The fourth book: #4 Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Not quite done yet, but a day or two away. I did want to make a brief observation about symbols. You probably know as well as I do about Chinese characters being pictographs, representing words, and how they are often made of combinations of symbols (such as 'forest' being three trees). This comes through in the stories - several times, written words or sentences are said to make little sense, until one of the smarter characters (including relative villain Cao Cao) points out that the actual meaning is that of the symbols making up the word. For example, 'horn' contains the symbol for knife, which is later interpreted to mean more. Interesting to see this used in context.