Around April to early May, my reading choices start to be informed by the fact that I know Adult Summer Reading Book Bingo is around the corner. Which books should I go ahead and knock off of my TBR, and which should I save because they have a lot of possibility to fit into potential squares? When should I start reading a new non-fiction book to finish it before the challenge starts? Should I go ahead and grab another audiobook, start it now, and chance that it won’t fit any squares?!? What’s the optimal time to place holds for books that I suspect will be good choices?
Anyway, I’ve been wanting to read Babel by R.F. Kuang for a few months, especially after all the crap that came out about the Hugos and Kuang being removed from the ballot for nonsense reasons. Reading Yellowface had put me in the mood to give Babel a chance, having previously passed it up because I didn’t like The Poppy War. But I knew I didn’t want to try to read it in the middle of Book Bingo, because it’s a heckin’ chonker and even the people who like it admit that it really drags in the middle.
So friends, I gamed the system. I placed a hold on Babel, and I accepted it a couple of weeks before Book Bingo started, reasoning that I would finish it around when the challenge began. If it fit a prompt, great. If not, I wouldn’t have to spend another week or two finishing a book that wouldn’t count for anything. I’m happy to say that this strategy paid off in a big way, but more on that later.
After reading Babel, my short assessment is that it’s a good book, but it’s not a great book. The pacing issues really drag it down. And as someone whose website still current says I’m a freelance editor (I’m not, I’m an executive assistant), I like to think about how to fix the issues I see in a book. I’m not sure what Kuang could have done differently to reduce the saggy middle while still establishing all the facts and character moments that contribute to the much more dynamic final 20% or so of the book.
My other complaint is that while I did think Robin’s character arc was interesting and served the dark academia theme of the book, I would much rather have read a book with Victoire as the main character. I don’t want to get spoilery in this review, so I’ll just say I don’t think we got to see enough of her, and then when I finally learned her backstory, I wanted so much more of her.
My final gripe is that the magic system was unique, but it also felt very much like it was created for the purposes of the book and didn’t feel like something I believed people could have discovered on their own. I wanted to know more about the magical history of the world. Is the magic done at Oxford the only sort of magic in the world? How was it developed? What failures along the way led to it being in its current form?
But all complaints aside, this was a pretty good examination of academia and empire and language and privilege and protest. I can see it making a great book club book, if your club has the patience for long, slow-paced books, because there’s a lot of room to generate conversation around the final act of the book, who went too far, who didn’t go far enough, etc etc.
I’m not sure if it should have won the Hugo. Maybe it should have. I do remember feeling like the Best Novel category last year was pretty weak sauce. Like there were plenty of good books, but they were just that… good books. Nothing groundbreaking. For all of its flaws, Babel was definitely more thought-provoking than the other nominees, even if I might have enjoyed reading some of them more.
TWs and CWs: As you might expect from a book that’s about imperialism/colonialism, there’s a good amount of racism and sexism in this book. There’s also slavery, religious discrimination/persecution, and some classism. The Opium War becomes a major plot point. There’s general death, death of a parent, violence, and illness/plague/pandemic situations. There’s a scene of physical child abuse and a pervasive theme of emotional neglect/abuse.
Format and Source: I borrowed the ebook of Babel from Sno-Isle Libraries.
Book Bingo Prompts
SAL/SPL Adult Summer Reading: One Big Book (400+pages). This is, in fact, one big book. I’m so glad I read it as an ebook, because it’s apparently around 550 pages in print, and my hands just don’t like holding a book that big for long reading sessions! I believe it was well over 600 pages on my tablet, but 125 of those were footnotes because it was formatted so that each note had its own page. ANYWAY, this is a special prompt that fills two squares, so I am really glad I timed it right to count for this year’s challenge.
Book Bingo Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 13 out of 25 prompts complete. 1 bingo.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 10 out of 25 prompts complete. 0 bingos.
SAL/SPL Adult Summer Reading: 1 out of 23 prompts, 0 bingos.