caitri | A Book a Day: To the Sky Kingdom

Every day I'm posting an image of a book I like. This is a rather clunky English translation of a Chinese fantasy novel--which itself is the first of a trilogy where the original novels have all been published, but there's currently no plans (as far as I can tell) to publish the following volumes in English. (There's a fan translation of one of them, but it's...not great.)

Despite the clunkiness, it's a page-turner; it was adapted into a fantastic 56 episode drama titled, variously Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms and as Eternal Love, and also as a 2017 film with the English title Once Upon a Time. So it's basically a genre blockbuster and it's interesting and frustrating to me that it's kind of left-hanging, and in general that the primary way for popular novels to be consumed in this transnational context is through fan translations--which can get abandoned at any moment if the person doing the free labor gets bored or just doesn't have energy to continue.