[Originally recorded on July 2, 2022]

After a lovely first #ReadingTheStone (virtual) face-to-face meetup as part of the Duke APSI Book Club in late June, we returned to our Twitter Spaces live chats in early July, and also dove back into reading the text proper. Eileen revisited one of her favorite moments of multimodal reading at the end of Chapter 23 – Daiyu’s encounters with snippets of famous stories of love. The group also had a lively conversation about where Cao’s narration of youthful emotion might be placed on the spectrum from Proustian nostalgia to Goethe’s depiction of Young Werther’s in-the-moment fervid passions. Other threads begun on that week’s Twitter threads and continued in the live chat include: Bao Chai’s cattiness, how Hawkes’ decision to not begin the English translation with the authorial preface changes our perception of the text, magical hexes and our understanding of them, and Xue Pan fanfic potential?? Early summer was a time for readerly fancifulness, it seems!

Listen here or on any of your favorite podcast platforms:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1974761/12228365

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The Twitter threads in late June and early July reached new and merry heights of high/low/no brow co-existence (this is but a small sampling…)