Related Posts:
- Introduction & #1 All the King’s Men
- #2 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man & #3 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
- #4 The Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns
- #5 The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
- #6 The Short History of a Prince by Jane Hamilton
- #7 Drowning Ruth by Cristina Schwarz
- #8 The Drowning People by Richard Mason
- #9 Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- #10 All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda
Thanks to these two bloggers for sponsoring the annual Blog Discussion Challenge:
- Nicole at Feed your Fiction Addiction
- Shannon at It Starts at Midnight
Babel by R.F. Kuang
© 2022
Date read: 1/22/2023
Other than Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series, I don’t read much fantasy. I picked this book up because its underlying premise is brilliant: bars of silver, when imprinted with pairs of words with similar meanings that demonstrate what is lost in translation, gain magical powers such as the abilities to increase industrial and agricultural production, to make weapons more powerful, and to heal injuries.
As I progressed through the book, my jaw kept dropping as the significance of this premise played out in one aspect after another of the society that controlled such power. By the end of the book, Kuang had used the premise and all its permutations to explore completely how societies create, build, and maintain power.
Advice columns often exhort writers to “go deeper,” and reading this novel demonstrated to me what that advice means in practice. The story gains meaning as Kuang follows each aspect of world building to its logical outcome. And it turns out that “go deeper” is also good advice for readers to keep in mind. I doubt I’ll ever again be able to allow a novel to just wash over me. I’ll want to see how every scene, every plot point, contributes to the whole.
© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown
