Caroline has been reading books to me in the car for time immemorial in my mind, but this last year was difficult as we didn’t find ourselves in the car all that much. During the past week, that changed as she started heading back into the office more often, and then on Sunday, we made serious progress towards finishing The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria by Annie Gray before finishing it last night. Finishing a book opens a small window to return to a book we use as an interlude between other titles.
Back at the end of September 2011, we ordered The Plum in the Golden Vase or Chin P’ing Mei: Vol. 1, The Gathering by David Tod Roy (Translator). This epic 16th-century work of Chinese literature was something Caroline read in an abridged single-volume edition prior to meeting me. She felt it was something I might enjoy, and she was curious about the unabridged version that had been being worked on by the translator for 30 years, from 1982 until 2012. David Tod Roy passed away in 2016, but his legacy will live on in this incredible translation of a Chinese classic that stands next to the Four Great Novels of the Ming Dynasty. Those other books are Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber.
As I said, we turn to The Plum in the Golden Vase in between other titles. Caroline will read two to four chapters of it before we open the next book and plow through it, though we have been known to take a commercial break and get a quick chapter in of some saucy Chinese l’amour. Reading this way, it took us nearly two years before we agreed that this was a compelling enough story that we’d go ahead and snag the other four volumes. That first book weighed in at 520 pages, and now, ten years later, we are in Volume 4 effectively on page 2,406 with only 1,266 pages to go.
Maybe you are thinking, “Hey John, when 2025 rolls around, and you and Caroline close the last chapter of that tome and say goodbye to Hsi-men Ch’ing and his band of cohorts and concubines, won’t you miss them?” A part of us will be crushed knowing we’ll never listen to these stories ever again; neither of us has previously invested a decade and a half of spending time with a cast of characters from a period over 500 years ago.
The good news is that when we hand those five books over to a library or Goodwill, we’ll be opening the 14th-century Chinese classic Water Margin, but at four volumes of 2141 pages, we should be able to make good time with it and have it done no later than by 2028.