Another book I received recently from home is American author Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962). This is one of the first English-language books that I owned, so I am very happy to be reunited with it.
We studied a short passage of the book in high school. As with the trend among students back then (something that perhaps persists even today), we memorised the whole thing without understanding it and promptly forgot about the subject after passing the exams.
But one sentence from Carson’s writing particularly stands out, and I know it has left a very deep impression on at least one other person. That sentence is: “In nature, nothing exists alone.”
And, yes, you guessed it — that sentence appears in Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem” (2008), whose English edition was published in 2014 and proceeded to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in the following year, thanks to American science fiction and fantasy author Ken Liu’s excellent translation. Most people know about the book these days due to its adaptation as the Netflix series “3 Body Problem” in 2024.
(Day 39 #WarmWinterRead #WWR25 via @librarieschangelives)
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 