Babel, by R.F. Kuang This review has been a long time coming! Dark academia at its strongest, the book follows Robin Swift, an orphaned boy from Canton brought by his guardian to Britain to study at Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation, the source of the nation's colonial and industrial power. I really enjoyed this book, it's a chunk but I read it in a couple of days. It's intelligent, fast-paced, and well-researched. As an ex-linguist, I thoroughly enjoyed the idea that translation is a betrayal of a mother tongue, and becomes a new beast heavily burdened with its own cultural heritage and the individual predispositions of the translator. It's an incredibly clever idea, and works so well because Kuang is a complete authority in the subject. She writes beautifully, and the footnotes throughout the book could have run the risk of making the book dense, but instead they're extra flavouring, sprinkled on top and interesting in their own right. Th...
A Lay-Author’s Thoughts On Women and Herbalism A stained glass window depicting Hildegard von Bingen at Église Sainte-Foy, Alsace via Wikimedia Commons When I sat down to write The Gilded Crown and thought ‘wouldn’t it be interesting if the main character were a medieval herbalist’, I was blessedly unaware of the enormous rabbit hole I was about to tumble into head-first. Cue many, many hours spent trawling books and articles on herblore and hedgewitchery, everything from the historical – Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician – to the scientific – Dauncey, Howes and Larssons’ Plants that Cure and Plants that Kill series (if you ever want to know the chemical composition of any plant poison, they’re your stop) – to the charmingly whimsical, such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage series. It was all fascinating and inspired me to make my own herbal oils and decoctions, but in the process, I came across Burkhard Bilger’s review of John Rid...