2018 books: The Three-Body Problem, The Barn, Dominion, Custodians of the Cosmos

[thistle_chaser]

♪ Dashing through the books,
in a one open-source Kindle~ ♫

The Three-Body Problem by
Cixin Liu (Author), Ken Liu (Translator)
Traditional or self-published: Traditional
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)

Comments

[orangerful]

That Avi book is from 1994 so, yeah, pretty old by kid's book standards. I've never read an Avi book but they are a staple of the elementary readers that right on a higher level but are not ready for YA kind of books.

Interesting notes on 'three body problem' especially since it won the Hugo, but then again, I find that award winning books don't do it for me either!

[thistle_chaser]

I think I read a different Avi book, and hadn't finished it either. Not sure why I picked up this one... It's on the older side (was on page 40-something out of 55 pages on my Kindle main screen), and back then I was more willing to take anything that seemed even sort of interesting. I had actually thought I might run out of books I wanted to read, haha!

I suspect I pay more attention to writing than many readers would, since technical writing is my job and I'm always aware for things that sound off or wrong. I skimmed a few Amazon reviews, and none mentioned the writing, so... probably just me.

I'm almost, almost below 300 books, but I have six new ones to upload, so even with this last flurry of books in the last couple days, I'm sadly not reducing my pile at all.

[juliansinger]

The 2015 Hugos were embroiled in a political argument, which may have affected the voting patterns a bit. Even if it didn't, I don't tend to consider the Hugos as necessarily all that indicative of quality, since they're voted by anyone who wants to pay for a membership to WorldCon. (The Nebulas are voted on by a smaller group, the authors of the Science Fiction Writers of America.)

[orangerful]

oooooooh, was that the year with all the weird groups trying to manipulate the vote and so on? I think I remember Scalzi blogging about that madness. But, yeah, I find books that win awards tend to not be my cup of tea anyway LOL. I mean, I'm a librarian so everyone always wants the award winning books for their children and I have to suppress the eye-roll because they are never as much fun to read as the non-award winners.

My usual line is "pick out a book, give me a minute and I will Google until I find an award it won somehwhere"

[hamsterwoman]

Is Uncanny Valley a thing for writing styles?

I definitely think it is! -- in the sense that sometimes I come across writing that is not bad but just OFF, and it bothers me throughout the piece. I definitely think translation can create that effect, because even if you're fluent in both languages, translation is really damn hard!

I was underwhelmed by The Three-Body Problem. There is definitely sci-fi later on in the book -- the opening chapter just sets the stage for character motivation, as well as establishing setting -- and it's even the kind of sci-fi that can work for me sometimes, but it didn't really here. I need my SFF to have actual characters in it, and none of the people in this were anyone I felt anything for.

[thistle_chaser]

Amazon reviews agreed on the 'characters aren't people', no emotional connection to the characters part. Sometimes I feel bad about giving up on a book so quickly, but in this case I think it was the right decision.

Makes sense about the translation. It would be hard enough to translate nonfiction, but fiction is a whole different animal!

[juliansinger]

I haven't gotten around to the Three Body Problem, and this... is a really vivid description of some kinds of translation. So possibly I will take even longer to get around to it.

[thistle_chaser]

To be fair, the Amazon comments are very positive, so it could be some odd thing about my view of it. But for me, yeah, it was a hard pass... Too many other good books out there for me to force myself to continue with one that's not working for me.