Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xueqin

Epic family saga from the late 1700s, reputed as the Great Classic of Chinese fiction. The full novel is War-and-Peace long, I only read the first book (of five). I've been wanting to try this novel for ages but it's the kind of thing that's really hard to get to unless you're living alone on an island for a while.

First: on the historical side, it genuinely blew my mind how often people used to die for no reason with little warning. The novel is semi-autobiographical and I suspect that the deaths are a fairly accurate reflection of the times. I must have known this intellectually but I never really imagined the impact it had on people and plans to just basically know you or any of your friends/family have a very high chance of getting sick at any moment and then dying pretty immediately. This isn't even a major theme of the book (there are ~400 characters in this novel, so a lot of people can die without it being a major theme), and if anything that was what made it so impactful for me-- a bunch of characters were just there one day and then got sick the next day and then they were gone, and nobody was super surprised about it. I genuinely felt lucky to be living in modernity for the first time in a while.

Second, this novel really reminded me of how much arbitrary power Finishing a Book has over my psyche. Dream of the Red Chamber genuinely seems like one single novel which the publishers (or whoever) have chopped into five sections purely for convenience –– it feels like they could have made the cutoff at any other chapter with just as much/little justification. Knowing how long the whole novel is I suspected I would only read on book, and that's probably what will happen now –– I enjoyed what I read, and I'm glad I read it, but I probably wasn't smitten enough that I'm willing to invest the time it would take to finish the whole thing. And yet... finishing the first book felt really important, I don't think I would have stopped 3/4 through the first book and said "well, that was good but I think I've had my fill now." This despite believing that End of Book 1 is (in this case) as arbitrary a milestone as 3/4-of-the-way-through-Book-1. I hate how much my mind prioritises Finishing Things, even when that's an arbitrary line.

Finally, I really enjoyed the fact that this novel had a bunch of "magical" qualities to it (the framing story is about a magical stone that is sent down to earth to experience human life) and a lot of breaking the fourth wall and stuff -- I don't know enough about literary history to know if this used to be more common before realism and then went away for a while, or whether it's always been one strand of literature and never gone away, but I just generally like knowing that books like this exist that did all kinds of very "modern" literary things a long time ago. Every chapter also ends with a "....but if you want to know what happened with X, you'll have to read the next chapter," which I thought was a charming reflection of the psychological tricksiness of writing, and that someone knew about these suspense-building tricks 250 years ago (and presumably even further back if I actually read older books).