Day 1056: Book completed

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by R.F. Kuang. This alternate history novel by a Chinese-born grad student author is very much a scathing indictment of colonialism, with a very unusual magic system - it's powered by the differences in meaning by words that are used for each other in translation. For example, the English and French words for something, especially something abstract, have overlapping meanings, obviously, but often the two words have slightly different nuances that don't fully get conveyed, and in this world that difference has physical power in the world. Imagine, then, how much greater the words might be in English and Chinese. And then imagine that Britain uses this magic to power its Industrial Revolution.

She's also written a military-fantasy trilogy based on the Opium War, which is surely one of the worst things Britain has ever deliberately done. I'll probably read the first of those soon too. I've been reading a lot of long books!