About a monkey

I've long had an interest in reading Journey to the West, the source material for Monkey and various movies of the story; but when I first went looking for it in a book store, I was surprised to learn it was a multi volume work (about 2,500 pages in all!) that I would surely fail to get into enough to finish. 

But, I have taken the easy way out, and started reading (on Scribd) an abridged version that comes in at a mere 479 pages:

I'm only 50 pages in, but so far, it's...interesting.

One thing I have noticed is how it's pretty limited in scene description of the fantastical, but perhaps it works because it leaves so much to the imagination?   For example, in a sequence which is reminding me a lot of Aquaman movie, our hero goes to get a suitable weapon from the Dragon King at the bottom of the Eastern Ocean, and we get passages like this:

[Sun Wukong is the name of the Monkey King, by the way.]   No description at all of what Aoguang himself looks like - or the "shrimp soldiers and crab generals".

I also wrote earlier this year about the peculiar Eastern belief about the great health benefits of men retaining semen.  Little did I realise that Monkey attained his immortality via this idea too:

 etc. Seems an odd point to make in a book that I thought was read out to children. 

Anyway, it's an easy read, and I am inclined to continue...