BW2: 52 Books Bingo - Babel

 

Courtesy of Ancient Origins

Happy Sunday!  Our first 52 Books Bingo category is Babel.  In both biblical and Assyrian accounts, there was an ancient city in which the people tried to build a tower to reach the heavens and God caused all to speak in different languages.  In the dictionary, babel is described as a "confused mixture of sounds or voices or a scene of noise and confusion."  Synonyms for babel are an uproar, din, a hullabaloo, pandemonium, a lament, bedlam, or a clang.  Clang kind of reminds me of New York or cable cars. How about you?  However you want to define babel, there are a number of directions you could go for this category. 

I recently read R.F. Kuang's historical fantasy - Babel: An Arcane History which was an excellent. 

"1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years 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. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?"

Once I started reading, I  couldn't put it down. The etymology discussions and how the characters related to the world around them. How the characters grew in knowledge, and the choices they made, some good, some bad. All their heart wrenching decisions. All of it combined to create a story that made me think about how it related to today's world and why people do the things they do.  I highly recommend it. 

And it makes me want to reread Samuel R. Delaney's science fiction class - Babel-17 - which I have on my shelves.

" At twenty-six, Rydra Wong is the most popular poet in the five settled galaxies. Almost telepathically perceptive, she has written poems that capture the mood of mankind after two decades of savage war. Since the invasion, Earth has endured famine, plague, and cannibalism—but its greatest catastrophe will be Babel-17.
 
Sabotage threatens to undermine the war effort, and the military calls in Rydra. Random attacks lay waste to warships, weapons factories, and munitions dumps, and all are tied together by strings of sound, broadcast over the radio before and after each accident. In that gibberish Rydra recognizes a coherent message, with all of the beauty, persuasive power, and order that only language possesses. To save humanity, she will master this strange tongue. But the more she learns, the more she is tempted to join the other side . . ."

or 

Josiah Bancroft's steampunk adventure - Senlin Ascends, the first book in his 4 part series the books of babel. 

"The Tower of Babel is the greatest marvel in the world. Immense as a mountain, the ancient Tower holds unnumbered ringdoms, warring and peaceful, stacked one on the other like the layers of a cake. It is a world of geniuses and tyrants, of airships and steam engines, of unusual animals and mysterious machines.

Soon after arriving for his honeymoon at the Tower, the mild-mannered headmaster of a small village school, Thomas Senlin, gets separated from his wife, Marya, in the overwhelming swarm of tourists, residents, and miscreants.

Senlin is determined to find Marya, but to do so he'll have to navigate madhouses, ballrooms, and burlesque theaters. He must survive betrayal, assassins, and the long guns of a flying fortress. But if he hopes to find his wife, he will have to do more than just endure.

This quiet man of letters must become a man of action."

Check out Goodreads collection of stories about Babel or Punctum Book's The Anthology of Babel.

Happy Reading! 

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