this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Lemmy World Rules
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Just finished Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.
It's good, but I found it to be unmoving. I can see that whatever is written is well written but it didn't made me feel anything. I didn't find it funny, emotional, surprising, annoying. At no point I was tempted to stop reading it nor I was anxious to continue. For me it's a really solid 7/10. Maybe I'm in the minority on that and maybe it's because it's not the kind of book that I would usually read.
On what's next I have been wanting to read the Three Body Problem but I'm curious about the translation. I've read books in english that were originally written in my native spanish and there's definitely a certain feel to them. It will be the first book originally in Chinese that I read, so I wonder about the translation, and if it would be better to get an English translation or a Spanish translation.
The translator of Three Body Problem Ken Liu is a native Chinese speaker with exceptional English language skills. I don't believe there are any issues with the translation work itself, but there are some oddities of intentionally reworked plots in the English release due to the book "Ball Lightning" not having been released for the English market yet so the references would not have made sense. I find this to be a poor decision, but you can always read Ball Lightning and about what that subplot was intended to be afterward. The Spanish version would likely have the same issue.
Thanks, you give me something to check out with that thing about the changes to the plot.
I found The Sea of Tranquility a bit dry but whimsical nonetheless.
In a genre overburdened by books with two dimensional characters and core dumps of exposition, it was an interesting puzzle but it also isn’t making me want to reread it either. 7.5 or 8.