locusmag (2022-10-11). "Barnes & Noble Best Books of the Year 2022". Locus Online . Retrieved 2022-11-27. Rebecca Roanhorse calls Babel Kuang’s love-hate letter to academia, which could not be more accurate. Nowhere else have I read academia described with so much biting, loving, unflinching detail. I tried my very hardest to like this. I thought The Poppy War was excellent when I read it a few years ago, and Babel seemed like a combination of subjects I find fascinating and spent my own uni days immersed in-- history, language/linguistics, colonial studies --but in hindsight, I wonder if I might have found it better if I knew nothing about those subjects.

This single-minded obsession with the novel’s themes is also reflected in its characters. All of them are written not as multi-faceted humans, but as spokespeople for a certain perspective the author wants to portray. Robin is a British-Chinese man torn between his two identities; Rami is an anti-colonial activist who hates the Empire; Lettie is a privileged white woman; every British man is a cruel, evil imperialist devoid of humanity. If you had told me that a historical fantasy set in the early 1800s at an Oxford institute for translation would make for an intriguing fantasy book, I would have said, Sorry, but sounds kinda dull. I understand that it can be difficult to shut down the bad faith reader inside your head. Still, authors need to stop writing to convince an imaginary person that they’re morally righteous, and start treating their readers like intelligent adults who can figure things out on their own.

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An astonishing mix of erudition and emotion. What Kuang has done here, I have never before seen in literature.” - Tochi Onyebuchi, author of Goliath https://limitededitionbook com/2022/06/08/radley-london-book-street-the-queens-jubilee-2022-special-limited-edition/

Through our core four characters—Robin, Victoire, Ramiz, and Letitia—we bear witness to the day-to-day lives of institutional outsiders as they try to navigate a system inherently hostile to their presence but desperately in need of their skills and labor. There’s some obvious similarities between the author and the main character, Robin, but all four of them carry pieces of that misfit quality that will ring true for so many. What she ends up doing with each character separately and as a group is very clever, probing their blind spots and privileges in ways that will challenge the readers’ own complicities. Their interactions are at times encouraging, sometimes devastating, but always ring true. Fair warning, though, there will be moments that feel so honest that they’re likely to sting. If your faves didn`t make the list, be sure to tell us who they are in the comments so we can add them to part two! 👀 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, colonialism and its long-standing, horrific impact. From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel , a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.This book, besides managing to both annoy me and bore me to tears also managed to almost ruin footnotes for me. (That’s a crime, given that I, as a devoted Terry Pratchett fan, have not previously met a footnote I didn’t love — until Babel came along).