It will be incredibly difficult for me to effectively articulate all my thoughts and feelings as I am still firmly entrenched in all the emotions this book incited. I initially wasn't going to read Babel until next year despite owning a copy of the book but it was put on the reading list for one of my classes this semester. I was literally in the group in my class in charge of leading a discussion on the book (despite not having it finished by then). In those 3 hours, we still couldn't discuss all that could be addressed so forgive my inability to encompass it all here. Reading this book was incredibly challenging for me purely because I am an angry person who struggles to remove myself from the stories I'm reading. I feel as if I am one of the characters in the book and take everything that happens extremely personally making reading about a lot of the interactions the characters have to suffer through a real test of my own will and patience. This is honestly why it took me so long to read.

To put it simply, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence is an exploration of language, power, and colonialism blending historical fantasy and critique of Western society and imperialism. As this is my first R.F. Kuang novel I wasn't sure of what to expect when it came to writing style or how extensively the subject would be explored. Reading this book felt like opening a wound, leaving me so incredibly vulnerable I could do nothing but watch in horrified fascination as it just got worse. I can only imagine the countless hours of research that could have gone into the process of preparing to tell this story, and while I've never felt quite so unintelligent when reading a book, I could not imagine any other way this could have been written. Kuang has a beautifully abrupt and realistic way of writing that not only enthrals you in the story but also aggressively confronts you with the reality that everything being said is steeped in reality and lived experience (why else would so many people have been so upset at its content when it came out).

Some themes and schools of thought are easy to determine and engage with because they are so embedded in the narrative it's virtually impossible to escape, so I will not be speaking on these topics in this review (especially since I beat them to death in my notes and highlights as I was reading). Maybe one day (when I'm not still so thoroughly fried and recovering from the reading hangover I'm experiencing) I may come back to expand on my other thoughts in this review, but for now, I'm going to have to leave it on the note that this is easily one of the best pieces of literature I have ever had the pleasure of engaging with and I cannot wait to read Kuang's other works. Right now I would kill for a prequel novella based on Griffin, following Lovell coming to get him, his time in the university and obvious falling out with his cohort and his induction into Hermes.