Read-in-Progress Wednesday

[geraineon]

This is your weekly read-in-progress post for you to talk about what you're currently reading and reactions and feelings (if any)!

For spoilers:

<details><summary>insert summary</summary>Your spoilers goes here</details>

<b>Highlight for spoilers!*</b><span style="background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF">Your spoilers goes here.</span>*

Comments

[duckprintspress]

I'm reading AWM: PUGB by Man Man He Qi Duo, and enjoying it. Not much else to say about it tho. I'm looking forward to a little more focus on the relationship and a little less on Qi Zui's wrist.

[geraineon]

How far into the novel are you? The focus does shift away a little and there will be more on the relationship but hand injuries are a big deal for e-sports xD (every sports manga/anime has a Injury Arc I feel).

[duckprintspress]

yeah it's definitely A Thing lol.

I'm most of the way through their big Pan-Asia tournament thing. I've also read this part in the manhua, tho we're getting close to where I was when Bilibili folded and I had to stop reading manhua (I don't like pirating it if I can help it. Also I hate all the ads on pirating webpages).

[llonkrebboj]

Did someone say e-sports and injury? 👀

Also, omg just realised this is AWM[绝地求生] (from AWM + the injury oops). \o/ I think I tried, but there wasn't enough :P

Any interest in e-sports and sick protagonist recs?
天才攻略论[全息] by 李温酒
English title: The Genius’ Playbook [Holographic]
Sickliness rating: 2.1
(Side note | the author writes lots of great sickliness on the side novels too :P)
Original link: https://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=4935283
English translation: https://exiledrebelsscanlations.com/novels/the-genius-playbook/
His body can't take the strain of going into VR, and he got a special prototype device that allows him to! He can't play for long hours though because his body doesn't allow it (he gets hospitalized and it gets worse), so part of joy of reading this is watching how he strategizes to make up for the handicap.

神颜主播又封神了 by 不是风动
English title: N/A No English translation
Sickliness rating: 1.1*
*The author has a note up saying they had to take away the sickly character tag. I think people must have complained because the character recovered eventually (there were grumbles on the weibo space when this was recced). Am amused and slightly appalled at the aggressiveness of sickly character lovers in the wild.
An ex-esports legendary sniper had to retire for health reasons. After recovering, he comes back to take the esport world by storm again.

priest - 橋頭樓上 Bridge Tower

[halfcactus]

I finished 橋頭樓上 just now and I don't think I can even discuss it anymore... It's the first time a cnovel has made me literally cry!!!!!!!! The meta parts hit so hard, too, no matter which age group you belong to. ;___;

Instead here is a drawing of an idiom I learned from the later parts of the book:


Lol j/k I do have some questions

Novel-end spoilers

I don't think this matters, but is she 小龍女 because she lives underwater.....???

I am, though moved to tears, still curious about CX and LSX's relationship! If I reread the diary bits will it make more sense to me??

I guess I overthought the Zhang Ting / Uncle Z thing and they were red herrings, after all. ^^; But I'm glad invoking her name did help dispel the monster, in the end.

I was surprised to see Chen dad genuinely care enough about CX to go after her. I guess he has that base level of concern for his bio-daughter, especially since he displaced his perversion for her onto LSX.

Anyway I'm going back to experiencing + processing my emotions late at night asjekjfa;fa this was the wildest ride and completely worth the weekly reading struggle. ;___;

Re: priest - 橋頭樓上 Bridge Tower

[geraineon]

I love that art!

I'll come back to this later to provide you with an extremely incorrect understanding of what this story is about based on what you shared here xD

Re: priest - 橋頭樓上 Bridge Tower

[halfcactus]

LOL PLEASE I was trying to avoid spoilers for these last few chapters XD

Re: priest - 橋頭樓上 Bridge Tower

[douqi]

You finished!!! Welcome to the emotionally compromised by Bridge novel club.

is she 小龍女 because she lives underwater.....???
ngl I had just assumed that she named herself after the Jin Yong character! (also 林仙儿 is the name of a Gu Long character so I wondered if priest decided to do a throwaway reference)

Re: priest - 橋頭樓上 Bridge Tower

[dayadhvam_triad]

hurray you finished!!!!! cry with us!!!! have you read the JJWXC comment sections on the last few chapters? So fascinating how it's turned into a sort of message board for people to talk about their own lives (often addressed to LSX—just as the characters in the novel do!) and support each other ;__;

Your art is adorable :D

I also assumed the name 小龙女 came from Jin Yong. Though Chinese 龙 are associated with water so what you suggest makes sense too! (Suddenly reminded of a comment that said 小龙女's "。" reply looked like a bubble coming from someone underwater...)

I thought this spoilery review bilibili video about 桥头楼上 was a good watch, you might enjoy too :3

[geraineon]

Honestly I am still drowning in the ORV pit. Good and bad news for me, I have less than 100 chapters to go so I am definitely slowing down a little to savour it.

In c-novel reads, hm, not c-novels specifically but I went back to reread an article in Catching CQL that annoyed me to highlight sections with comments, so I can post about it. I guess that counts?

[aurumcalendula]

What do you think of Catching CQL overall? A number of articles in it look interesting, but I've been going back and forth over buying it since I'm not especially interested in CQL.

[dayadhvam_triad]

The ORV pit is a deliciously meta place to be :P

I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on Catching CQL. I don't like CQL so I know I'm not its target audience lol and suspect I'd be frustrated, but curious nonetheless ^^;

[forestofglory]

I'm still reading To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth and I still have not gotten to the actual translations of stories! It's ok though because all the stuff about Ge Hong and how people would have read these stories in his time is interesting too. There's a chapter coming up call "text critical matters" that I hope will talk more about the textual history of these stories and maybe if I'm lucky the TPGJ too

[geraineon]

Ah I remember you mentioning you were at the introduction of this book. That must be a really long introduction/background!

[larryhammer]

I read maybe a dozen chapters of priest's Taisui, still in book 1, but didn't get further because I got distracted by a long Hermione Being Awesome saga.

[geraineon]

Ah, not really catching the reference. Hermione Being Awesome saga?

[douqi]

I am 3 chapters away from being fully caught up with Ning Yuan's To Embers We Return, after which I'll be following it chapter by chapter as she updates.

It has been a wild, wild, WILD, WILD ride so far and I'm not even sure we're halfway through (it's already at 500K+ words; I feel like it's going to end up being a million words plus)

I also find that I'm extremely into one of the secondary couples. Extremely hot when one of those quiet, reserved, second-fiddle type girls manages to completely domme the scheming seductress who had her wrapped around her little finger. The other secondary couples are also fun in their own way, but this particular one is excellent.

[geraineon]

Extremely hot when one of those quiet, reserved, second-fiddle type girls manages to completely domme the scheming seductress who had her wrapped around her little finger.

This is a great dynamic!

How long is Ning Yuan's novels, usually?

[llonkrebboj]

Not much cnovel reading this week. I'm continuing to enjoy Chapter 5 of Manifest in Words.

Literary collections consisting of all the works of a single author or even ones containing only poetry played crucial roles in the circulation and transmission of poetry during the Tang, and were one of the most important routes by which Tang poetry was transmitted to later dynasties. What's interesting to me is that poets themselves were acutely aware of the importance of compiling these collections (I learnt a bit about this from doing research for a Li He fic last year - the mini biography I used which was written by Li Shangyin was mentioned in this book, to my delight LOL) and often did it themselves, or entrusted their works to friends when they did not have the ability. But there were also a lot of challenges and considerations in doing such a thing. This whole chapter is a dive into examining them.

Manifest in Words is SO relevant to my interests. I'm going to re-read and take notes this time once I'm done.


Because we've been talking about genre in other spaces*, I found this interesting article about wuxia.
And because they're so interrelated, this also touches a bit on the emergence of xianxia.

*https://c-ent.dreamwidth.org/219753.html

What Speculative Fiction Writers Can Learn from the Origins and Evolution of the Wuxia Genre
https://www.sfwa.org/2021/12/28/what-speculative-fiction-writers-can-learn-from-the-origins-and-evolution-of-the-wuxia-genre/

On the other end, Huanzhulouzhu 还珠楼主 wrote epic fantasy tales inspired by the tropes of early chuanqi stories, depicting xia who could fly atop a sword across mountains, cultivate to become immortals, and possess Daoist magic. His stories inspired the creation of a wuxia-adjacent genre known as xianxia fiction 仙侠小说, which has seen a revival in popularity in the 21st century through online web publishing platforms and drama adaptations. Notable examples include Jade Dynasty 诛仙, The Journey of Flower 花千骨, and Eternal Love 三生三世十里桃花.

[geraineon]

Between this, and what forestofglory is reading, and my mountain of TBR, I think I am set for a very long time (if I don't get absolutely distracted by something else in the meantime).

I have read that article before! But hm, probably worth pinning it under one of the resource pages (... someday I will try to figure out a better way of organizing information so that it's easy access on this comm). I think when people think of wuxia now, it's mostly New Wuxia, and that does have boundaries that are stricter than before New Wuxia (but as we've discussed elsewhere, also getting fuzzier and *shakes fists!!!*)

[aurumcalendula]

More Record of the Missing Sect Master (I'm on chapter 74 now) and I started rereading The Beauty's Blade!

[geraineon]

Oh you're close to the end for Missing Sect Master! I remember it being in the shorter side of c-novels.

[dayadhvam_triad]

I'm listening to the 3K Workers audiobook, which updates with batches of ~6-minute-long episodes every night. Currently at episode 560+, which maps to chapter 240+ in the novel.

I also read some more historical transmigration stories, mostly set in the Tang and Song dynasties:

(a) the free chapters of 从唐宋诗人开始 (WIP), which is quick transmigration ft. MC jumping around in time and meeting famous Tang & Song poets (Du Fu, Li Bai, new arc has Huang Jingtian); it seems promising, so I bookmarked it to check back once it's complete.

(b) 大唐长安, ft. MC as a daughter of Xuanzong of Tang (under whose watch the An Lushan rebellion happened). It's an entertaining brain-mostly-off popcorn read; the author clearly has a story Type, because I also read their Qin dynasty novel 我给始皇当秦二世 before and the gist of the plot is the same—MC is the daughter of an emperor, who plans to take over the throne with social/tech change along for the ride. There are some differences in plot elements, so 我给始皇当秦二世 has hidden identity absurdities with the MC growing up in anonymity, and 大唐长安 has multiple transmigrators who are geographically scattered (though imo the story drops the ball on developing that element). At the end of the day, it's very standard historical transmigration fare where the iddy self-indulgent factor is that the MC gains power and revolutionizes society, but unlike dude-targeted stories on Qidian I can at least be assured these do a much better job portraying female characters. I read these stories to cater to my inner history geek, so on that front it delivers. However, I am disappointed by the bit at the very end about territorial expansion, which fails on both a Watsonian and Doylist basis—unfortunately not the first time I've encountered such a thing too.

... I think 3K Workers has spoiled me for this genre >_<;;; because 3K Workers did a much better job showing characters' interiority across a whole ensemble cast. 大唐长安 is a breezier read without much suspense—the number of spies MC has in An Lushan's camp to essentially defang him is hilariously high beyond my suspension of disbelief—and imo a lot of the cast falls short of full 3D development (though I think the author does a good job with one of the main antagonists, Li Linfu). 3K Workers is self-indulgent in a different way—it's not about being successful in gaining power and revolutionizing society, but about holding true to the ideals of equality and righteousness in the midst of a chaotic world (while the team Lu Xuanyu is on does eventually gain power and she sparks changes in society, there's a contrast in thematic focus imo).

I did find it very funny that 大唐长安 is labeled yanqing (BG), yet there is never a romantic subplot and the "love" interest literally appears as a 0-line background prop in the last chapter where the MC interacts with her daughter. Is he plot relevant? never! is he at least a decently prominent supporting character? no! is he as good as a square piece of cardboard? yes! LOL. It's like the author went "damn ok she's gotta have an heir... here this guy can occupy the slot, he doesn't even need to speak in the actual scene where we learn she's got a kid because obviously no one actually cares about him" 😂😂😂

whoops tl;dr

[geraineon]

Hahaha as someone who is usually more into the Plot than the romance, I support the dude being just a there to fulfill the CP requirements in the most barebones way.

3K workers sound very intriguing actually. I don't know if I've asked but can you link where you get the audiobook? At some point (after double ORV), I might try listening to it.

[llonkrebboj]

First xD gotta comment on this.

However, I am disappointed by the bit at the very end about territorial expansion, which fails on both a Watsonian and Doylist basis—unfortunately not the first time I've encountered such a thing too.

This happened in the extra chapter of one of my favourite novels. Its called 'irresponsible extras' and hell yeah author 🤣 glad you realise. This chapter is about territorial expansion's result 200 years in future of the novel's events. And my face was basically 😬 or 🤣 throughout. LOL.

I've got 3K planned after my Zerg reread (which is going nowhere because I've been distracted by Manifest in Words, irl work and Wan'er xD whoops). Slow but steady, bag of cats for brains will get there eventually.

And 从唐宋诗人开始 sounds interesting 👀 bookmarked under 'check out when complete'!