Back in April, I was posting about a book titled The Plum In The Golden Vase and how we’d just started volume 4 of the 850,000-word mega-book. At the rate we’d been reading it, I figured we had until 2025 before we’d finish it; well, I was wrong. Tonight, we closed volume 5 and put to rest its myriad of characters that had lived with us for ten years. It was never our intention to stretch a title out for such a lengthy period of time, but now that it has happened, I think our fondness and familiarity with the story will have us grieving its end.

I believe that the reason we picked up steam was that volume 4 ushered in the demise of our central character while volume 5 took down those corrupt minions that lived off the excesses that were exemplified in the previous chapters of the 100 chapters this book covered.

So, the main takeaway from reading such a long work over many years is that I believe everyone should pick something of this extraordinary length and read it slowly enough that it lives with them for years. Sure, we get attached to characters in much shorter works, but to live with those featured on so many pages year after year, they grow over time in our memories and, in some way, become family.

While we’ll be jumping into The Water Margin, a.k.a. Outlaws of the Marsh, soon, we’ll take at least a short break from classical Chinese literature to indulge in French literature via Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time, and once we gather some serious traction with its 1.2 million words, we’ll be folding The First Crusade by Peter Frankopan into the mix.