“The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster. Ok, I’m flipping the question because I’m a native English speaker, but for all the readers filling this thread with great recommendations from other countries, I suggest you pick up The Phantom Tollbooth, if you haven’t already.

Wikipedia tells me that the book has been translated into many languages, but I can’t imagine how that was done, and I doubt it recaptured the magic. The book is an Alice in Wonderland like magical story about the adventures of a little boy in an imaginary land built from wordplay, puns, and interpreting English idioms very literally.

Agree there is a difference between not liking something and being bad. Three Body Problem was absolutely terrible. Cardboard characters with simplistic motivations acting out a plot with holes a mile wide, combined with stilted, forced writing style that people wrongly assume is due to translation (it is not). Absolutely terrible.

Three Body Problem

Three Body Problem

I literally threw my copy of Absolution Gap across the room at one point. I love Alastair Reynolds, but the last two books in the revelation space series just threw all hard sci-fi restrictions out the window and it was magic quantum tech after perpetual motion machine for the rest of the story. Hell of an anticlimactic ending too. (Galactic North was good though.)

Yeah I stopped there, in both the books and the show. I loved the first part of The Expanse series. But everything after opening the gate was trashy nonsense.

This technically isn’t a dedication, but the first line of the first chapter of the textbook Statistical Mechanics by David L. Goodstein. Does it count?

“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.”