The advent of the year of the Monkey gave me as good an occasion as any to try and read this, and I'm so glad I did. I'd been familiar with the characters from a picture-book series I'd encountered in second grade, but it was [a: Max Gladstone|3405346|Max Gladstone|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1440009008p2/3405346.jpg]'s blog post a couple of years back that put it back on my radar.

Even across just Part I here, I cannot overemphasize how cheerfully bonkers this story is. Take the toilet humor, which a) is utterly brazen, b) comes out of nowhere more often than not, narratively speaking, and c) actually made me LOL, which is hard when I'm reading silently to myself! Or the fights, which are written in heroic verse and nearly always end with a hasty retreat and a pratfall. What I'm saying is, the tone is amazing, like a cartoon, or [b: Ulysses|338798|Ulysses|James Joyce|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1428891345s/338798.jpg|2368224], except it's also a metaphor for the soul's maturation, because of course it is. The unabridged version, which is what I've dived in for, is a bit of a slog if you don't like nature poetry or obscure alchemical symbolism, but then again, who doesn't? (There is an abridgment by this translator, [b: The Monkey and the Monk|158792|The Monkey and the Monk An Abridgment of The Journey to the West|Wu Cheng'en|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347577989s/158792.jpg|153266].)