it at the same time as The Ramayana. Nice to find another youtuber who likes big books and also loves asian literature!! Subscribed!

Good luck with your challenge!

I’m extremely envious of your sets of books. Not gonna lie. 😂

Mammoth’s are fun! I just started reading some of the biggest books on my shelves, and it’s been such an enriching experience.

Just wanna say thank you for opening my eyes to New Lit to explore. You might already be aware, but for April ‘Classics & Company’ YT channel is doing a read along of Les Misérables :) I’m here from watching Steve’s input video ‘You Don’t Have to Read Hard Books’ Thanks, again 😻

A daunting prospect but I do wish you all the luck you'll need for this project. I admire your enthusiasm. Sixty-two years ago I achieved (seems impossible now!) a degree in French, and I can still read Proust pretty easily in French, as long as a dictionary is at hand. My advice: Put Proust at the very bottom of your list. Heresy, perhaps, but... Well. Enough said, I guess. By the way, I love both the cat and dog. Best to them, too.

not sure if this is your cup of tea, but maybe check out Sei Shonagon's "The Pillow Book" and Nick Joaquin's "The Woman Who Had Two Navels" edit: i know they're not mammoths, but since you're currently into chinese / asian literature, i'm reminded of these books.

I love a good mammoth, but similar to you I read a lot last year but for some reason they were mostly novellas. I have Anna Karenina on my list, but also Don Quixote, Les Miserables, and a few others. I have actually never gone a year without reading a mammoth, but the last couple of years we had a lot going on and it left me very little space ot either commit to a big read or even to a series. In any case, love your series recommendations, love your views, and your cat.

I saw the title and got excited thinking you would be reading the “Clan of the Cave Bear” series. They are all mammoths, about mammoths and Neanderthals…great read.

What you are doing here is, you are preventing these books from becoming extinct. By purchasing them you make sure that the legacy of their authors lives on. Thanks for the video man!! Best wishes to you from Ásgeir in Iceland!!

Your cat is so cute!

This is an incredible project David! My experience with Anna Karenina is also making me think to tackle more mammoths … but I might feel tooconfident right now 😅

I read and enjoyed the first book in The Cairo Trilogy but never went on. Now I think I’d have to re-read the first to get back into them. I read he first book in my three volume set of Proust and don’t have any motivation for going on.

I just finished Lonesome Dove, a great read. More casual and written in the 80s it’s not too complicated either.

I need to read Romance of the 3 Kingdoms at some point. The Dream of Red Mansions look really nice on the spines. That Princeton University Press Sale is really good if you can find stuff, I got a lot of nature books as usual lol. Good luck with your March reading!

Don’t forget about C.P. Snow’s “Strangers and Brothers” series of connected novels. Wonderful.

I have read all or most of an abridged children's version of 'Black Beauty' by Anna Sewell. That was demanding enough for me.

I ordered one series and saved the rest for later. Thank you so much for this video. I've not heard of any of these books aside from "The Tale of Genji" to which I had purchased previously. I would also like to respond with a new favorite of mine that I had just finished reading two days ago called "1Q84" by Murakami. It is a trilogy, yet my copy is contained within a singular binding. Over a thousand pages in total. Give your pups head pats from me tell them I said they're good dogs. Thank you.

I'm very fond of the two books The Plum in the Golden Vase and Dream of the Red Chamber(or The Story of the Stone). In my opinion, although they were developed independently of the development of modern Western fiction, in terms of their creative concepts, they share startling similarities: a restrained and objective tone, and a deliberate, meticulous organization and revision of the overall structure of the text, which makes the plot more expressive at a local level. Which is why I couldn't resist also reading the English translations of these two books, to see what the reading experience would be like in an English-language setting. To me, the work done in the English translations is outstandingly good; it even made me wonder if I was reading a masterpiece of Western literature. Yes, although the translation makes every effort to preserve all the information of the original text, in practice the experience of reading it in Chinese is completely different from reading it in English, although both experiences are very good. But in order to explore the reasons why classical Chinese fiction was able to produce works like The Plum in the Golden Vase and Dream of the Red Chamber, I have also read many relatively unknown works that nevertheless reflect the historical development of Chinese fiction; especially works from the period between The Plum in the Golden Vase and Dream of the Red Chamber. In the historical development of classical Chinese fiction, the early period was marked by works such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin and Journey to the West, which depicted heroic and legendary stories. The Plum in the Golden Vase captured the gradually developing creative techniques and literary aesthetics of these stories, especially in Water Margin, which unconsciously included a mass of realistic detail - just as Don Quixote, although it tells the story of an adventure, includes a mass of realistic detail. The Plum in the Golden Vase, which was expanded from a minor plot of Water Margin, initiated the writing of ordinary secular lives in classical Chinese fiction. The Plum in the Golden Vase is a complex work. It is both erotic - because it was also affected by the mass of vulgar, erotic fiction which proliferated in early Chinese fiction (or perhaps The Plum in the Golden Vase was written precisely to criticize and satirize this kind of vulgar writing) - and at the same time critical, and then secular. Later, many works of classical Chinese fiction appeared which inherited part of the DNA of The Plum in the Golden Vase. On the one hand - and ironically ,the writing of Don Quixote fatally wounded the writing of chivalric romance, but the writing of The Plum in the Golden Vase led to a further flourishing of erotic fiction because The Plum in the Golden Vase was welcomed by both intellectuals and the urban classes, so many inept imitations quickly sprang up, further intensifying the erotic and violent elements and finally resorting to a tragic ending to express a critical attitude. So, out of revulsion towards works of this kind, works like appeared; it also borrowed from The Plum in the Golden Vase the framework of one male protagonist and his five wives, but gave up the erotic elements and used extremely elegant, highly poetic writing to tell the story of how even if the women were not, as in The Plum in the Golden Vase, evil, cunning, treacherous and vicious, but on the contrary possessed talent and high moral character, they also met a tragic end; the novel is simple and elegant, extremely rich in female consciousness and is suffused with an air of melancholy nostalgia. Of course, because this novel only focuses on the description of the interior of a household, while The Plum in the Golden Vase also includes a depiction of the different classes of society, Lin Lanxiang seems quite thin: it is only a little longer than Madame Bovary. Moreover, because it uses an extremely elegant literary style, the plot is just a series of trivia about the daily lives of noble people and "civilized" arguments, which makes the novel quite boring to read. Add to that the fact that Dream of the Red Chamber inherited from it and comprehensively surpassed it, so this novel has almost no fame at all. On the other hand, as an example of the critical novel, The Plum in the Golden Vase quickly aroused many critical works in different styles which targeted different social phenomena. For example, , which focuses on fierce women, telling the story of a woman (or several) who, driven mad by past karma or present oppression, take revenge on their husbands; at the same time, it also describes more broadly the injustice, corruption and depravity at every level of society. The literary style is rich but strong, and the plot is exaggerated to the point of bias.And then there's , which one might call China's 120 Days of Sodom (it was also lost for a long time; it was only rediscovered towards the end of the last century); it covers all the modes of sexuality of erotic fiction, from the perspective of a society in which everyone is sexually incontinent, describing the absurdity and ridiculousness of different social groups. One difference is that this book is nearly a million characters long, but the reading experience is anything but disgustingly difficult, on the contrary it is extremely concise and smooth, witty and humorous, sometimes like reading a joke book, sometimes like reading a richly meaningful symbolic parable. The author excels at describing marginal social groups or people with bizarre characters or habits, such as unemployed rogues, gamblers, swindlers, misers, and so on. And the central clue which links these absurd characters and events in this long and complex novel is a simple or even naive love story - a blind prostitute and a poor intellectual fall in love and finally escape from the brothel to live together; this main plotline appears and disappears, and all around it is chaos and depravity, like the calm center of a storm. The novel ends with the fall of the Ming dynasty and the world descending into even greater chaos. The reason that these two books have been intentionally ignored is very simple: because their plots involve a mass of violence and pornography. On the other hand, the novels themselves have fatal defects: their thinking is relatively backward, and they frequently try to preach, making the work rather bloated and even affecting the shaping of the characters and the plausibility of the plot; in particular, they also have a strong misogynistic tendency. And, there is , a work that was produced in the same period as The Scholars; this book mainly describes the son of a wealthy and noble family who is gradually corrupted by the temptations of the world, whores and gambling, and finally loses all his family fortune, before suddenly having an epiphany and repenting; it is a didactic novel. Unlike most of the works mentioned above, which mostly took Buddhist philosophy as the background of their literary aesthetics, this novel is guided by Confucian thought, and explores questions of humanity and education. Of course, there are many other such works. These works were all produced after the birth of The Plum in the Golden Vase and clearly show the influence of The Plum in the Golden Vase at the same time, they were produced before Dream of the Red Chamber. Although it is impossible to know for sure whether the author of Dream of the Red Chamber read any of these works, it is an interesting thing to compare the merits of Dream of the Red Chamber with these works and see how Dream of the Red Chamber overcame their defects. After the birth of Dream of the Red Chamber, it quickly inspired the birth of a mass of works, especially stimulating literature by women. For example, the earliest extant vernacular novel written by women in China is a sequel to Dream of the Red Chamber. Of course, there are also women's long narrative ballad novels, such as Chen Duansheng's Resurrection as a Couple, which is a long poem novel, the whole text being 800,000 characters, written in seven-character a line stanzas with rhyme; the author was a seventeen-year-old girl when she began to write it. It tells the story of how the two noble families of the Huangfu and Meng families agree to marry, which arouses the hatred of another family, the Liu family, so the Huangfu family is framed and only the son of the Huangfu family, Huangfu Shaohua, escapes, while Meng Lijun, the daughter of the Meng family, refuses to marry the son of the Liu family and escapes disguised as a man.She then uses her male identity to pass the imperial examination and enter government service, and finally rises to be the highest official, vindicating the Huangfu family ; but at this time Meng Lijun is unwilling to give up her male identity and power and return to her status as a wife, and begins to struggle with the emperor, her husband's family, and her own family, until finally her female identity is exposed and betrayed to the world, Meng Lijun vomits blood, and the story stops.It seems that none of these long novels have English translations.

Kitty, kitty, kitty♥ I'm Japanese and yet, I've never read the whole Tale of Genji. It's written in old Japanese, so it's quite challenging to read the entire work, even for a native reader. We read some in school, of course, but it's rare that people read the whole original work. We have lots of related books: modern-translated version, manga versions, shorter versions, how-to-read-The Tale-Of-Genji versions, etc. Hopefully, I can read the whole work someday with the help of different versions.

There’s something I really like about “aspirations”. More than just wanting, not necessarily as much as a firm external commitment, but significant and meaningful. I’m doing some major whittling back on my RU-vid subscriptions to carve out some more time for physical therapy-related projects, and perhaps some long-stewing fiction. Hoping this current heady-brew subscription works out well. Mammoths really do have a special appeal. At the moment I’m reading some series of shorter volumes I’ve been meaning to get to (for thirty years, in some cases) But I also have my eye on what my younger friends call chonky boiz to swim in for a while. For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t expect to read Journey to the West in a month. But then I would also not expect to read it exclusively.

A Dance to The Music of Time by Anthony Powell. 12 Volumes - I really enjoyed reading it.

Proust was mind numbing. I highly recommend the duology 'Stalingrad' and 'Life and Fate' by Grossman, combined just under 2000 pages. You will have guessed that it revolves around characters, both Russian and German, involved in the Battle of Stalingrad in WW2. Totally absorbing. My favourite mammoths are War and Peace (I have read it three times over the years), and Quiet Flows the Don by Sholokhov . Enjoy your reading everyone.

Those are indeed some big books and equally intimidating. Thank you for introducing me to some of these titles. Ps- I've also failed many a times while reading some big books but I plan on returning to them once more. I recently got done with one having 700+ pages. So, I'm cheering you on!!!

I'd like to reread _Don Quixote,_ amongst others, someday.

The Recognitions of Dhalgren by Richard S. Prolegemon

Dear lord, I must not watch videos like this ... too many books already waiting to be read, dang.

Nice video! Excellent-looking Princeton complete Ramayana...may have to cop one for myself. "Marienbad My Love", at almost 18 million words, may claim the title of longest novel, although given its unusual structure and manner of composition some people might not consider it to truly be a novel. Great interjections from the animals -- would like to hear their thoughts specifically on mammoth novels in the sequel.

dalkey archive press are about to release the first english translation of "marshland" by otohiko kaga, a big sweeping japanese novel that has been compared to tolstoy. thought it would fit well with your mammoths of asian literature.

I have just finished my mammoth "The Eighth Life" by Nino Haratischwili (944 pages in Hardback, 1258 pages on Kindle), described as a "Georgian War and Peace" I am still processing my thoughts, I think March of the Mammoths is a great event to encourage us to read such behemoths. The actual War and Peace has defeated me twice, although I did read Anna Karenina a couple of years ago.

Proud owner here of volume one of Plum in the Golden Vase

do a pet intro!!

A year of reading mammoths is called #migrationofthemammoths; reading 18 mammoths of at least 800 pages in a year or 6 minimum.

Wow. Crazy, man.

Subscribed. Read the Mahabharata too.

Is the Tale of Genji worth the commitment? My edition is 1300 pages and I'm told it is largely without a plot.

i've not heard of A Dream of Red Mansions! and have not read enough Chinese lit! thank you for sharing your mammoths! as a side note, love your Yoshitomo Nara prints!

Amother Chinese mammoth is The Three Kingdoms.

Tell me about those paintings

He must have a lot of spare time.

Game of Thrones reads as one novel.

The rocking back and forth is dizzying for me. Sorry.