Babel, or The Necessity of Violence

The premise is cool, all the linguistics stuff is right up my alley, but time and again I'm reminded that I'm just not into fantasy. I started to lose interest two-thirds in, and I'm also not the kinda reader who adores ‘young revolutionaries' types of literature. Nevertheless, I was happy to finish it, and the messages aren't lost on me. Overall a good book.

Also this is alternative history and fantasy, so no points are lost for bad etymologies, however there are so many cases of almost right etymologies that make it clear that Kuang is just wrong (the etymologies don't change the fantasy narrative). Stuff like saying English ‘night' and Spanish ‘noche' come from Latin ‘nox'. Because of errors like this that I am familiar with, I am sad that I can't add the other etymologies that I'm not familiar with, on account of Kuang's mishandling of etyma