I’m the first to admit I’m a slow reader. Painfully slow, sometimes. Slow enough that I’ve lost count of how many What I Read This Month posts have been effectively empty. ‘Working on the same thing I was last month’, is how those generally go.
And here we are again.
Lately I’ve been reading The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. And it’s good. It’s definitely well written.
But.
Tossing in all the variables like my slow reading (sometimes fractions of a page a day, or even none at all, depending on what else I’ve got happening), when I read (generally right before bed, when I’m my most tired and when falling asleep at the drop of a hat isn’t a big ask), and I have to admit, the book’s lengthy opening subject matter (following a few characters in the decade-long Chinese Cultural Revolution, complete with footnotes to explain key items and figures to Western readers who likely aren’t familiar with them) have all made getting through it so far… let’s say “slow even for me”.
I’ve gotten to parts that are much more engaging, but now those aspects are being interspersed with sometimes long stretches of the story delving into a character’s bizarre, deep video game play that are clearly tied to the oddness that’s happening in the real world, but I’m not yet sure how or why. It’s frankly on the cusp of losing my interest sometimes, but then draws me in again. Which I suspect is another part of the lengthiness in getting through it: It doesn’t have me totally sucked in.
It turns out I have some unexpected time in the immediate future to read it more when the sun is up, though — COUGHnoshiftsatworkCOUGH — so hopefully I’ll get through it faster from here on out and it’ll leave me wanting more (i.e. the next two parts of the trilogy, all of which are highly recommended far and wide).
Speaking of which, it’s well after midnight. Time to get some (ok, any) reading in while I can.