The Three-Body Problem was the fourth Chinese book I started for my World Books Project and the first I succeeded in finishing. A few years ago, I tried Mo Yan's The Republic of Wine and gave that up quite quickly. It may just have been I wasn't in the right mood at the time. Last year I started Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong, about an educated youth who is sent to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution and becomes fascinated with the wolf/human relationship there and the balance that is being lost. I read about 150 pages of it, but I found the blood and violence hard to tolerate, so I set it aside. Earlier this year, I started Han Shaogong's A Dictionary of Maqiao, another book about an educated youth living in a remote part of China during the Cultural Revolution. The "story" unfolds in the form of a dictionary, describing the specific meanings of various words and phrases in the village Maqiao. It's a really lovely book, but very slow. I read about 150 pages then set it aside in June as my travel schedule picked up and I needed a different kind of reading material, and I never went back.
Which brings us to The Three-Body Problem. I didn't really know anything about it before reading it except that it was science fiction and several people I know recommended it. So, I was quite surprised when I started it to find that it, too, began during the Cultural Revolution and one of the central characters is an educated youth sent to Inner Mongolia. Before going into it, I perhaps doubted that genre fiction -- and more specifically sci-fi -- for my world books project would adequately represent the country, but in fact Chinese history is central to the story in The Three-Body Problem. (This is not so true of a couple other instances of genre fiction I've read as representatives from Scandinavian countries; from reading Scandinavian crime fiction you'd think things were much grittier than they actually are there, I think.) I can hardly claim to be a sci-fi expert, but this book struck me as unusual in that it's a sci-fi novel set nearly entirely on contemporary earth, featuring rather regular humans.
I suspected I would finish The Three-Body Problem while upstate so I brought two other books with me for my time there and my return trip home. I had just received Jasmine Guillory's Royal Holiday in the mail and I imagined it would be just the book to read on the train to make the trip fly by. But the train ride is only 2 hours, so I decided I had better start it ahead of time so I could finish it on the train. I picked it up late Saturday afternoon and was 70 pages in when I set it down not long after to have dinner. Sunday morning, I woke up pretty early and had breakfast with my mom and then the couch and the fire and the dog were calling me (that's Royal Holiday in the photo above), so I read some more and about 3 hours later I finished it just in time for brunch. Somewhat ironically, because I love rom-com movies, I never thought romance was a genre I would want to read. I think I imagined the entire genre consisted of self-serious bodice-rippers. But of course there's diversity in the genre, and Guillory's books are modern and funny, and they tackle race in important and unexpected ways. One of the things I really love about her books is how all the central characters are really passionate about what they do -- often this passion itself is part of the conflict: her characters have important jobs that they love and can't give up for another person. The central character of Royal Holiday is a social worker in a hospital who helps families navigate difficult situations, and the fact that this is a background theme in a romance novel is, to me, so unexpected and refreshing. In any case, Royal Holiday wasn't my favorite, but Guillory's books are fun to read and just the perfect type of escapism for me sometimes.
