Babel, or The Necessity of Violence

I loved this for so many reasons:

- I love history
- I love language
- I love learning, anything really

For those reasons this will likely bore a lot of people to tears or they won't finish it, but I was swept away with it right from the start.

In the most simple summary, this follows a young boy from Canton in the 1830s who becomes the ward of a professor at Babel, a sector of Oxford University where they imbue silver bars with the magic of translation. These bars can make trains run faster, make lights burn longer, among many other things.

This explores so many themes like colonialism, racisim, revolution, the list goes on.

I do think it's perhaps a bit too long, there were points where I thought it was wrapping up but it kept going. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this and was in tears at the ending.

Also, I know I'm weird but I like footnotes