Continuing my series, as promised. In this post, I present the books I read in December 2023 & January 2024, in sequence.
I didn’t do much reading in October and November 2023. In December, I started reading again.
Paradise and other short stories is a bit different from other Khushwant Singh books. As in, they are not personal stories about his life, but short stories with the themes of sex and religious superstition. I really enjoyed it and half-way through also realised that I had already read it before, years ago.
I have been following Niall Harbison on social media for quite some time and donating to his dog rescue efforts. When I saw that he has released a book about dogs, I eagerly bought it. Interestingly, the book is not directly about dogs. Instead, Niall first goes through how toxic his life was and how dogs turned it around.
After this, I started Liu Cixin‘s The Three-Body Problem, a trilogy spanning millions of years. It is well written and entertaining, although, being a Chinese sci-fi, it overestimates the importance of China in the global order.
It was good enough for me to move on to the next book in the series, The Dark Forest, which was slightly better than the first part.
But the best book in the series was Death’s End. 2 things stand out :
- The description of how 3 dimensional beings perceive 3 dimensional objects in the fourth dimension. This part is so well done, I read it twice.
- The way Yun Tianming tells three stories to Cheng Xin to give her clues without alerting the Trisolarans is genius.