Babel, or The Necessity of Violence

3

This book was a ride. When reading a book I always have these moments where I think: “What rating would I give this book so far?”

This book went from a 5, to a 3. To a 4. To a 3. And a 4. And then I decided it would be a 3 after all.

You can tell that the writer has a lot of knowledge of linguistics, I even read a review saying “this is a book where Kuang is continuously flexing her knowledge” - I get why people would say this.

The beginning was intense, it immediately sucked me in. So much happened, it was gory, violent, intense... And then it just kinda fell flat (for me)? Suddenly I was in pages full of lectures and discussions about linguistics and etymology. I kept reading on a much slower pace than the beginning. My brain wasn't keeping up. At one point it even became a chore and I was thinking about DNF. Then I thought: what am I missing? This book is so highly rated. I was on page 250 and started reading reviews on Goodreads. There was literally someone who wrote: “I am currently on page 225 and I started reading reviews, because I'm not getting the hype” - At about the same point.

About 150 pages before the end, plot twists came. Stuff changed. A lot happened. I noticed myself suddenly reading the book very quickly until it, once again, started to slow down to such a way I couldn't really wait to finish the book so I could start on something new. I noticed myself quickly scanning some pages and I couldn't even be bothered to read entire footnotes anymore. I started annotating but kinda stopped halfway. I wrote down tl;dr at some footnotes. I first wasn't annoyed by the overuse of footnotes by the author, but in the end there is a page where more than 50% is a footnote. And chapter 36 (I believe...) is literally one sentence with two pages of footnotes?

Knowing the entire story, in the end, it was quite the ride. So much happened, changed, and there's definitely a underlying meaning in the entire story. But I guess, the way how dense the story was at some points, this book just wasn't for me.