There are certain books that, for lack of a better term, leave a mark on you after you finish them. They become demarcation points in your life, in that there was you before you read it and then the you after you read it is different. Maybe it’s the way you see yourself or the way the sky seems a bit bluer, but that book changed you in some way.
The Three-Body Problem did this for me, as you all probably know, I read a lot. And I read across multiple disciplines and genres because I like learning and I adore stuff that really makes me think. This year, I’m making a concerted effort to go through all the rec lists and my ever-growing To Be Read pile and that’s where the 2019 Reading Challenge came from. Someone in the Books-A-Million where my Darling Roommate works had bought it and recommended it to me and so when my library had a copy, I picked it up (All Hail the person/people who came up with Overdrive). Once I started it, I couldn’t put it down. It pulled me in and wouldn’t let go, almost mesmerizing me with the beauty and the starkness it conveys.
To know that this book is also a translation makes me breathless because having lived part of my life overseas from my native country, I know exactly how hard that is and how much can get lost in translation, if you’re not careful. It makes this book doubly wonderful for me.
The Three-Body Problem is set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution , a secret military base sends out signals in order to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization receives the signal and plots to invade Earth. What happens next is predictable to a point – different camps start forming. Those in favor of the invasion and those that are not. That’s where any and all predictability ends. The way that the story is told unfolds the tale of what has happened and how the different camps came to be in such a masterful way. This book, which is book one of three, which is something I didn’t realize until I’d finished it, is one that makes you really stop and think and it blew me away.
I’ll be sitting with this one for a while. If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend this book.