The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, 399 pages, translated by Ken Liu, audio narrated by Luke Daniels.

A book that starts with the Cultural Revolution in 1960s Beijing and then spins out about four light years. Along the way there's an online game, the Three-Body. Those in the Three-Body  they have a problem, namely that the world they inhabit has a tendency to self-destruct. There are too many suns, it gets too hot, and then it gets too cold and the inhabitants have to use some extreme measures to survive.
The people who play the game start to think about it all differently when they realize that maybe it's not a game.
There are a lot of interesting characters and some convoluted storylines. It is easy to see why The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo last year.

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Love and the Turning Year: One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese

Love and the Turning Year: One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, 140 pages.
This book was added to the library's collection in January of 1971, just a little over a year after the Delmar location opened. Linda Ballard was a librarian then, as was Shirley Goldberg. I wonder if they were happy when this book came in. I wonder who ordered it. It's a beautiful collection of poems. Rexroth translated these poems of love, longing and loss, written
Many of them are short, unadorned, and cutting, like Ch'ang Ch'u Ling's poem, "Since you left" which was written in the late 600s or early 700s, during the T'ang Dynasty:

Since you left, my lover,
I can't take care of myself.
I do nothing but think of you.
I fade like the waning of the moon.

and an anonymous poem from the time of the Six Dynasties (whenever that might have been, Rexroth assumes we know some things here).

What is the matter with me?
With all the men in the world,
Why can I think only of you?

Others in the collection are longer, lyrical but just as mournful.
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