The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to like The Three-Body Problem. Some people whose judgment I usually trust recommended the book highly, so when I heard opinions that it is a serious novel about contact with another civilization, I immediately put it on my "To read" list. Alas, I ended up disappointed. For the most part, I found reading the novel to be a tedious task. If not for a few special features, my rating would barely reach two stars.

Trying to avoid spoilers I will list the few factors that save the novel from a "Do not recommend" rating. First of all, the very beginning of the novel describes dramatic events during the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s, the purges, "struggle sessions," public humiliations, and political murders committed by ideologically crazed teenagers. It provides a sobering commentary on the dangers of ideology and human propensity for evil.

Then there is mathematics, which is, for me, the best thing about the novel. The three-body problem is an actual problem in mathematical physics of three masses revolving around each other, whose trajectories we want to compute/predict. Unfortunately, an explicit solution of such a model does not exist, and most initial conditions of the system lead to chaotic solutions. The author of the novel well explains the model (three suns orbiting each other) and presents the practical consequences of the chaotic solution.

To continue with mathematics, the author also writes about the unfolding of a higher-dimensional space into a lower-dimensional one. A nine-dimensional structure is unfolded into a two-dimensional one. The topic is close to my heart, as I supervised students' project on unfolding a four-dimensional cube into 3D and 2D.

Finally, and most importantly, there is Trisolaris, the system of three suns orbiting each other, with all its chaotic motion. Solaris is a wonderful, serious sci-fi novel by Stanisław Lem, the master of the genre, about the impossibility of contact with alien beings. Lem's His Master's Voice remains the best novel about SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Coincidentally, The Three-Body Problem was published in 2006, the same year that Lem died. I would like to believe that Cixin Liu's novel about Trisolaris is a kind of homage to Stanisław Lem.

Other than the math bits and the grim stories of the Cultural Revolution, I don't find much to recommend in the novel. The plot, which in my view lacks coherence, is quite silly and bordering on laughable in some places. I found it hard not to giggle at passages like "The fate of the entire human race was now tied to these slender fingers."

In the conclusion, I will repeat that for a serious, well-written, and interesting sci-fi novel about contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, I recommend His Master's Voice by Lem.

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The Strangler's Honeymoon by Håkan Nesser
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is the fourth novel by Håkan Nesser that I am reviewing here. I absolutely loved his Hour of the Wolf and rated it with five stars, an unusually high rating for a novel in the police procedural genre. I found The Inspector and Silence very good (four stars). I also liked Münsters Case, and gave it three stars. Alas, I am unable to recommend The Strangler's Honeymoon, the ninth installment in Nesser's long-running Van Veeteren series.

While the plot that involves the familiar trope of a serial killer is relatively interesting, the book is certainly too long, at 630 pages in the paperback edition. The reader may be tempted—as I was—to just turn the pages, scanning the text instead of reading it, hoping to find the next important fragment. There is so much extraneous stuff in the novel that I am wondering whether the author was under contract to deliver to the publisher a certain number of pages...

Many dialogues sound unnatural and stilted. They often involve repetitions; "What do you mean?" or its equivalents appear too many times in the conversations. I thought that maybe the awkwardness of style was the fault of a new translator, but that was not the case; Laurie Thompson was the translator of all Nesser's novels that I have read.

To sum up: after deleting about 300 pages, it could become a pretty good police procedural.

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The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I feel that one can either write too little in a review of The End of the Affair or too much. I choose the "not enough" option, pretending that it is not laziness that affects my choice but the desire to avoid spoilers.

Graham Greene's novel offers a deep psychological analysis of an adulterous affair and a study of obsessive jealousy that becomes the driving force of human behavior. This anatomy of jealousy shows its connections and intersections with love, hate, pride, and pity, where all these feelings make up a dark aggregate of human suffering occasionally relieved by flashes of happiness.

The End of the Affair is a very serious book demanding the reader's full attention. Yes, beyond the psychological study, there is a story happening in London in the 1940s, but the story is certainly not the most important aspect of the novel. Bargaining with God enters the picture, and the author seems to offer love of God as a sublimation of that messy, deeply human amalgam of love, hate, and everything in between.

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The Illustrated Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An entertaining and illuminating read! Mark Forsyth presents the etymology of several hundreds of English words and phrases and often surprising connections between them. We begin with "book" and end with "book," which justifies the subtitle "A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language." So a book, via gambling, leads us to pool, from which we go to gene, then to testicle, and from there to codpiece..., etc. It may seem random, but the author convincingly justifies the chain.

Below are some snippets or quotes taken from the chain of connections that I found most interesting or amusing. As a mathematician teaching probability, I found "[...] if probable comes from the same root as prove, can you guess why the proof of the pudding is in the eating?" On a similar topic, the origins of the arithmetic signs, such as plus and equal sign are explained.

We learn the origins of the word "spam," and as a bonus, Monty Python is mentioned, which is always a good thing, particularly if it leads to bringing up Python, a programming language. The author clearly shows that the two most popular four-letter swearwords are not acronyms, despite the popular urban legend claiming so. Speaking about legend, how can we not admire the author's cool turn of the phrase, "According to legend (the beautiful elder sister of truth [...])"?

I found fascinating the history of language(s) spoken by people inhabiting the current teritory of Britain, whom the ancient Greeks called "Prittanoi," which meant "tattooed people." Also, I learned a new word: woad. The etymology of "Starbucks" and "serendipity" were further highlights for me.

One can find plenty of humor in Etymologicon, like, for instance, in the fragment detailing Ovid's story about Halcyon: "Of course, modern biologists scoff at Ovid's story and dismiss it purely on the base that it isn't true. However, poetry is much more important than truth, and, if you don't believe that, try using the two methods to get laid."

The book ends with a series of quizzes checking the readers' intuitions about etymology of various words and phrases. But let's not talk about the quizzes, as my scores were rather distressingly low...

I would otherwise rate Etymologicon with four stars, for its educational value and humor, but the flood of illustrations and, generally, the graphical form of the book are, to me, totally distracting and greatly reducing the fun of reading. There are also a few pages with gold letters on black background rendering the text virtually unreadable for me.


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One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner by Jay Parini
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

William Faulkner was one of the literary idols of my youth—late high school and college years. I think it was the difficult yet highly rewarding prose that caused my fascination with Faulkner, particularly with one of his major novels, Absalom, Absalom! There also was probably a component of self-conceit in it—pride of being able to appreciate complex prose. Anyway, over fifty years later, I read Jay Parini's One Matchless Time—an exhaustive, full of minute details, and well-referenced (over 50 pages of notes) biography of William Faulkner.

In addition to documenting all major and minor events of Faulkner's life, the author includes detailed literary analyses of all his novels and many short stories. It is far beyond my competencies to comment on these, so I will mainly use the author's words. There are several main motifs of this monumental biography. First, the author shows the various personas that William Faulkner was creating and cultivating for himself. "He became a war hero in his own mind, creating a uniform and story to fit this need and acquiring a limp. He became many other things as well: an outcast, a bohemian poet, a drunk, a rogue, a postmaster, a husband, a lover, a hunter, and horseman and so forth. These were all masks put on for the occasion, the life-phase, the person in front of him, the immediate need; he could discard them easily [...] " And some more masks: "the Nobel Prize-winning man-of-letters, and the cultural ambassador, the professorial writer in residence, the benevolent grandfather—just to name a few."

Faulkner's novels and stories, more than any other major author's, show his acute sense of place (rural Mississippi) and sense of the past. Parini writes in Chapter 1, "His sense of the present was profoundly shaped by his sense of the past, and the past brought a peculiar pressure to bear on the present in his life and work."

Parini points out another characteristic of William Faulkner's storytelling, which he calls "layering subjectivities." He writes, "Faulkner was not the first author to use the technique of layering subjectivities [...] modern authors such as Joyce, Woolf, and Conrad [...] turned to similar strategies of narration. But Faulkner's mastery of so many different points of view—with each being a version of the same story and each filtering the data at hand in ways that become vivid distortions or misreadings—conveys an overwhelming sense of epistemological slip and slide. In the end his novel is all performance, a play with different voices, a blistering and darkly comic summoning of decay."

Parini writes vividly and ornately about Absalom, Absalom! "[a] masterpiece, [...] in which the Faulknerian language reaches its baroque apogee, a kind of strange magniloquence, almost a metalanguage or counterspirit, running parallel to the known world of signifying, but also beyond it, a distant harmonic." And somewhat later, "The novel becomes, in effect, a grammar of narrative, one of those rare novels that opens up the hood of fiction to show what's inside. Absalom is, for me, a study in radical subjectivity, as each version of the Sutpen story changes the story itself, much as the physicist Werner Heisenberg suggested that an observer will have a physical effect on the thing observed in a physics experiment."

In the penultimate paragraph of the book, Parini summarizes, "William Faulkner stands alone, a master of tragic farce, a wild-eyed comedian, a raconteur of the highest order, still sitting around the campfire in the Big Woods, still talking in the thousands of pages that remain his legacy."

For readers less familiar with Faulkner's literary work, his famous, deeply inspiring Nobel Prize acceptance speech is highly recommended. It can be found, for instance, at https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lit....


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The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my fifth book by Elizabeth Strout; I liked Olive Kitteridge, My Name Is Lucy Barton, and Anything Is Possible very much. I also enjoyed Abide with Me, but not as much as the previous three. (My reviews of all four are here, on Goodreads.) Unfortunately, The Burgess Boys continues the downward trajectory of my ratings, and I can barely justify a three-star rating.

Jim and Bob, both lawyers in their fifties, are the Burgess brothers. Jim is successful in everything he does; his brother, not so much. Bob ruminates, "Look at him, his big brother! It was like watching a great athlete, someone born with grace, someone who walked two inches above the surface of the earth, and who could say why?" And: "What was this thing that Jimmy had? The intangible, compelling part of Jimmy?" Whereas Bob is disgusted by "his big, slob-dog, incontinent self, the opposite of Jim."

The teenage son of Jim and Bob's sister commits a civil rights violation offense, which precipitates a crisis in the family. So, although it is not difficult to guess where all these "paint-by-numbers" characterizations are going, the plot is quite engrossing. Ms. Strout's assured, masterful prose saves the novel from the ignominy of a two-star rating.

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Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8: The First Manned Mission to Another World by Robert Zimmerman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"They were no longer in earth orbit. Apollo 8 had become the first manned vehicle to break the bonds of earth."

Robert Zimmerman's book tells the story of this phenomenal human endeavor, when three astronauts, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, "broke the bonds of earth" and successfully performed the "lunar orbit insertion." On Christmas Eve 1968, their spacecraft entered the lunar orbit, orbited the Moon 10 times, and returned to Earth on December 27th. The success of the Apollo 8 flight made it possible for the Apollo 11 astronauts to land on the Moon just half a year later. The title of the book comes from the television broadcast on December 24, during which the astronauts, already in the Moon's orbit, read aloud the first few verses of the Book of Genesis.

The story of the Apollo 8 flight is shown on the backdrop of political events and social movements of the tumultuous late 1960s. The Soviet Union, having achieved the first artificial satellite flight on 10/4/1957 (Sputnik 1) and the first human flight to outer space on 4/12/1961 (Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1), wanted to cement its domination of space by being the first country to send their cosmonauts to the Moon. In his famous speech on the 25th of May, 1961, President John F. Kennedy took the challenge and promised, before a special joint session of Congress, that the United States would safely put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. The United States kept this promise by landing the Apollo 11 astronauts on the Moon on July 20th, 1969 and successfully returning to Earth.

Explaining the political context of the U.S. space efforts and the portrayal of the late 1960s are, to me, the best features of the book, along with the technological and human behavior-related details of the Apollo 8 flight. The worst aspect, to me, is the excessive emphasis that the author puts on the astronauts' families and their activities.

Let's also mention an interesting tidbit. The computer that helped the astronauts navigate the Apollo 8 trajectory had barely 4 kilobytes of memory. Today's personal computers typically come with 16 gigabytes of memory, which is four million times more. Unfortunately, many people don't believe that a 4-kilobyte computer could do anything practical. Well, in the 1970s, I programmed on a PDP 11/04 computer with barely 32 kilobytes of memory and managed to run pretty big and advanced programs on it.

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