Mostly I write here simply to document my progress in Chinese. With each book I read, I look up fewer and fewer characters, but it still requires a lot of concentration.
骆驼祥子 (LouTuoXiangZi) is about a rickshaw puller in Beijing back in the 40s when the Japanese had invaded, and life was really hard. He tried to do everything right, and be a good person, but he repeatedly was met with hardship. I won’t give away the whole plot, but this book helps me to better understand the great hardships the Chinese faced in the past. This helps me better appreciate the great progress in the last few decades, as there is a human story to all of this.
Now I am starting my fifth novel. I am on about page 21 of 三体, or the Three Body Problem, named after a problem in Physics, which I hope I describe correctly here, where for three “bodies” (particles/planets), we can’t adequately describe their speed and position simultaneously. I have more to read, but this book one the Hugo Award, the first Chinese novel to do that, and I look forward to getting more into it. And also this book was written recently, so the language is more modern, and hoping I can “breeze” through this one.