Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Skarsgård or Curry?

IT by Stephen King

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

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Two Halloween-ish reads this month! I’ve been lagging behind a bit and that’s mostly to do with the fact that I ended up picking two hefty tomes that I didn’t enjoy all that much. First up: Stephen King’s IT.  We all know the story: mysterious killer clown kills children in `the small town of Derry, is chased by a group of people, first as children, then as adults. My dad made me watch the film when I was six. That’s all you need to know […]

“An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.”

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F Kuang

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1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to England by Professor Lovell, a mysterious Englishman who happened to appear at his mother’s deathbed . Once there, he trains for years at a grueling pace in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. (And yes, it’s a tower; subtlety, this England doth not have it.) Babel is the world’s center for translation and, more importantly, magic. […]

Going Through Hell

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

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Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are graduate students studying Magick at Cambridge University. They are both being advised by the star of the department, Jacob Grimes, a professor they fear and worship in roughly equal measures. Desperate to secure a rare job placement in academia, they would do anything for Grimes, including, as it turns out, taking a literal trip to Hell for him. When a seemingly routine Magick trick goes wrong and sends their advisor to the afterlife, Alice and Peter are each determined […]

“That’s just what translation is…. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases…”

Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution (A Novel) by R.F. Kuang

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Cbr17bingo Black Imagine a world in which a kind of magic exists that is only accessible to those skilled in foreign language, those who are so fluent they dream in those languages. In Babel, RF Kuang immerses the reader in a world that, despite the presence of “magic,” is strangely and sadly familiar. This is a novel about imperialism and racism, but it’s also about friendship and bravery in the face of odds stacked against you. It is a long novel (over 500 pages) but […]

A Grimdark Story Set in Fantasy China

The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang

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Rin is a war orphan whose foster parents are planning to marry her off to an older man. To escape a fate that she considers to be worse than death, Rin works herself to the bone to study for the national test that will determine whether she can escape her rural province. Thanks to the help of her tutor and her own brutal work ethic, Rin excels and earns a place at Sinegard, the war academy of the Nikan Empire. Arriving at Sinegard, she realizes […]

Lost in Translation

Babel by R.F. Kuang

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After reading and enjoying the Poppy War trilogy, I was excited to see a new book by R.F. Kuang. I found the world of Babel intriguing right away. It is mostly set in Victorian era England, but where much of the technological progress of the industrial revolution has been replaced by a form of magic imbued into silver bars. The people working the magic into the silver are the translators of Oxford University. They work on finding translations of words from various languages into English, […]



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