Why do all of these young people have such weak constitutions?Yes, this volume does center around their poetry club, but there are tons of intriguing (and frankly, simply insane) things that happen as well. Also Xi-Feng, my darling, gets a lot of undeserved flak in this one, but also sometimes she deserves it, so I'll give them that one. I've decided we would be friends and not enemies, but only because I know never to talk to her about money!5/5, I wish I lived in the garden. ( )

600 pages of pampered teens planning to write poetry and drink tea, and then writing poetry and drinking tea, punctuated by savage beatings and suicides which are instantaneously effaced by more poetry and tea drinking. It's like one of those nineties indie bands that were quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet LOUD quiet quiet quiet LOUD... but with a greater ratio of quiet to loud.

Xi-Feng continues to bring the spice to this otherwise fairly insipid hotpot, orchestrating pranks on good old Grannie Liu (who is a terrific sport) and getting violently shitfaced at her own birthday party. Behind the scenes she's busy keeping an increasingly precarious number of pecuniary plates spinning as the family's fortunes, imperceptibly to most, decline apace. The canary in the coalmine, as so often, is a memo from Accounting...

I'm still enjoying this even if my eyes glaze over at yet another description of a knick-knack or character's attire, or the arrival of yet another sub-clan of country cousins. I'm still in the dark about the identity of the vast majority of the characters, but it doesn't seem to matter. There's a hypnotic rhythm to this volume that makes it perfect for one-chapter-per-night reading. ( )

It was clear from the first five chapters of volume one that this is the best book ever written, but 1000 pages in it hasn't let up. Read it. ( )

Better than volume 1, which I also quite liked. These have both been very interesting portrayals of aristocratic life in Qing China. So decadent and rigidly hierarchical, and transgressions are met with such ferocity and violence. Feudalism and aristocracy be crazy, yo. At the same time as reading this, I've been listening to a history of the French revolution podcast, and yeah, I totally get why peasants revolt and try to overthrow the system.

At the same time, I just really enjoy reading about Chinese history and culture. I love the level of detail Cao brings, painting word-pictures of the everyday goings-on of the Jia estate. Learning about history is an ongoing, never-ending process. There are always more gaps to fill in. This book certainly helps with that. ( )

In the second volume of Hawkes' five-volume translation of The Story of the Stone, life for the Jia family goes on surrounded by luxury and literature. This volume, though not as fanciful as the first, expertly portrays life for an upper-class Chinese family and their corresponding material culture. Hawkes' translation is adept at bringing this far-removed world closer and once more, the translation is fluent and reads well. As I mentioned in my review for the first volume, I have some issues with the liberal translations of the poetry but these are small in comparison to the good work Hawkes has already accomplished. ( )