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What’s the most you’ve ever spent on a book?
(thelemmy.club)
Excluding textbooks for classes, I bought this for ~$300 (several several years ago as a special treat)
Most of my collection is thrifted/bought from garage sales (for a quarter to a dollar usually) but I do have a handful of nicer ones.
It's amazing how rich and ancient China's literary history is. I should make more of an effort to get into Chinese writing, all I've read is Shi Naian's Water Margin which was great fun. Maybe Confucius' Analects would be a good place to start with the really old stuff.
The Analects is pretty approachable, although there can be variation in translation. I’ve been reading portions of it through a Classical Chinese primer and you have to make quite a few decisions when you translate it into English. One of the weird things is that nouns can act as verbs, so something like “father father, son son” means “a father acting as a father, a son acting as a son.”
The big thing is to be very wary of any translations of Daoist thought or the I-Ching. I would only trust academic translations. Daoism tends to attract cranks who understand it as a hippie thing, when it is more complicated than that.