Has anyone attempted reading any Chinese literature?

Define literature;-) I am not adwanced enough to read advanced books but i love to read e.g: 长袜子皮皮 (Pippi longstocking) and other children book for my doughters. I find childrens book to be very fun to read and it really improve my reading skills. I try to have my daily session reading Chinese news but that is still very troublesome with to many unknow words for me so it takes a long time. A tool that helped a great deal with that is http://www.popupchinese.com/tools/newsinchinese worth a try. New words I import to skritter with the booklet .

My friend, a rather literary Chinese guy, recommended some modern dramatists (haven't graduated up to them yet, don't recall any names), as well as the poet 海子, who I've read a bit of, and he's not bad. At the height of my 努力, I was reading a poem a day, looking up all the words I didn't know, and adding them to my Skritter studies.

Eventually I'd like to read 三国演义，西游记，红楼梦，and 水浒传，but those are at least a couple years off for me.

If you want something modern that is written in the language style that people actually speak and write in these days, I'd recommend books by 孙睿. Fairly entertainingly written, and he uses mostly a simple 口语 style of writing (albeit with a medium amount of Beijing slang) so most intermediate-advanced students should be able to get a lot out of them.

I've been reading a bit of 鲁迅 - I've got a parallel Eng/Ch version, with the texts on facing pages, and this is quite good. I also read a really good intermediate learners version of 西游记, and the vocab has been surprisingly useful. I'd love to read the original, however; but this is - for me - probably more than a couple of years off.

西遊記 really is fun, I read the novel in the English translation, then read a a multi-part picture book version that had pinyin and VCD's (still pictures with and audio).

Right now I'm reading 余華's 兄弟 (Yu Hua: Brothers) and 棉棉's 糖 (Mian Mian: Candy) in both English and Chinese. Their Chinese seems quite contemporary. Neither has bowled me over, but they're both entertaining and enlightening. I would like to start reading Taiwanese authors though, seeing as that's where I live. This thread has just inspired me to give 朱天文's 荒人手記 (Chu Tien-wen: Notes of a Desolate Man) a whirl.

The best reading experience I've found to take anything I can find that I can export to a plain text Unicode file, and read it with Pleco on my iPod. This is how I read Taiwanese Panorama, a bilingual magazine that has many of it's articles free on the web.

I am half way through 他乡发现 by 冯骥才. I was reading it in class with my teacher when I was in Beijing. After leaving Beijing, I was just reading it. I wasn't worried about getting every word. I just wanted to appreciate his point of view on things. I was doing fine up until one essay. That one had so much 书面语 that I was left dumbstruck. I plan on going back and finishing it, but I have yet to decide on when. He is a modern author. I think he is in his 50s or 60s now. The book was written in the 80s. He bounces back and forth between pretty straight forward writing and some of the most saccharin sweet poetic prose imaginable. Diabetics might need to have an extra insulin shot handy for the occasional essay.

Also, after I am done with that one and my current HSK project, I plan on going back and reading my copy of 孙子兵法 (The Art of War）。 I bought a copy of that in modern Chinese while in Beijing.

I’m reading some 卫斯里小说 online. http://www.dilee.cn/wsl/ Kind of sci-fi without the “sci”. Not easy, but at least easier than those 西游记 or 水浒传.

Li Bai's poetry is very nice and ascetic to read.