Well, for the sake of discussion, we'll count Jing Pin Mei. So it's really "which is your favorite of the FIVE."
For me it goes
1. Water Margin
2. Dream of the Red Chamber
3. Romance of the Three Kingdoms
4. Journey to the West
Personally, I haven't read Jin Ping Mei, so I can't rank it.
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Anonymous2009-07-28 15:08
☻/ I'M A NIGGER
/▌_
/ \
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Anonymous2009-07-28 16:54
Dream of the Red Chamber far and away.
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Anonymous2009-07-28 17:18
Romance of the Three Kingdoms is fucking marvellous. Dreams in the Red Chamber bored me to death and was generally awful, and I'm still about to read the other two, but am expecting great things from Water Margin due to authorship.
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Anonymous2009-07-29 0:20
It better be as good as the games.
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Anonymous2009-07-29 12:28
>>5
You mean Water Margin? Suikoden has little to do with it, aside from the 108 thing. That said, it's a glorious little bastard, easily my favorite, though I haven't read Dream of the Red Chamber. I HAVE read Jin Ping Mei though. It's... interesting.
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Anonymous2009-07-29 21:31
Water Margin is far and away my favorite.
Then ROTK, then Journey to the West.
Haven't read Dream of the Red Chamber.
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Anonymous2009-07-30 5:26
>>6 >>7
Dreams in the Red Chamber is literally a soap opera set in olde China. Literally. It wasn't especially bad, but I couldn't stand it for too long and finally stopped reading at about 20% in. Fuck all those rich women and their retarded household problems.
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Anonymous2009-08-03 19:05
Jin Ping Mei. It's porn with plot. Water Margin is a very close second though.
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Anonymous2009-08-05 14:35
Dream of the Red Chamber is my fav. sure it's kinda like soap opera but it doesn't dwell too heavily on scandalous themes like most modern books do and the characters are very well developed. bao yu is a pussy though. he's like the chinese version of shinji from evangelion
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Anonymous2009-08-09 20:33
Can anyone recommend a good in-print translation of Water Margin? I can only find out-of-print listings or partial series. I have Romance and Journey already, and waiting on Red Chamber.
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Anonymous2009-08-12 1:18
Just started reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms because my Chinese name is from it. Haven't read any of the others, though I can tell you that the characters from Journey to the West are on Chinese TV, one channel or another, all day and night. So thanks for this thread. You might say it's relevant to my interests.
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Anonymous2009-08-16 21:32
I'm wondering if the classics aren't as relevant to modern China now that it has abandoned its history and traditions.
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Anonymous2009-08-16 22:49
>>13
China has not abandoned it's history or traditions. The most common reaction to questions about the cultural revolution is equivalent to a facepalm.
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Anonymous2009-08-25 10:29
Water Margin all the way. It's a glorious revolution.
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Anonymous2009-08-28 1:33
So, um, is there any place where I can find Romance of the Three Kingdoms in .odf or maybe even .txt format?
Reading an ancient multi-volume tome like the Water Margin must amount to enduring Chinese water torture. If anyone in this thread actually read the whole thing, I commend your resilience.
It helps if you skip the parts where they describe in detail who was in a battle, how many troops they took, etc. That'd probably cut out a hundred pages or so worth of boring.
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Anonymous2009-09-17 18:55
Jing Pei Mei. Putting aside the porn, it really is interesting in it's own right. The porn is just a bonus.