General Resources and Reading Suggestions

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This is a post to drop titles of and links to relevant reading material, be it nonfiction, poetry we might want to collectively hit up in future or read on our own time, or fiction (including trying to hustle up fresh blood for your latest reading/watching obsessions, and information as to where one can find such titles).

We'll talk about poetry and nonfiction as a group before adding it to the Great Plan. 

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Gan Lirou's Whole Thing is Very Fic Prompt

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''When her husband was home, the two of them also composed many linked verse together. The pentasyllabic regulated poem “Night in the Boudoir,” one of many such joint efforts by the young couple, demonstrates the romantic and poetic compatibility between them.

C17.10
Night in the Boudoir
Your lovely sentiments transmitted in ink,
2 My good friend excels in poems and songs. (Baihuang)
Fragrant tunes rise from the zithers,
4 The tinkling gems enhance the jadelike beauty. (Ruyu)
As the temple bell sounds amid hushed bamboos,
6 The moon’s reflection rises late on the curtain. (Baihuang)
You want to put all your efforts into the vocation of a thousand years,
8 Deep in the night, not yet gone to bed. (Ruyu)

Alternately composing couplets for the same poem, husband and wife shared many conjugal moments and signed their courtesy names (Baihuang and Ruyu, respectively) to the couplets they each composed. Her husband initiates the poem by demonstrating his appreciation of his wife’s expression of love in skillful poetic composition. Gan Lirou’s first response emphasizes their conjugal harmony and mutual pleasures by using a standard image for husband and wife, the two types of zither—qin and se. The synesthesia of the visual, aural, and olfactory senses in the line “Fragrant tunes rise from the zithers” conveys the quality of and harmony in their relationship. While her husband continues in the next couplet to bring out the nocturnal universe that is exclusively theirs, Gan Lirou ends the poem by reference to the familiar theme of their mutual dedication to his studies for the examination late into the night. This is also the valued time of their being in each other’s exclusive company after the children and elders have gone to bed.

Tragically, her husband died in his thirties while studying away from home, and Gan Lirou was left a widow to bring up her small children and care for her motherin-law. During the three-year mourning period, she wrote many poems grieving for her husband. Many of these poems make explicit the contrast between their happiness together in the past and her solitude in the present. Cast in the emotionally expressive sao style (chap. 2), “Expressing My Feelings” melds the external desolation of a funeral wake with the young widow’s passionate grief'.