Welp, that was a huge disappointment. When you talk about the distance between expectations and reality, Babel was about as far apart as you can get.But before I get into that, let me start with a disclaimer. As you can see, I did not like this book. In fact, I'm hard pressed to come up with even one thing I enjoyed in here. But I'm decidedly in the minority, and many readers clearly loved this. If that's you and you thought this was the best thing you've ever read and would happily spend the re...

DNF at 60% but I skipped around until the end. Dark academia is hot right now, and Babel was supposed to be THE dark academia novel of the year. However, I absolutely despised Babel, and here's why...RANT INCOMING:What a boring, mean-spirited book. It had little charm and came from a place of hate. And can this author write about anything other than one person starting a revolutionary war? Even her dark academia novel ends up going in the same direction as her Poppy War trilogy. Sis hasn't gotte...

Right, so… this really wasn’t the book for me. Oh dear, I have a lot of issues, but remember: if you loved this book, that’s valid, but you didn’t, it doesn’t mean you aren’t “intelligent enough”. To be honest, after reading that, I’ve become convinced more than ever that people rate a book highly purely based on the fact it covers important topics to avoid “looking racist” rather than actually rating how a book handles and discusses racism and incredibly important discussions such as capitalism...

“Babel, Or the Necessity of Trauma Porn”I can talk about the many problems I had with this book in terms of its length, its structure, its utterly paper-thin characters, and how goddamned condescending it is, and you can find that discussion below. But I feel that I should start with the part of this book that broke me.There’s a concept often floated around when people talk about how to portray bigotry and prejudice in fiction, and it’s the concept that in portraying racist (or queerphobic, able...

‘Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country,’ wrote the great Italian author Italo Calvino and when ‘words travel the world,’ as translator Anna Rusconi says ‘translators do the driving.’ So what happens when these hands are behind the wheel of a war machine, what responsibility does one bear when translation serves the aims of imperialism and becomes a weapon? R.F. Kuang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution ...

Babel reminded me of the classics and literature I had to study in my school days. Yes, there was a lot of noteworthy ideas and discussions to be had but by god was it a challenge to get through. First off, the person who wrote the marketing tagline, "for fans of The Poppy War" needs to be fired from their job. This is nothing like The Poppy War. The latter was an epic military fantasy war story while the former is an literary fiction-esque urban fantasy. Going into Babel expecting something rem...

ARC was provided by the publisher—Harper Voyager—in exchange for an honest review.Babel was absolutely impressive, ambitious, and intelligently crafted. As unbelievable as it sounds, R.F. Kuang has triumphed over The Poppy War Trilogy—which I loved so much—with this one book. “Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.” Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of Oxford Translators’ Revolution...

let's lead with the good: this is very polished and eminently readable, and it is no small feat to make a book that's at least 30% lectures about etymology into digestible commercial fiction. it ticks along like a well-oiled engine, it is a thick book where i would plow through pages by the hundred at a time, and the research that holds it up is visibly thorough, particularly where it intersects with rf kuang's own areas of study. the lectures about etymology are vibrantly, engagingly delivered,...

The Italian word for disappointment is delusione, from the Latin de-ludus, literally “to make fun of”. Its closest cognate in the English language is delusion, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as “an idiosyncratic belief or impression maintained despite being contradicted by reality”.R. F. Kuang has me stuck in a never-ending cycle of delusion and disappointment. I keep convincing myself that I’m going to love her next book, and she makes fun of me by delivering something that doesn’t remotel...

this was the nerdiest book I’ve ever read (and I loved it)—★—There are so many praises to sing about this book. RF Kuang’s prose remains as gripping as ever, even as she slowly builds tension and layers on nerdy academic teachings. I have always been interested in the dark academia genre but have yet to read many of the staples—but I feel completely satisfied with Babel. What else do I need when I have a book about the horrors of academia within the colonial empire, tackling the balance of life ...