Review: Babel by RF Kuang
Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang Pub Aug 2022, Harper Voyager I will admit I’m not well versed in the dark academia sub genre so I wasn’t sure what to expect but I can tell you, a full-on Shakespearean tragedy was NOT IT. ❦ This book is 542 pages long and it FELT like it. I swear it took me 84 years to get through. By all rights, this book should be totally up my alley. I love academic settings, the study of languages, etymology, and translation. And those things play a huge role in this book. I was really excited for it! And honestly it’s a great story but it was just hard for me to keep turning pages for a while. (A long while.) Fortunately, the last 150 pages or so were very exciting; after all the set-up and exposition of the first two thirds, the action really ramped up in the final section (for the most part) and you could sense the end getting nearer. It was kind of a nail biter. And the ...