Babel

 Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History by R. F. Kuang, 544 pages.

Kara reviewed this book in December here, and I'm going to link her review because the premise of this one is a bit complex and I couldn't have done a better job myself. 

This book, despite all of the academia and technical knowledge that went into it, still feels pretty easy to follow, and it's pace is much quicker than what I expected. I do feel the need to mention though that in many ways this feels like two books in one. The novel is divided into five books. The first two cover mostly Robin, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty's lives as a cohort at Babel, Oxford's college of translation, while books four and five deal more directly with colonialism (and three serves as a sort of bridge). I read the first half of this book pretty leisurely, picking it up and putting it down many times over the course of a few weeks, but by the time I reached the end of book three I was seriously hooked. 

This book is an interesting dialogue and well-crafted. I can't quite shake the feeling that I wanted something from it that I didn't get, but I would still call it a very solid book with a lot of interesting things going on inside.