Babel — R.F. Kuang
Babel — R.F. Kuang
A fantasy novel about translation, empire, and power inside a magical Oxford institute.
Essay
This book stayed with me because it treats language as power, not just as expression. Translation, naming, and interpretation are never neutral here, and that made the whole thing feel intellectually alive to me.
It belongs close to Language as Thought because it sharpened my sense that language does not only describe reality. It organizes access, hierarchy, legitimacy, and exclusion too. As someone who cares a lot about words and their precision, that made the book feel unusually relevant.