What book(s) are you currently reading or listening to? July 15 (discuss.online)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Finished Tripwire by Lee Child, third book in the Jack Reacher series.

Ending was expected, but I guess if you have such a long running series, pretty much ending will always be expected. Bad guy meets Reacher, bad guy loses, Reacher wins. Fun to read though, which is the main point. Going to keep reading them.

Don't think it ticked any of the Bingo boxes though.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

The repetition is there because these are primarily oral tales that have been barely edited into something that almost, but not quite, has a coherent narrative.

The tales within Journey to the West come from a very wide period of historical storytelling and are in a wide variety of storytelling traditions. There's very little consistency from tale to tale, and any overarching theme was added much later in forming the "novel". (It's a "novel" in the same way that Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a novel, right down to inconsistencies from member story to story.)

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Cool, appreciate the context. And this applies both to the repetition between chapters and within a particular chapter?

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

The repetition between chapters happens because the storyteller of a given story doesn't know if you know the origin story or not. (It's like how every damned Superman or Spider-Man or whatever movie always has to show how Superman/Spider-Man came to be.) Within chapters it could be part of an oral recitation thing with the repetitions being vestigial choruses. There is a lot of scholarship around this novel, and I'm not really deeply involved in any of it. I'm a situation- and opportunity-driven dabbler.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Thanks for the insight!

this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025

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