Very exciting!

So my gifter sent me a lovely message asking about some shipping particulars and also about some of my preferences, so I already knew this was a wonderful and thoughtful santa :). The gift arrived really very fast as well!

The package is pretty heavy, it's a big huge cardboard envelope, of course it's from amazon because everything is from amazon lol ;). As I open it I take a peek inside I see two books, one of which is a hardcover. Fancy! Both of them are pretty thick so I'll have loads to read :). From my perspective the softcover book is at the 'top' so that's the one I pull out first.

It's a book called "The Three-Body Problem"! I don't think I've ever even heard of this book, but I know that the three body problem is something in physics, so that's already interesting to me! What is even more interesting is that the book was originally written in Chinese and was translated into English. In the past year or so I've actually tried to find more books by people who have roots in different cultures, because they often bring an interesting perspective to made-up cultures in scifi or fantasy. I've not read many book that were translated from different languages though, mostly because I wouldn't know where to find any. But now I don't have to search! Thank you santa!

Of course there's the lovely hardcover book: I pull it out and see nothing but black and white and a particularly toxic shade of green, because the book is upside down and the cover doesn't immediately make sense in that orientation. Due to the colors my first association is with the musical "Wicked", haha! But turning it right side up I find it's "The Testaments" by Margaret Atwood :). My gifter probably saw on my goodreads account that I read The Handmaids Tale but not this sequel. Very thoughtful of you, santa! I had heard that it came out but I felt sort of traumatized by the first book, it hit me really hard. So I was sort of putting off reading the sequel. Then again, I do feel insanely curious how it is for an author to revisit such an important book decades later, as the real world and the author themselves probably changed, so it was definitely still on my list of things to read some day. I guess this is a sign from my santa that I should quit putting it off and just read it! I didn't expect it to be so big, The Handmaids Tale is not a very long read. So I'm looking forward to see where this book takes the story/world of The Handmaids Tale.

Thank you so much santa! I am quite sure I will enjoy these books, you hit the nail on the head!