I’ve advanced in my Chinese studies to a point where most people would call me passably fluent, at least in terms of high school fluency, but for some reason I’ve never read an entire book in Chinese. I’ve read children’s books, of course, but that barely counts. I’ve read short stories – Ba Jin, Wang Meng, Bing Xin… but I haven’t read a full BOOK.

I’m going to ease myself into this goal slowly by beginning with a young adult book – a translation of Astrid Lindgren’s The Brothers Lionheart (or something like that, I’m translating from the Chinese translation). I just finished the first page with only one blip (a relatively uncommon word for ghast/ghoul), so I think I’ll breeze through this pretty easily. That’ll be a nice warm-up. After that, I’ll probably read Ba Jin’s Family, or whatever it’s called, and then I’m going to read some classical works (my mom teaches classical chinese literature so I’ll have her help me get the hang of the cadence and structure of it).

I’m going to mark this goal as “give up,” because I hate clutter on my 43things list, but really I will be working towards it.