Being able to read literature in the original language has always been a big part of my enjoyment of learning foreign languages, but for Chinese I fear this may be a pipe dream.

I'm going to China next month and would like to pick up some novels that I will be able to read, if not now then eventually. Any suggestions for good places to start? I've heard that 巴金 uses simple language.

I currently know about 1500 characters. Are there any books I could tackle now, or should I wait awhile?

Thanks for your help!

I just saw that Oliviero posted something similar a few days ago, so sorry for the repeated topic. My question is a bit different though, because I'm looking for actual works of literature written in Chinese, not just a story for reading practice. But like I said, maybe this is a pipe dream and Chinese literature will never be within my grasp. Any thoughts?

You could try 黄金时代 by 王小波. It's a collection of short stories. I finished the first one, by no means got all the details but could get the gist of the story. I know about 2000 characters but still had to look things up.

China has four important and classic novel:
1)西游记 xiyouji http://baike.baidu.com/view/2583.htm
2)红楼梦 hongloumeng http://baike.baidu.com/view/2571.htm
3)三国演义 sanguoyanyi http://baike.baidu.com/view/2372.htm
4)水浒传 shuihuzhuan http://baike.baidu.com/view/2578.htm
If you can read those,.... you are incredible.

The problem with reading chinese (paper) novel is that you will find yourself stuck most of the time. I have tried it with a few and I found I needed my (Pleco) electronic dictionary at least once for every line of text. Very tedious. However I find reading novels an essential part of learning a language. For other languages it is not that hard, you are never really stuck because you can always read the word, and even if you don't know exactly what it means, you can often guess from the context, or look it up if it really bugs you. In fact Chinese people only rarely find themselves stuck, because the know the language, so if there is a character that they don't know, they can guess pronounciation and meaning from the context. For us, of course, it only shows up as a blank. Wouldn't know how it is pronounced, let alone what it means, that is if we can even guess how the sentence is broken down and where one word stops and the next one begins.

So, what should one do? For me, reading on my computer, or in the Pleco reader on my Palm computer really helps. You have easy access to a dictionary! So, I suggest you go to one of these websites where you can download books like this one: http://www.txdzs.com/
I have downloaded a few of theses and by using my browser I can immediately see the translation of the parts that are a bit too difficult for me.
Don't expect great literature, though!

Marc

余华 Yú Huá's 1993 novel 活着 Huózhe (To Live) apparently uses no more than 900 Chinese words?
http://thinkingchinese.com/index.php?page_id=85

I started 活着 but it proved too tough, maybe it got easier though for all I know. The other book mentioned in that article is fairly easy though and well worth reading (许三观卖血记). I have also read a short story by him which is pretty easy to understand called 我胆小如鼠.

I am currently reading a book called 1988:我想和这个世界谈谈, got through the first 30 pages so far with few problems and it also seems a good read which is a bonus!

As a side note, it would be very useful to have some kind of list that says what books you can read according to your level/vocabulary range (if such a thing is possible). And also, as a rule of thumb its best to if you understand roughly 90-95% of what's written, otherwise look for something simpler/harder.

Thanks to all for the suggestions!
@marchery: Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. I agree that reading in electronic formats is much easier, but it's just not the same as curling up with a real book. If only my iPod touch had an autofocus camera, then I could use the Pleco optical character recognizer and just point at the characters in a book to look them up. Of course I can still draw them to look them up in Pleco, it just takes longer.

I actually sometimes keep a physical dictionary with me when reading Chinese, looking up the characters and words I don't know as I go or writing them down for later checking. I know it's a pretty crazy thing to do, but it's actually pretty fun to do things "manually" from time to time. I have to use a dictionary with a character index by radicals (Concise Oxford is pretty much the only one-stop shop I've found at my local 新华书店 for this), and even then I fail to find them sometimes because I can't identify the radical or the character's not in the somewhat truncated dictionary I use.

Of course, I don't read nearly as often as I should, and what I do read is usually work-related and on my computer, so I just use the Zhongwen extension on Chrome to help me along.

As far as material, the book that I've plugged away at more than anything was given to me by a former Chinese teacher purely for its level-appropriateness. It's called "说话之道" by 蔡康永, a flamboyant Taiwanese talk show host. It's not a novel, but rather a book about how to communicate with people to maximize the positivity of the overall interface. Not my choice of topics, in all reality, but it's actually fairly interesting from a cultural standpoint, as his advice and scenarios are based on a sort of fusion of Chinese and Western culture reflecting the actual reality of modern Chinese culture's shifting seas.