June Yi (she/her)(1/2) Thanks to that *one* Babel review and the uproar it caused, I went out and bought the book (and I almost *never* buy hardcovers) and moved it up in my TBR pile. I gotta read this book that makes white people so angry 😆
(2/2) When the book first came out, it seemed right up my alley since I did my undergrad in linguistics, but TBH I was still recovering from reading the bleakness of Poppy War years ago. For someone who plays super violent video games, reading about that amount of violence was too much for me.
John McChesney-Young@juneyi I forced myself to stop reading a library copy of Babel because I knew I had to buy my own copy to read aloud to my wife because it was so good; we're about a quarter of the way through it. But I also never read the sequels to Poppy War because I found it too grim and violent.
@jmccyoung Wow, that's quite an endorsement! I miscalculated and did the one-two punch of reading the ____ (TW) of Nanjing right before Poppy War, which Kuang said she based some of the violence off of, and it was...not a good time. I think if I hadn't read that other book so close to Poppy, I could have handled it better.
@juneyi Thank you for the semi -warning about the Nanjing book! I knew of it but had avoided it for just that reason. With your background in linguistics you might enjoy Battle of the Linguist Mages: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/0509522d-effa-4f5b-97dd-62c21dbe723d It's not fabulous like Babel (so far, anyway) but it's quite good.
@jmccyoung Haha funny I tried to read Battle of the Linguist Mages but put it down. Too much glitter and just toooo extra for me. I really wanted to like it too, but it just didn’t click after a chapter or two.
@juneyi Good for you for not finishing! There are too many excellent books out there to keep reading ones you don't find congenial.