पीली गलियों के पार भाग – 3 :

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Quasit's Book Recommendations: "Bridge of Birds" (1984) by Barry Hughart

This is a very special book, for me: for one thing, it's the second-most-often stolen (i.e. borrowed and never returned) book in my library. I own several copies now, including a hardcover edition of all three books in the series. It won the 1985 World Fantasy Award, and well deserved it.

Set in "an ancient China that never was" it's the story of a very strong young peasant man, Number Ten Ox, who's tasked with finding someone to help cure a plague that's afflicted the children of his village.

In the big city he encounters Master Li, an incredibly ancient sage with "a slight flaw in his character" that usually expresses itself in crime and murder. The two of them make a wonderful team as they cross ancient China trying to find the answers to one mystery after another. It's a little reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, with magic, humor, mythology, and mystery; it's really quite different from any other book I've encountered.

You WILL laugh out loud while reading this book. The characters discuss their hopes for rebirth after death during a lull in a rather dangerous situation:

“Henpecked Ho,” I sniffled through my tears, “I will miss you, but I know that we will meet again. Master Li will be a three-toed sloth, and Miser Shen will be a tree, and you will be a flower, and I will be a cloud, and some day we will come together in a beautiful garden. Probably very soon,” I added.

"Bridge of Birds" was the first of three novels about Master Li and Number Ten Ox. The succeeding novels weren't as good, but still well worth reading. There have been several collections of all three books released as "The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox".

I have a bit of an interesting story about Bridge of Birds. In the early days of the web I found a website about the book. It featured a labyrinth you could navigate with the arrow keys. Throughout the labyrinth there were spots where you had to answer a question about the book. If you answered correctly, you got a chapter for a lost first draft of "Bridge of Birds" called "A Bridge of Birds"' it was VERY different from the published version. Among the differences were that Master Li was young rather than old, and Number Ten Ox was a minor character who was basically mentally handicapped.

I mapped that labyrinth, answered every question, collected all the chapters...and then assembled them in the right order and turned them into a PDF. Just for the fun of it, I hid a link to that PDF on my tabletop RPG website. By that point the site with the original labyrinth was long gone, of course. But the PDF is still there on my site...if you can find it.

"A Bridge of Birds" was also included in at least one special edition of "The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox", so I'm still being circumspect about the link. But it's out there.

Another interesting tidbit about "Bridge of Birds": I've read it many dozens of times, and recommended it to lots of people. But it has a curious flaw that I only discovered after I read the book •aloud• to my son. Let me know if you catch it!

As for "Bridge of Birds", as far as I know it's still in print. It's also available for borrowing via the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/bridgeofbirdsnov00hugh

Happy reading! 🤓📖

#Books #Bookstodon #fantasy #Mystery #Humor #QuasitBookRecs