Happy Year of the Sheep! Couple of days ago, I stumbled across the Book "The Last Yin Yang Master", aka "The Last Onmyoji" （最后一个阴阳师), a supernatural ghost story available for free online. It's incredibly rare to find full-length books that aren't impossibly difficult to get through, but this one is phenomenal for learners. I'm gonna put part of the first chapter here, so you can dive on in. The rest can be grabbed on <a href="http://www.zhuaji.org/read/146/" target="_blank">Zhuaji.com</a>.

I've recently sort of discovered that ghost stories and detective novels are where it's at for practicing reading. The cliches in a Chinese murder mystery are exactly the same as they are anywhere: hard-boiled cop, confused rookie, seductive woman, shady business, and definitely a chase scene. It's easier to follow a story when you have a semi-expectation of what's supposed to happen. They get hard when people start talking about blood spatter and ballistics, but you can kind of get the gist. Ghost stories are the same way - a scene of normalcy is set, followed by some red-flag strangeness that everyone ignores, followed by some myths and legends, or maybe a mysterious old man, or maybe a body goes missing, and then things freaky. Again, things get hard when people start talking about the mystic books of old, or funeral customs, so you should probably be reading this with the help of Pleco (which I do), but The Last Onmyoji is accessible enough that those parts shouldn't stop you.

This really is worth a go for readers at almost all levels. The read is mid- to late-intermediate, but using Pleco, late-stage beginners and early-intermediates will be able to understand big chunks of it, enough to motivate you to puzzle through the parts you don't get. Advanced readers may just appreciate learning a bit of spooky vocab.