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Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
Nov. 26th, 2025 08:15 pmKatabasis
3/5. The elevator pitch on this is two grad students go to hell to retrieve their dead advisor in order to get recommendation letters. As you might expect, there’s a bit more to it than that.
Congratulate me, I finally finished an RF Kuang book. This was my third attempt in five years.
Parts of this are great. Some really sharp and accurate observations of what you do inside your mind as a woman trying to succeed under the authority of an asshole man. My circumstances were different, but boy did she nail the compromises, the things you tell yourself, the ways you try to out-competent misogyny (it doesn’t work that way). This book is also constructed on paradoxes as a magic system, and it goes hard on the double-think you have to engage in to survive that sort of thing.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really like anything else: the characters, the whole hell set of nested metaphors, the romance (god help me, I really cannot with that). I’m being a bit unfair here because I think I’m irritated at this book in part because of how some people talk about it. For real though, some people think this book is like some super deep intellectual masterpiece. And my dudes. I am concerned for you. This is the wikipedia version of formal logic. I know extremely little about this field and I can still tell that. It is not deep. This is not an insult, it’s just, you gotta be able to recognize a spade when it’s in front of you.
This was not really for me, but maybe one of her other fantasies will be, someday.
Content notes: Misogyny, a lot of suicidal ideation, ableism, sexual coercion, murder, gore.
3/5. The elevator pitch on this is two grad students go to hell to retrieve their dead advisor in order to get recommendation letters. As you might expect, there’s a bit more to it than that.
Congratulate me, I finally finished an RF Kuang book. This was my third attempt in five years.
Parts of this are great. Some really sharp and accurate observations of what you do inside your mind as a woman trying to succeed under the authority of an asshole man. My circumstances were different, but boy did she nail the compromises, the things you tell yourself, the ways you try to out-competent misogyny (it doesn’t work that way). This book is also constructed on paradoxes as a magic system, and it goes hard on the double-think you have to engage in to survive that sort of thing.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really like anything else: the characters, the whole hell set of nested metaphors, the romance (god help me, I really cannot with that). I’m being a bit unfair here because I think I’m irritated at this book in part because of how some people talk about it. For real though, some people think this book is like some super deep intellectual masterpiece. And my dudes. I am concerned for you. This is the wikipedia version of formal logic. I know extremely little about this field and I can still tell that. It is not deep. This is not an insult, it’s just, you gotta be able to recognize a spade when it’s in front of you.
This was not really for me, but maybe one of her other fantasies will be, someday.
Content notes: Misogyny, a lot of suicidal ideation, ableism, sexual coercion, murder, gore.