Question Jin Yong Suggested Reading Order?

I'm interested in reading through Jin Yong's works, I was planning on starting with the Condor trilogy, but I'm curious what is the best reading order for his other works. Are other books parts of series also, or are some more standalone? Are there certain ones that shouldn't be read without having read other works first? Is there a benefit to going through his works chronologically in the order they're written and seeing how his style evolved?

If anyone has suggestions on the best way to go about it I'd appreciate it.

 

Demigod Semi Devil
then Condor Trilogy
then Smiling Proud Wanderer
then Duke of Mount Deer.

except Condor Trilogy other are mostly stand alone, my recommendation is based on timeline, and i normally prefer these novel of Jin Yong

 

Generally speaking there's little connection between his books other than the trilogy. The rule of thumb is that Jin Yong's longer books are better and more memorable than his shorter ones so you can just read them first in release order and then go back and read the shorter books. In case you're unsure which is which, the longer books are 40-50 chapters and the shorter ones are 20 or less. Personally I read them in a more or less completely random order and that worked fine as well.

Now as to the connections, there are a few characters from The Book and the Sword who show up in "the Outer Stories of the Flying Fox" (untranslated), and a couple of characters from Sword Stained with Royal Blood in The Deer and the Cauldron. You can read those in order if you want but I don't think it's necessary. Other than that, you'll see occasional mention of characters (figures really) and martial arts from one book spoken of in another, but the time gaps between the stories is so large that they're more retellings of legend more than anything else.

Oh, and "the Outer Stories of the Flying Fox" is the prequel to "the Flying Fox of Snowy Mountain", but you're supposed to read them the other way around as that's how they were written. You could read them in chronological order but it's a little odd if you read them that way.

As to your point about writing style, I'd say that Jin Yong improved by leaps and bounds from the earlier books to the later ones. But the thing is that he started getting so experimental that the effect ends up being a bit muted. Also, so much of the quality of his writing comes from the words he used that I don't know how much of it can come through in a translation.

 

Thanks for all the advice

I'll be using translation along with audiobooks in the original, so hopefully I'll get some idea of his style, though I'm sure I'll still miss out on some stuff until my language abilities are higher.

 

For the condor trilogy I'd suggest to watch the tv show instead.

 

In that case, good reading!

I would suggest you not start with Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils and The Deer and the Cauldron. These are both experimental books that would work better after you've read a few other Jin Yong novels. In the former, he played with multiple protagonists and a shifting story structure. The latter is a story that plays against the narrative conventions of wuxia, conventions that were prominently established by Jin Yong himself. The story would lose impact if you're not already familiar with what these conventions are.

As an aside, I'd like to point out just how bad the translation of Jin Yong's titles tend to be. I don't entirely blame the translators as many of those titles were the ones used by various TV shows and they're not particularly easy to translate in the first place.

What, hell no. Not only are there tons of TV adaptations of varying quality to choose from, but even the good ones tend not to be particularly accurate to the books. And heaven help you if you accidentally watch one of Yu Zheng's awful productions. Some of the better adaptations can be considered a good intro to Jin Yong's writings, but they should never be thought of as a substitute.