#책

Reading this now. Borrowed it along with “Things I Wish I’d Known as a Graduate Student”—the start of an epic late-to-the-party reading series. Why are there so many things I should’ve known?

If the book that started last year was Han Kang’s Human Acts , this is the one that opened 2026. It was a good choice. After twenty-some years of life, I feel as though I’m only now beginning to understand how to live. Your words, written after eighty-some years of life, reassure me that what I’m learning isn’t wrong. Thank you.

Currently reading

Currently reading *What follows is a rambling, runaway review by a writer excited to have finally found a novel to his taste. Reader discretion is advised. **The risk of spoilers is low until the “SPOILER ALERT!” below. I do mention a few things, but most appear early in Book One or won’t make sense to anyone who hasn’t read it, so don’t worry. If anything, I hope this post makes more people curious enough to read the book. *** Radiohead - Everything In Its Right Place : The original song used in one of the trailers for The Three-Body Problem. If you’re looking for something to listen to while reading the book or this review, put this on. It doubles the rush. ⋮ ⋮ --> First encounter I first learned about The Three-Body Problem from a trailer that played after I finished watching Nameless Gangster on Netflix. I watched it all the way through, but apart from its enormous scale, I couldn’t tell what the story was about. That only made me more curious. The source material was also a Chinese novel, something I’d never read before, and it seemed like a good book to try right after reading Japan’s Snow Country. Besides, it was the first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award, and Obama had mentioned it. I had no reason not to read it. I decided to start with the novel before watching the series. It was late March, not long after the Netflix original series came out, but the novels already seemed quite popular. The original story has three books. At my local library, Book One had already exceeded the maximum number of reservations; at the digital library, 15 people were waiting for it. When I checked again the next day, that number had grown to 22 (it’s 45 now, lol). That wasn’t a wait of a few weeks; there was no chance I’d borrow it this season. I gave up early and looked for another way. I considered buying it from Kyobo Book Centre, but the print edition was fairly expensive (15,300 won. Perhaps that isn’t much in a world where we spend about the same on a meal or a movie, but for some reason I’m especially reluctant to pay that much for a book). The e-book wasn’t much cheaper. Then I discovered I could borrow The Three-Body Problem through Kyobo’s e-book subscription service, sam! There was a Premium plan that let you borrow a set number of books each month and an Unlimited plan, which was cheaper. The puzzling pricing made sense once I learned that the two plans had different catalogs. Premium included The Three-Body Problem; Unlimited didn’t. Foolishly, I only realized this after the word “Unlimited” tempted me into subscribing to that plan first, and I found I couldn’t borrow the book. The Premium plan, which allows two books a month, costs 9,000 won monthly. If I kept reading regularly, it seemed cheap compared with the time and effort of reserving books at a physical library, going to pick them up on time, and returning them. The first month was also on offer for 1,000 won, so I subscribed without nearly as much deliberation as I give other online subscriptions. These days I’m keenly aware that money can buy not just things, but time and energy too. **Update** I kept getting an error when I tried to borrow Book Two, so I contacted customer service. Apparently The Three-Body Problem had been removed from the catalog in the meantime! Good grief. I’m canceling you right now. You can’t give me something and then take it back! An author soaring into the sky on the twin wings of science and imagination *Someone’s description of Liu Cixin. Obama said of The Three-Body Problem that its scope was so immense that his day-to-day problems at the White House seemed petty while he was reading it. Before I read the book, that puzzled me. It was only a book, words on a page—how could it leave such an impression? But it took only a few pages for me to understand. Soon after Wang Miao starts the “Three Body” game, I read about people dehydrating during a Chaotic Era and turning into thin sheets of skin. I was floored. It seemed plausible, yet it was an image I had never seen or even imagined! That was when I fell for the author’s ability to imagine strange, fresh things most people would never think of—and to build a setting where they belonged. The behavior of the stars in the three-body world is another example. I already knew that the three-body problem has no general solution and that binary star systems are more common in the universe than single-star systems. Even so, I had never imagined a system with just one more star: a triple-star system. Much less what life would be like there under the stars’ complex three-body motion. (The system with the most stars actually observed—or inferred—apparently isn’t a triple system but a seven-star system !) Suddenly the old Samsung Electronics logo looks different to me There were a few parts where the plot felt a little less natural or the science a little less convincing. Flying Blade was deployed in an operation when it was still too immature to mass-produce, for instance. And there was proton unfolding—I wonder whether that’s possible in the first place, but even assuming it is, it seems like a sophon could cause far more destruction than the book describes. Still, these were well within what I could accept as artistic license. Among the comments on the Netflix original series trailer, someone worried that the novel’s scientific foundations weren’t entirely solid, which would make adapting it for the screen difficult. I’ll have to read more well-known science fiction novels before I can compare how firmly their worlds are constructed. Thoughts on the novel as a medium — How it differs from film Reading this book made me like the novel as an art form even more. Novels resemble films in that their main purpose is to tell a story. But I noticed advantages they have over films. The first is that I can take them in at my own pace. I enjoy films and have watched plenty, but I’ve always thought I wasn’t very good at fully grasping the characters, their relationships, and the flow of the story on a first viewing. Lately I’ve even preferred watching films on my laptop, where I can replay a scene several times (apart from certain films built around grand visual and sound effects). With a novel, though, I read at my own pace by default. I can read slowly, reread a passage, or take notes as I go. It may take longer to finish, but when I do, I don’t feel as though I’ve missed anything. The second advantage is the scope for expression that comes from the flexibility

To me, Japan is a country both near and far. Apart from North Korea, Japan is the country physically closest to ours, and it’s the overseas destination Koreans visit most. Yet despite having traveled abroad quite a bit, I’ve never been there. The main reason has to do with circumstances particular to me that come into play when I travel overseas. But even aside from that, I’ve always felt that Japan and I just wouldn’t click. Travel is one of my biggest hobbies, but photos of Japan have rarely given me that thrill of wanting to set off. Actually, there is one place I’ve wanted to visit: Sapporo in winter. What interests me there, though, is the snow-covered landscape rather than the people or culture. Japan’s “culture,” it seems, isn’t what draws me in. Of course, it’s risky to decide something isn’t for you before you’ve properly experienced it—whether it’s a travel destination, a career path, or a person. So if someone asked me to travel around Japan with them, I wouldn’t say no. If that doesn’t happen, I might go alone someday. I have even more reason to give it a chance when I think of China, another country close to home: I thought much more highly of it after visiting than I had before (though I think it helped enormously that on both trips I could travel comfortably and safely under some form of authority). But as things stand, Japan doesn’t feel like a good fit for me. The same goes when I narrow the subject to Japanese art. Japan’s animation industry occupies a league of its own, and I find that impressive, but apart from Spirited Away , none of its works has truly moved me artistically. With Japanese literature, it’s even worse: I’ve barely finished any. None that I can remember, at least. So when I started this book a few days ago, I knew finishing it wouldn’t be easy. It had been in our house for ages, and a few years back I’d read ten or twenty pages before tossing it aside. But I told myself I ought to give Japanese literature a proper chance at least once—and that there must be a reason it had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I straightened up and got down to reading, telling myself, “If you can’t even finish a book this short, you’re a baka” (oh, Japanese really hits the spot for that). As expected, it wasn’t easy. It took me over a week to read some 160 pages. Dozens of times I wondered, “What are you trying to say?” My mother, whose chemistry with Japan seems about the same as mine, looked over and told me I wouldn’t know even after I finished it. I tried to dismiss her warning and eventually made it to the final sentence. And the result… nothing stayed with me. I don’t know what it was trying to say. The casual adultery? Fine. The story is set in a time and culture different from my own, and even something generally considered immoral can have a place in a work of fiction if it conveys a message. But I couldn’t find any message in the story. Should I focus on the prose, then? Judging by the criticism, the book does seem to be famous for its style. As I read, I could tell the author had a distinctive way of telling the story. But rather than moving me, that distinctiveness made me cringe and recoil, much as I do when I watch Choi Jun’s B-Daemyeon Date . Why? Is it because I don’t know Japanese culture? Is it because elements beyond meaning, like rhythm, were lost in translation? Or is it really just not for me? If it’s the last one, this is a fascinating case. I’m actually a fairly boring person: there are quite a few things most people enjoy that I don’t, like drinking coffee or alcohol, or rooting for a sports team. I don’t enjoy those things, but I understand why other people do. What makes Snow Country different is that I can’t even see why someone would like it. People who like Snow Country are harder to find than Hanwha Eagles fans or soju lovers, but the fact that it won the Nobel Prize in Literature must mean there are plenty of them—even outside Japan, among people who don’t speak Japanese. So if anyone reading this genuinely enjoyed Snow Country , I hope you’ll strike up a conversation and enlighten me. Help me understand what on earth this world is all about. It’s a little disappointing that, after writing such a long book review for the first time in ages, all I’ve really said is “I don’t think it’s for me.” But that’s honestly how I felt. *** Below is a YouTube video I’d come across before that came to mind while I was wondering whether I couldn’t enjoy Snow Country because I don’t speak Japanese and couldn’t hear the rhythm of its language. The bigger the circle of the known, the greater the contact with the unknown. The speaker says that the more languages they learn, the sadder they feel thinking about how many masterpieces exist in languages they’ll never learn in their lifetime. It sounds a bit like a humblebrag, but I can relate to it, too.

Our company’s CEO gave me this book because there were extra copies lying around in the lounge. Without my even realizing it, Daiso has become the store I visit most often. I’d always been curious about the company, though not curious enough to look it up, so I really enjoyed this book and read it in no time. The next time I visit Daiso, I think it’ll be fun to see whether Chairman Park Jeong-bu’s descriptions of the stores ring true and to imagine all the thought that went into the products.

Currently reading