Bring Your Own Coffin

Chapters 74-75

Lord Guan continues to seem more imperious and arrogant. He is almost a new character, not the hero of the march we saw in Chapters 27-28. We are almost rooting against him in Chapter 74 when Pang De arrives to fight him. But it’s not because we don’t like Lord Guan (he’s not that far gone); instead, we’re made to like Pang De.

Pang De’s allies doubt his commitment to the battle. To prove them wrong, he brings his own coffin to the battle, saying he is determined to fight Lord Guan to the death. But he doesn’t get to die in battle. Lord Guan destroys most of Pang De’s army with a flood. When Pang De’s advisors want to surrender, Pang De kills them himself and charges Lord Guan’s men. He fights hard, but eventually falls in the water, gets captured, and is executed. It’s a glorious chapter for him, a nice one-off in the book.

In the next chapter, the physician Hua Tuo returns to heal Lord Guan’s wound from a poison arrow. They both get to look superhuman: Hua Tuo for his abilities, and Lord Guan for suffering through the treatment without complaint. But things start to go downhill for Lord Guan; he is tricked into giving up much of Jingzhou by Lu Xun, a new commander from the south.

Poetry Writing Constraints

Chapters 78-80 Tons of plot in these chapters. Most importantly, we get the deaths of a major character (Cao Cao) and minor characters (Xiahou Dun, Hua Tuo, Liu Feng). Hua Tuo’s death is one of my favorites, given my love of lost books. His “Book of the Black

The Devil Goes Down to Arabia

Nights 681-695 After the last couple weeks, I was worried that I was tiring of the Nights. But there was some good stuff here! My enthusiasm for the Nights has been restored. We can thank al-Asma’i, who the index says was a real-life expert on the

Head is a Hot Potato

Chapters 76-77 With the biggest death of the book so far, and likely one of the biggest in the book overall, we really get the sense of the end of a great one. Sun Quan beheads Lord Guan and quickly regrets it. Sun is advised that Liu Bei will

Seriousness replaced absurdity

Nights 649-680 It’s hard for me to say why I found this story so much more tiresome than what came before it. Maybe I’m getting tired of the Nights. Maybe work is particularly stressful right now. If I were to look for an objective reason, I’d

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Poetry Writing Constraints

The Devil Goes Down to Arabia

Head is a Hot Potato

Seriousness replaced absurdity