Reading the Three-Body Problem trilogy took me six months, spread across a year, with long pauses between volumes. By the time I reached Death's End I had changed enough that the beginning of the book felt like it was written for a different person.

Liu Cixin thinks at civilizational timescales. The individual characters are important to him but the protagonist is human civilization across millions of years. This is philosophically unusual in Western science fiction, which tends to operate at the scale of individuals, crews, or nations. The scale of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy is genuinely planetary and temporal in a way that requires recalibration.

Death's End's ending is not consoling. It doesn't offer redemption for the scale of loss it depicts. It just shows what happens. I found this more honest than most SF endings I've encountered. Whether it's a better ending is a different question.