Cao Xueqin (1715–1763)

Xi-feng is my favorite and no one can convince me otherwise. Is she a bit messy? Yes, but I still love her. I think I would absolutely hate her in real life, but in the same way of I'm against my brother but my brother and I are against everyone else (Xi-feng being the proverbial brother in this situation). I also loved Qin-shi but not quite as much, for reasons that I can't possibly share with those who haven't read it. I hope Xi-feng keeps being her bad self in the next volume, which I will soon be embarking on. That being said, I must share a grievance of mine that has more to do with me than the book itself. I found myself in dire need of a family tree pretty much immediately. Why, you ask? Because pretty much every character is related and they're introduced in large batches and they live together so they all blended together. This isn't always a problem for me. Even in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is arguably worse because it actually has characters with identical names, even sometimes over ten characters with the same name running around at the same time, I had no problems because I had a family tree going into it. I did not have a similar aide for this one, however. I spent several hundred pages ruminating on my inability to keep characters straight. Who were Qin-shi's in-laws? And she was married to Jia Rong, I think? Where did Jia Zheng/Zhen/Qiang/Lian/Lan (seriously, I could keep going on) come into this? I was at the point where I was even considering making a family tree of my own. Then, when I was about 500 pages in (yes, 500 out of the 520ish that are actual text and not appendices) I put my book down upside down to help a patron at work and I spotted something on the back cover, which I had neglected to read. Friends, there was a family tree in the back of the book the whole time, and it said that very clearly under the blurb on the back cover. It always comes back to smarter not harder, I suppose. A masterpiece overall. Much saucier than one would expect, yet at the same time philosophical. I especially enjoyed the tags at the end of the chapters which encouraged the reader to read on. As someone who tries to read a minimum amount each day and often doesn't read extra, this was the support I needed.… (more)