Hello, my friends. Welcome to my corner. About a year ago, I shared with you my experience reading the 1001 Nights, and I told you in that video, and in other videos too, that long texts, long stories, tend to give me anxiety, but at the same time every now and then I feel the need to immerse myself in one of those stories that are so vast that they seem to almost obliterate the so-called real world. What I have right here, The Story of the Stone, by Cao Xueqin, is such a story. I had great expectations for this text, and let me tell you, they were all of them exceeded, okay? This is just one of the most splendid stories that I have ever encountered, and I wanted to share with you my experience reading The Story of the Stone. And I want to say this: do not worry, because I am not going to overdo it the way that I did with the 1001 Nights. The first thing that I want to look at is basically two issues, actually: context and authorship. The Story of the Stone was published around the year 1760, so just to give you a little bit of context with that also, Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne, is from 1759. December of that year. So it's contemporaneous with The Story of the Stone. The Story of the Stone: regarding the title, okay? It is also known as the Dream of the Red Chamber or A Dream of Red Mansions, okay? Honglou Meng, which is the original title. And this “red chamber,” right? The “red mansions” basically refers to the place where the daughters of rich men would live. So, as the translator points out in his introduction, one way of thinking about this would be as a title like A Dream of Golden Girls, right? But you can see why the title doesn't function the same way in English, especially if we consider, when we say Golden Girls, the relationship that I, you know, at least have with that TV show, so that is not really a very good title. So I'm going to refer to this text as The Story of the Stone throughout this video. This is basically the most famous of the Four Classics, or the Six Classics, depending on who you ask, of Chinese literature. The others being of course The Journey to the West, The Story of the Three Kingdoms, and Water Margin, which is also known as Outlaws of the Marsh or also as All Men Are Brothers. There are very different versions of this text, many of them, okay? As you can imagine, because it's quite a voluminous text that we have here, and none of them definitive, okay? So, that's one thing to keep in mind. The author is Cao Xueqin, but he wrote 80 chapters of this book. The rest of the chapters are by an anonymous author who was close to Cao Xueqin, and they were also edited by a guy by the name of Gao E. We're going to talk a little bit more about that towards the end of this video, when we look at those two final volumes. So, I read this book in the Penguin edition, as you can tell. This was translated by David Hawkes, who was a professor of Chinese at Oxford, and also, the last two volumes were translated by John Minford. The story itself, so the actual reading that that I did, takes up 2,344 pages, so it is quite long, and it is divided into five volumes, okay? So, the division into five volumes that you see right here, that was a structure that David Hawkes decided to follow. Originally, the novel would be divided into more volumes than that, because maybe one volume would cover 10 chapters, so you ended up with quite of voluminous, you know, number of books, but that is the only… the only time, or the only way in which David Hawkes has changed the structure of the book. In everything else, including the division into 120 chapters, he followed the original. In other words, what we have here, if we have 120 chapters, we have 80 chapters that were translated by David Hawkes and then the remaining 40 chapters were translated by John Minford. The first part was the part that we know was written by Cao Xueqin, and the 40 chapters in the end are the ones by the anonymous author and also edited by Gao E, who is given credit, actually, in the last two volumes of this edition by Penguin. So, are you ready for the connection? You know who was a big fan of The Story of the Stone? Of course, I'm talking about Jorge Luis Borges, and I wanted to take care of the Borges Connection as an introduction to the book. We have two books by Borges in which um he mentions The Story of the Stone, so I'm going to tell you about these two. And the first one, which is one that I have shown you before, is Textos cautivos, right? So, a collection of his reviews, for the most part, that he wrote for the El hogar magazine during the 1930s. And what he did here was that he reviewed a translation of The Story of the Stone into German, by a certain Franz Kuhn. One of the reasons why this was an important translation, and apparently it is the one that Borges looked at and the one that he read, is because this was the first translation that featured the complete text of The Story of the Stone in a European language, okay? So, let me share some of the things that Borges says in his little review, because it's really quite brief. So, he says: “The first chapter tells the story of a stone of celestial origin destined to repair hole in the sky and which does not fulfill its divine mission. The second narrates that the hero has been born with a jade stone under his tongue. The third introduces us to the hero.” I'm going to skip a little bit. “After that, the novel continues in a rather irresponsible or insipid manner. Secondary characters swarm and we don't know very well who is who; we are, as it were, lost in a house of many patios.” I'm also skipping a little bit here. “A desperate carnality governs the work. The theme is the degeneration of a man and his final redemption through mysticism. Dreams abound. They are more intense because the writer does not tell us that they are dreams, and we believe they are real until the dreamer wakes. (Dostoevsky, towards the end of Crime and Punishment, employs this approach once, or twice consecutively.) The fantastic abounds. Chinese literature does not know of [quote-unquote] “fantastic novels” because all of them at some point are just that.” And this was written in November 19th of 1937. So, I think Borges really speaks. I don't need to comment on that. But I do want to tell you that the other book in which Borges mentions The Story of the Stone is this one right here: his Libro de sueños, so the Book of Dreams. Because there are a couple of important dreams in The Story of the Stone that Borges refers or describes in this other book, and I'm going to tell you more about that as we approach those places in the text. So, one question here would be, “Jorge, the contents, okay? What is The Story of the Stone about?” In a very small nutshell, The Story of the Stone is the story of the Jia family. It's very, very… you know, brief, I know. There is a hero, okay? His name is Bao-yu, and he has been born with a jade under his mouth, and actually Bao-yu means “precious jade,” so the name is directly related to the plot elements that we have here, with this stone that he has under his tongue. He's about 13 years old when we meet him in the novel as we begin to read, and his conflict is primarily a romantic one, okay? He is torn between two cousins. On the one hand we have Bao-chai, whom he associates primarily with beauty, and then on the other hand we have Dai-yu, whom he sees as an incarnation of intelligence. So, beauty or intelligence: which one are you going to choose? And throughout the novel basically we follow the fate of Bao-yu, but at the same time we meet an almost infinite number of secondary characters who are living in this household. This is a household that basically takes on life as we read and becomes just, you know, this amazing thing right there in front of our eyes as we continue to experience the story. Genre, okay? One of my favorite topics. Let's look at that. The Story of the Stone, as you can imagine, is many things, and as tends to be the case with novels that are these long… this long, it is many types of novels also in the same place. But let me say this, at the risk of stating the obvious, right? The Story of the Stone is a novel, okay? And it's not a novel… novel; this is a novel-novel, okay? It's not like Moby Dick, or like War and Peace, or any of those: this is really… surprisingly, you know… a novel in the traditional sense of the term. Now, what kind of novel is it? I would say that The Story of the Stone is primarily a novel of manners with elements of allegory and also elements of satire, okay? That is how I would define it, but there are many other ways that you can look at it. And I think this is an excellent novel, because it is a great example of the realist novel, so, realism, but sprinkled with elements of what we call fantasy or with the marvelous. So it really has a lot going for it. I would personally not speak of magic realism in this case, but I can imagine that many would, you know, and I would totally see what they mean if they say that there are elements of magical realism in The Story of the Stone. And I want to say something about structure also. I talked about this structure before in terms of the division into five volumes, but I want to look at the structure of the chapters. Here's one thing that you're going to see as you read The Story of the Stone: you're going to notice that instead of focusing on one main event each chapter focuses on two episodes, okay? So, it's very interesting in this case. This is because as a narrative, right? As a device, the author, what he does is to basically end every chapter with a cliffhanger. So that you continue to read the other one. So the following chapter gives you the conclusion of the last episode of the previous one and also begins with a new episode. Sometimes this is not really, you know, very important, because the author will… or the narrator will take care of that previous episode in the first paragraph. He'll say something like, “Oh, and by the way, that episode ended this and this way.” Right? And that's it, and he moves on to the next one. But as a device it really works, because it keeps you turning the pages, because you want to find out what happened, right? It leaves you like unsatisfied, if you will, as a reader, so that you will continue to read. This is an episodic novel that has one solid unifying thread, which is Bao-yu's story. There are many stories in The Story of the Stone, but that thread is always present, you know, and that's what keeps us interested. So, now that we know a little bit more about what we're talking about and what we're dealing with, let's look at some highlights from each one of the volumes of The Story of the Stone. So, let's see what we have here. The first volume, which is this one right here, is titled The Golden Days, and listen to the beginning of the story. Basically, what we have here, is this: the goddess Nü-wa wanted to repair a hole in the sky, so she basically molded 36,501 stones in order to repair that hole, okay? That is a fantastic magic realist device right there. The details, okay? When you're narrating something that is so totally outrageous, so preposterous that nobody would believe it, but you provide such details that they make what you're saying believable. At one point, I don't know where, García Márquez talks about this. He says, “If I tell you, ‘I saw elephants flying in the sky,’ that is one thing. But if I say, ‘Oh, I saw 123 blue elephants flying across the sky,’ that is completely different.” The details make it more believable. So that's one of the reasons why maybe some people would see magic realism in The Story of the Stone. But anyway, let's go back to this… these 36,501 stones. She uses 36,500. So there's one stone right there that is left unused, and this stone has magical powers, okay? One of the powers that it has is that it can change its appearance, and it is this stone, actually, that is reincarnated… or, I guess in this case we would have to say “reinstonated”… into that piece of jade that is found under about Bao-yu's tongue when he is born. So, volume 1 what it does is basically to place us in the Jia household, okay? Which is also known as the Rong-guo house. There are two houses in The Story of the Stone. Both of them belong to the same family, but we spend the vast majority of the time at the Rong-guo house. The other one is the Ning-guo house, which I'm gonna mention also towards the end of this video because it becomes important at that point. This… the Jia family is obviously a rich and prosperous family. You'll be able to tell because of the beautiful and detailed descriptions of furniture, of the clothes that they wear, of the rooms in which they live, and all of that. And in the course of the novel what's going to happen is that we're going to meet most of the people who live in this household, both the masters and the servants. The focus, of course, is going to be on Bao-yu and his love triangle, you know, his relationship with Bao-chai and with Dai-yu and also with some of the maids. Bao-yu, okay? What is he like? What kind of character is he? I would describe him as self-indulgent, maybe a little bit concupiscent, expressive, I would say… he's a little bit spoiled also, he has a tendency towards melancholy, but overall he is a good guy. One of the strengths of this novel is that it really gives us a good hero that is at the same time believable. He's not perfect by any means, but he's good, and the Jia family, actually, are actually very good people, okay? One of the things that they take pride in is that they treat their servants well. So we have good characters right here, a good setting. Also, something that you're going to find in volume 1 that is not present in other volumes is that we have a very strong fantastic element. For example, I want to highlight two chapters right here that include this fantastic element. The first one is chapter 5, and in this one Bao-yu meets the fairy named Disenchantment and he travels to the Land of Illusion with her, where he is initiated into the pleasures of the flesh. So that's one example, and another chapter that stood out to me is chapter 12, in which another character gets in trouble when he looks at the wrong side of a mirror. So, he is told do not look at the side in which you are reflected, just look at the back side, and of course, you know, as in any folk tale, when somebody is told, “Do not do this,” of course they do it, right? And he gets into trouble because of that. This is one of the two episodes that Borges mentions in his Libro de sueños, the mirror episode of chapter 12 of the first part of the novel. Other than that, there are basically two major events that we find in this volume 1: we have the funerals for one of the members of the family and also a visit from the Imperial Concubine, who is a member of the Jia family. So, this family is prosperous because they are connected to the government, okay? Bao-yu's father, he works for the government, okay? He was minister of education at one point. But also you have this Imperial Concubine, who belongs to the family, so you have also that very important connection to power, if you will. We have volume 2, okay? The title of which is The Crab-Flower Club. It's a little bit longer, the story, in this one than the first one. And I see at least three main themes in volume 2, which are routine or the daily life of the household, poetry, and the roles of women, okay? Those are the three things that I find primarily expanded in this volume. This one is much more realistic than volume one, so you're not gonna find elements of fantasy here. This deals primarily with the daily life of the Jia family. We hear about visits, about ceremonies, about meals and things like that, in great detail, and the volume ends with the celebrations of the New Year's Eve Festival. The title, okay? The Crab-Flower Club. What's up with that? Here's the thing: in this volume it is that the central characters, right? The girls primarily, and Bao-yu, who is always hanging out with the girls because he does not like men, okay? So he spends lots of times… lots of time with… with the girls. They decide to start a poetry club, so that is why… they call it The Crab-Flower Club, so that's the title of this. And the focus, I would say, of this second part is on women, okay? Those who have power, or who exercise power in the household, those who manage the household, and also those who are the servants, so we have at least those three layers right there. We get more of a sense also of Bao-yu’s love for Dai-yu and how they are always or almost always quarreling, okay? It's a very troubled connection that they have, a very troubled relationship, so that's something that, you know, is striking about how they… the dynamics between the two of them work. And another thing that is emphasized in this second volume is also the importance of the character of Xi-feng. I did not mention her before, but in the first volume Xi-feng is made the manager or the manageress of the Jia household, so she exercises quite a bit of power right there, and we get a sense of that in this volume 2. I would say that there are two superimposed plots in The Story of the Stone. On the one hand, this is definitely the story of the masters of the Jia household, but it is also the story of the servants, and to me the most important part, you know, the most important aspects of The Story of the Stone take place when those two layers or those two planes overlap. That… that's where you find The Story of the Stone at its most interesting. Even though there are no fantasy elements in the second part, that doesn't mean that it's not interesting, because you have two suicides that happen, and I wanted to mention also, as I did for the first part, a couple of chapters for you to look out for. The first one would be chapter 36. In this one a maid named Aroma is… receives a promotion, okay? She is promoted. Bao-yu really likes Aroma, okay? And in this chapter what we get… the reason why I like it, or at least the main reason… is that we get a lot of details into the lives of these people. For example, we find out things like what was the salary of a maid? How much were they paid, right? We also see how the adults decide what the relationship is going to be between these kids, right? Or these youngsters. For example, what's the relationship going to be between Bao-yu and Aroma? Is she going to be a wife? Is she going to be a concubine? The adults decide all that, and the kids just live their lives, they don't even realize what's going on behind the scenes. The other important chapter that I wanted to highlight is chapter 46. This one I like because it may be read as a short story, and what happens in this short story is that Sir She, an old man, wants the maid Faithful as a concubine for himself. And here's the problem: she refuses. In most cases, he would get his way, right? But she refuses, and what I like about this is… it's not that I like the story, right? But it really gives us some insight into the plight of women, especially of servant girls. Because you're going to see that there are a lot of women in this story, The Story of the Stone, who exercise a lot of power. I mentioned Xi-feng before, there's also Grandmother Jia, who seems to be just the head of the household, if you ask me. But there are also women who have quite a difficult time here, especially the maids, and in this chapter you get to see that. Let's move on to the third volume, which is titled The Warning Voice, okay? And this one, what it does is that it gives more attention to minor characters, characters that seem secondary to us. I call, personally, this volume the volume of changes, okay? The part of changes, or the book of changes, to steal that title from the I Ching, if you let me do that. And the first important thing that happens is that in this volume Xi-feng begins to experience some difficulties, and because of that there are two other characters, Li Wan and Tan-chun, who take over some of her duties. And this, as you can imagine, has some effects, okay? Xi-feng was rather despotic, and the problem is that these two characters who are running the household now, they are not. So there's much more laxity to what happens in the household and that results in a lot of problems. We hear about some debts, we hear about some marriages also. And there's a company of actresses who are living in the Jia household, in the Rong-guo house, and they become very, very important in this volume 3. So that is something to look out for also. There are more celebrations, okay? We hear about Bao-yu's birthday, we hear about Grandmother Jia’s 80th birthday, which is quite a celebration, we have funerals, we have festivals, and we get a lot of details about these events, okay? Now, very interestingly, at the midpoint of this volume, which would also be the midpoint of The Story of the Stone as a whole, we get the story of the marriages of two girls: Er-jie and San-jie. And here's what happens: Jia Lian, who is Xi-feng’s husband, wants to marry this girl, Er-jie. Of course, he does not tell his wife, and the problem is that this happens during a period of national and personal mourning, so that is an absolute no-no, okay? You don't get married, especially if you already have a wife, during a time of national and personal mourning. So, if you look at Chapters 64 to 69, which are about the marriages of these two girls, they could be read as a short novel. I'm not going to say a novella, because it doesn't really have the structure of a novella, but it could really be read as a short novel. During these episodes what happens, though, is that Bao-yu kind of disappears into the background, okay? So, we lose a little bit of that thread right there, but after that we take it up once again. And for that reason, and also because in this volume there are a few discrepancies in the stories that I think most readers are not even going to notice, but David Hawkes believes that especially… especially the story of the marriage of San-jie was kind of grafted onto the novel later on, okay? So, keep that in mind. There are some differences here, some discrepancies in the story. What about the poetry club, okay? What happened to that? Well, they try to revive it, okay? They change its name and everything, but for the most part it is in this chapter which, you know, I see as a book of changes, that the poetry club begins to disperse, okay? Through marriages, through deaths and things like that. But that's what happens. So, in part three it is that you begin to see the beginning of a great melancholy tone in The Story of the Stone, but at the same time there's also some humor. For example, there's a very funny and also pathetic episode involving a purse that is found just lying there on the floor, which has an erotic design on it, and people are like, “Where did this come from?” You know? They start a whole investigation into who was the owner of that purse that had that… that design right there. Chapters to look out for. Chapter 56, okay? That's the one that I liked. Borges included this one also in his Libro de sueños, or Book of Dreams, and in this one Bao-yu learns that he may have a doppelganger, so that's one of the many reasons why I like it, because I am obsessed with this concept of the doppelganger. And this idea that he may have a doppelgänger leads to a dream in which he sees himself dreaming, so it's like a mise en abîme kind of thing, in which you have a dream within a dream. That's one of the reasons why Borges mentioned it also. So, we arrive at volume 4, which is titled The Debt of Tears. This is the first volume, as you can see, that is credited to Gao E, okay, also, and it is translated by John Minford. John Minford, by the way, was David Hawkes' son-in-law, so you can imagine that there was communication between the two translators, okay? When they put together this translation of The Story of the Stone. So it's quite seamless, if you ask me, you know. I thought it was great really. If nobody had told me this was translated by two people, I would not have realized. And at the beginning of this part what we have is that the family is concerned for Bao-yu's future. On the one hand you have his father, who wants him to get serious about his education. On the other hand you have his mother and his grandmother, who want him to get married. So, marriage and education, you have those two important elements right there. And there are also many characters in this part who are ill, so to me, if you look at that theme of sickness, right? I see a clear notion of the decline of this family that intensifies in this volume number 4. There are many references also to episodes that happened in previous chapters, and that to me does two things, okay? On the one hand it gives unity to the story, so you can see that maybe the editor was trying to connect things to previous episodes, to kind of wrap things up. But at the same time you get also a sense of nostalgia, because of those references to previous episodes, and I think also nostalgia maybe is a way to indicate some kind of a decline, because you know how it is, you know, when we're happy and enjoying the present we tend not to think about the past. It's when things begin to crumble that we start thinking, with warmth, right? About the past. So you see that here in this volume number 4. We read about more celebrations, okay? There are more birthdays, more promotions, but there are also some unfortunate events. There are, of course, more deaths, okay? But also one of the characters is accused of murder, and you also begin to see some financial difficulties that the family is experiencing. Very importantly, at one point, you're not going to believe this, but Bao-yu loses the stone. Can you believe that? He's not very fond of the stone, by the way, but at one point he loses it, and then the volume ends with his marriage. A little bit of trivia here, a couple of things. The first one is that we hear again about Bao-yu’s supposed doppelganger, so that is announcing kind of a meeting between the two of them. And the other piece of trivia that I wanted to share with you, is that in chapter 92 Mu-lan is mentioned. Yes, the same Mu-lan of the Disney films. So, you know, if you're interested in that, look out for Mu-lan in chapter 92. She's just mentioned by name, okay? Another important chapter is 89, okay? And this one, to me, is important because it marks a turning point. At this point, in chapter 89, it is that the characters, the protagonists, all of a sudden, just like that, come to the realization that they are not children anymore. So that's why I consider it to be very important. And that brings us, my friend, to the last volume of The Story of the Stone, number five, also credited to Gao E other than to Cao Xueqin, and this one is titled The Dreamer Wakes, okay? In this one, the financial difficulties that the family is experiencing intensify, okay? And many characters leave the household. So, one thing that happens in Bao-yu’s life is that he begins to feel abandoned, I would say. He feels like everybody around him is leaving him, right? We also see supernatural elements, so there is a connection to the first part of the novel, right? To the first volume, also, once again, as if the editor had wanted to tie it back to that part. So, supernatural elements come back, and a great example of that, I was thinking, would be an… a scene in which we see the exorcism of the garden, okay? The garden, after many years, just falls into disuse, you know. It has been neglected, and the characters think that this garden is haunted, so they call some people to do an exorcism, and you see some supernatural elements because of that. And the last straw right for the Jia family comes when the secret police raid not the Rong-guo house but the Ning-guo house, who is run, as I told you before, by members of the same family, and they arrest some of the members of the Jia family. So you can see here, you know, that really… this is decline, okay? I mean, in the words of William Butler Yeats, “Things fall apart,” and you begin to see that in this final volume, how things are basically collapsing around this family. There are more debts, okay? More suicides, a robbery, a kidnapping, and it is the kidnapping of a nun, of all people, so, very interesting and very, you know, catastrophic things that that are beginning to take place here. And because of this, and many other reasons personal, you know, and external also, Bao-yu really falls into a depression. I would say, if you asked me, “Okay, Jorge, what is it about chapter or part five of this novel? What is the salient feature here?” I would say it is how weird Bao-yu is in this last volume. At one point he becomes like almost catatonic, I would say, but of course, you know, if you keep reading that is also developed. A couple of chapters to look out for, okay? Chapter 103 was one that caught my attention, and I think this one is noteworthy because it reads like a crime story. So, if you want to get a sense of that mystery, right, genre inside The Story of the Stone, because there are many genres within this large novel, then chapter 103 will give you that. And also, the other one that I liked is chapter 115, because of course in this one Bao-yu finally meets his doppelganger, and that's all that I'm going to say. There's some tension also towards the end, like very, very close to the end, because at one point Bao-yu disappears, so the entire family is just looking for him and just, you know, very, very worried about what may have happened. Then there's a final revelation towards the end of the last chapter and a surprise appearance… appearance, and then at that point it is that the story ends. So, before we look at some conclusions, I wanted to share with you some data, okay? Because in a previous video I said that I did not like numbers, and that is not entirely true. In some cases I do like numbers. Now, in this case, with the case of The Story of the Stone, this was such a long journey that I wanted to keep a reading log, okay? So, basically I timed myself, meticulously as I read The Story of the Stone. So, I began to read this novel on June 27th and I finished it in July 24. So, we are looking at exactly 28 days. I read The Story of the Stone through a period of 28 days. And it's… of course, you know, as you know, you're not reading the entire time, those 28 days, so actually, the time that I was reading the novel, it took me exactly 67 hours and 40 minutes to read this novel. So, that is basically 2.8 days or a little bit less than three days, and the average… I calculated that also… is that I basically read 2 hours and 25 minutes per day. So that's not a very long time, actually. And the only reason why I wanted to share this with you and also with my future self if I ever look at this video again, is just as trivia, okay? Please keep in mind that, as I have said before in many of my videos, I am a very slow reader, and proud of it. I actually was quite surprised (and quite proud of myself, I’ll say that) that I was able to finish this in less than a month. I was not expecting that at all. That was not my experience with the 1001 Nights, as you know, because I basically dedicated the entire last summer to that book. But this is different, right? Because here you don't have a lot of stories the way that you do with the 1001 Nights, but you have one thread, you know, to follow. So, that's one of the reasons, I think, why I was able to read it the way that I did. So, I just wanted to share those numbers with you. Bottom line, okay? And I'm out of breath here. Do I even need to say that this was a life-altering, unforgettable reading experience? I think that's kind of self-evident, and as I read it, you know, I was thinking of describing The Story of the Stone as a tapestry. It definitely is that, okay? You can look at it that way. Those tapestries that you see in which there are so many things happening all at once, right? But this is more than a tapestry, okay? This is just a freaking universe, okay? Not in the sense of the space that it covers, because for the most part, 95 or even 98% of the time, we are in the Jia household, so one of the good things about that is that you feel as if you had actually been in a Chinese household of the time that the novel describes. It's really amazing. So, in that sense, it has a lot of unity, it has unity of space, but there are so many lives that converge in that space, and all of them are fascinating, and the novel really does a great job of transmitting that to us as readers. What I did was, you know, at that point… I don't remember what day it was… June 27th, as I said before. I said, “Okay, I'm gonna pick up volume one. You know, just take it easy. Little by little, you know. It doesn't matter if it takes you a long time. Just do not go crazy with this novel here.” But as soon as I started reading I was just not able to stop, okay? This was just kind of like obsessive reading. I just kept going and going and going. I did not feel the desire to stop and read something else. Last summer, when I read the 1001 Nights, I stopped at many points to read other books too. With this one, I took one break, okay? I took just one break, and it was… it wasn't because I wanted to, it was because I needed to. I just read, in the middle of this, I read a very short book. It's titled War and Peace. I don't know if you… No, just kidding. It was just a novella that I needed to read for a book club, okay? I enjoyed it too. I'm not gonna say which one, but I enjoyed it too, but what I'm saying is, I only took a break of maybe half a day to read something else because I kind of had to, you know. Other than that, I read The Story of the Stone continuously, because I was so engrossed by the reading experience. Please read it, okay? That's all that I'm going to say. Please read it, and when you do please come back and let me know what you think about it, and then please also let's get coffee someday, okay? And talk about this. It doesn't matter if you live on… on the other side of the world, or anything like that. We'll just figure something out, okay? So, please let me know. Do you have any questions, comments, recommendations, recipes? I usually say, “Those were my two cents on…” the book that I have talked about, but in this case, please let me do this, I'm gonna say, “Those who were my two dollars on The Story of the Stone,” because this is kind of like a longer novel, so I think I need to say it like that. So, those were my two dollars on The Story of the Stone, by Cao Xueqin, a book that I hope you will give a chance and that I hope you will experience, and as I said before, please let me know what you think about it. Thank you so much for stopping by, and have a wonderful day.