The Three-Body Problem

I just don't get all the praise and awards for this book. I guess a lot was lost in translation...but the English version won awards also, so not sure. To me it felt like someone challenged the author to write a novel and use every single word from the glossary of a physics textbook. I kept waiting for the book to get to the good part, because surely with all the praise, it would get better. I would describe the book like this. Take a simple scene of a child throwing their red ball toy accross a room, and watching it bounce with wonder. This book would describe it like this: Child throws ball with speed of 3 meters per second. First bounce is 30cm high, 2nd bounce is 15cm high, 3rd bounce hits carpet, and rolls to a stop due to friction. End scene.

tldr: Save your money. The core idea of an alien race using humans to conquer humanity is not new, but can still be entertaining. Unfortunately, this book is written like budget quality fan fiction. If it had been posted as a serialized story on Reddit I'd be impressed, but a novel that has been hyped this much and turned into a series? I don't get the enthusiasm. This isn't a problem of translation; it's structural. The characters are flat, unchanging cliches, the story itself is clunky at best, the settings make no sense (everyone import happens to be in the same place and already largely know one another), the characters' actions are overblown and don't make sense, and worst of all it's just boring. There is no reason to care about the people in the book. "Hey, here's a bad guy who is bad for ideological reasons but otherwise largely unmentioned. Oh no, an unnamed pixie walked up to him and snapped his neck like an 80s action hero.". It's grade-C at best.

could not get into it- tried the 1st chapter 3 times with months in-between but found it too grotesque to want to go beyond that. there is a photo I recall from when the khmer Rouge took over Cambodia of student slamming a wooden chair on a burning hanging corpse....senseless violence. I dont need or want to immerse myself in that world.