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Four whole stars. Don't let the fact that it took me over a month and a half to read 300 pages say otherwise. That was due to life, and pausing to read something else in spooktober cause Monkey don't fit that bill.

This was great, though not my usual fare. I was never chomping at the bit to read it, and kind of had to make myself get back to it sometimes, but every time I started again, I was loving every minute of it. That doesn't make a lot of sense and I can't explain it, but there it is. It reads really quickly since it's pretty much all action, and I was never bored with it. That doesn't leave a lot of room for literary stuff that's supposed to be in all the modern novels like subtle character development, but sometimes it's nice to leave those things behind.

This version of Monkey is an abridgement. I usually don't like those, but I was perfectly fine with it here. The original, written in the 16th century, is 100 chapters long. This one was only 30. It includes Monkey's origin tale (chapters one through seven), Tripitaka's origin (chapters eight through 12), Tripitaka gaining his disciples (chapters 13-15, 18-19, & 22), only three of the many adventures they had (chapters 37-39, 44-46, and 47-49), and the journey home (chapters 98-100). Trust me; that's plenty. Having to read 30 additional adventures in 70 chapters would've killed me no matter how much I enjoyed the ones I read, and I understand the missing sections get pretty repetitive. This abridgement is like baby bear's porridge: just right.

Hu Shih... I'm sorry, I just have to laugh at that name because I'm immature, not to mention insensitive (according to some people). At least it's not as bad as Chu Mi and Hai Fat in The Man with the Golden Gun, but I laugh at those too. Anyway, Who She? wrote the introduction to this translation and lamented that five particular adventures weren't included, and I probably would've been fine with five more. But thirty? Not no way, not no how. Mr. Shih agreed with the other omissions, though, so that's something.

The characters were a scream. I especially love how Tripitaka burst into tears almost every time they hit a snag, and Monkey had to tell him not to worry, it would be alright. Then he would perform some ridiculous magic, and everything would indeed be alright. If you're going to enjoy this, you'll definitely need to throw all logic and knowledge of physics out the window, but that's what makes it great. I also enjoyed the tricks Monkey played on his fellow disciples. And Monkey's kung-fu was awesome as well. In fact, I'll just go on record as saying that Monkey was the bee's knees. I'm tempted to put him on my favorite protagonists shelf, but that's pretty prestigious. I'll have to think on it, but he's reeeeeaaaally close.

The Monkey character is apparently the basis for a ton of eastern fiction, books, TV shows, movies, games, etc. I'm not well versed in that, but even I can recognize similarities in some things I've seen. I really like , and for a long time I thought that was a modernized translation of this book, but the only real link is a few characters, and they took tremendous liberties with most of those. And I should've known better. There's no way a round eye would appear in a 16th century Chinese novel, though there's certainly one in the movie.

I also saw a lot of influences on Dragonball Z which was one of my favorite shows in college (at least through the Cell saga. Even I lost interest when they got to the 78 million episodes that cover Buu). This brings us to a great irony, and I now realize the joke is on me once again. I was supposed to read this book in college for some Eastern Lit class. I wasn't a very good student (explained further in my Woman in the Dunes review), and pretty much didn't read it, though I think I at least started it. But what was I supposed to do? That was just classroom bullshit. In the real world, Dragonball Z was well into the Frieza saga, and I made sure I was back in my room to see what would happen next when it came on. Usually it was a lot of staring and grunting and taunting when they weren't doing stuff like this:



If the silly professor had just told us that there was a link between DBZ and Monkey, I totally would've read it on the spot, and might have even passed the test! Bastard.

The fact that this was taught in one of my college courses convinces me that I must have missed something. I read the story and really enjoyed it. It was fun. It was funny. There was action and fights galore on land, sea, and air. But there must be more to it than that because they don't make you read books in college just for the fun of it. There's always a bunch of literary stuff underneath it all, and I'm afraid I didn't pick up on any of it. Maybe we were supposed to learn about Buddhism and Taoism? I looked for my old notebook for this class last night, but I couldn't find it. I purged a lot of my school stuff several years ago, and I didn't see any from that particular semester, so I suspect it's long gone. I did find some for several other classes, and... embarrassing. There are so many doodles and extracurricular musings in the margins that I'm not sure I paid attention to anything the teachers ever said. There are also notes to the people sitting next to me, and death wishes for some of the other students, specifically the ones who wanted to ask stupid questions unrelated to the lesson at the end of the class on days that the professor was more than willing to let us go 10 minutes early.

So, if you want a quick, light, nonsensical, fun read, and you're the type of person who likes crap kung-fu movies such as (aka The Iron Fingers of Death, aka The Death Mask of the Ninja, aka Shaolin Death Mask), then you would probably like this book. It's probably a good book for other people too, but like I said above, what you're supposed to like about those other parts is beyond me, so I can't advise you.