“Babel” by R. F. Kuang

It took me months and months to read this book, and I almost gave up several times. The closest was when I reached the section about Letty’s betrayal leading to the killing of key members of the Hermes Society. The book is very long and pedantic, and the subject matter, colonialism and exploitation, is described in all its horror. As I said, it took me forever to find the emotional strength and interest to finish Babel.

That said, I must also add that the book is very well written, though I did get tired of reading about match pairs of words, and their effects on silver. The characters are well developed and very realistic. The protagonist is Robin Swift, who was the result of a commercial sexual union between a Chinese woman and an English professor, who planned to put the resulting child to work as a translator at Babel, at the University of Oxford. Babel’s function was the manipulation of silver to augment all aspects of the infrastructure making up England. A vey few benefitted, while most suffered from lost jobs, overly fast machines causing injury and death etc etc.

“Pearly Everlasting” by Tammy Armstrong

 I bought this book because it took place in New Brunswick, and the word ‘gothic’ was used in its description. I guess I’m glad I read this story about a girl and her bear “brother” and their lives in a logging camp, but I did find it to be somewhat slow. I never did bother to look up some of the very technical logging vocabulary that the author used, and her descriptions, though evocative, were sometimes unclear to me. There were, of course, cruelty and sorrow in the book, but love as well. Logging was a very hard life indeed.

And I must say, there was less of the gothic than I had hoped for. I guess it resided in the tall tales/myths of creatures living in the forest.