the Lord of the Rings: book three

This book is the third part of J. R. R. Tolkien's timeless classic The Lord of the Rings series. As with previous more recent posts about these books, these are ones I've read before, so please dig into my blog history through category tags or the dated archive to see my fuller thoughts and/or summaries on the themes/plots of this story - I experienced this again through the ongoing mission of YouTuber Tolkien Trash to read the whole trilogy to her audience a chapter a week, a task which I have to say she is performing excellently.

Galatians Study

This book (available for free online from that link) is a Bible study by Tim Keller working through Paul's letter to the Galatian church. I've been working through it with my dad over the last few months, and would highly recommend it as a small-group study resource. The Galatian epistle is a potent little depth-charge of a book anyway, but Keller's insightful commentary and selection of passages from other theologians (especially John Stott and Martin Luther) who have written about the letter make this study extremely edifying and fruitful for thinking through Christian discipleship in powerfully provocative and helpful ways.

the Glass Hotel

This book is Emily St. John Mandel's fifth novel - the first of hers that I've read, but I was pleasantly rewarded with being introduced to her as a new talented author who kept me entertained throughout. She is a precise and unshowy writer, her prose not particularly poetic but well-suited to detailing events and feelings with nuance, mystery and character.

   In the story, we follow a number of different threads across numerous locations, skipping around between the years 1994 and 2018 (apart from one chapter set in 2029, but that's only three pages and doesn't add much to the plot). Paul Smith is an addict struggling to make it as a composer. Vincent is his half-sister working as bartender in Canada's remote Hotel Caiette. Jonathan Alkaitis, a New York financier, owns the hotel. Leon Prevant is an executive of the Neptune-Avramidis shipping company. In spring of 2005, a hooded figure writes in acid marker the message "why don't you swallow broken glass" on the glass wall of the Hotel Caiette; in December 2008, a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme run by Jonathan implodes; and in 2018, Vincent, now working as a cook onboard a Neptune-Avramidis ship, disappears off the coast of Mauritania. These people and events are all woven together in a nebulous but gripping tale of moral compromise, thwarted hope, the impacts of crossed paths, and how one never quite escapes the bits and pieces of their past.

   This is the first non-sci-fi/fantasy novel I've read in a while, and it was a great reminder that a good story well-told doesn't need all the bells and whistles of genre to make it so. I'd recommend this to pretty much any enjoyer of fiction.

Carbon Black Cicada

This book (available as a free download from that link) by David Brookes is a remarkably diverse and powerful collection of short stories. He was an extremely talented writer, with a knack for delicate phrases that lend surgical accuracy to his descriptions of situations and feelings, and a keen eye for human nature in all its variety, from the odd and unique to the universal and predictable.

   I will give a potted summary of each story in the book. We open with Sugar Cube, in which a father & daughter acclimatise to life in a new, strange, remote place. Next we have the titular Carbon Black Cicada - a snapshot biography of an aging sailor told through his tattoos. Head Under Water sees a man trying to set the world record for holding one's breath while wrestling with unrequited love, In Hellas is an exploration of the little frictions between a newlywed couple after the wife suffers an injury, and Vanilla is a close dissection of a guy's protective jealousy over his girlfriend's "friend". In Follow the Sun Underground a wealthy Mexican emigré returns home to quarrel with nature and spirituality, in Identifier a fisherman reminisces about his friend Jack after his trawler dredges up Jack's corpse from the Channel seafloor, and A Good Match is Hard to Find gives an account of a weird experience in the tricky modern dating scene. A Dictionary of Our Time in the Wild, probably my favourite piece from the whole book, is an alphabetical collection of memories of a spiky but deeply meaningful relationship with a nature lover. The Destination Before Next sees a film location scout investigate an Istanbul dockyard, then in Silverfish we remember the story told by a boy's sister about her three-day disappearance when they were seven. Precious Targets tells the story of a wildlife officer who gets roped into security detail for a rare orchid discovered in a park, in Pass, Pass an insomniac struggles to fully engage with a normal social life, and In Your Arms is an anecdote in which a diver off the Cornish coast gets detained by an octopus. Finally in The Only Lasting Beauty we are treated to reflections on the lessons about love taught by a deceased alcoholic mother.

   I don't read many short stories, but I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, and I reckon anyone with a healthy appreciation of humanly sensitive and invigoratingly originally-voiced fiction will too. You may also be interested to check out David's poetry, which is also of a superlative quality.

the Present Age

This book (available for free online from that link) by Søren Kierkegaard is a short but hella punchy treatise about the political and psychogical malaise that European modernism has left us in. The passion & activity of antiquity is gone, replaced by a blandly "democratic"* equilibrium roiling about in the seas of reflective intersubjectivity - the boons of education and understanding and the free press have left us all deeply well-informed, yet the sheer glut herein has left us existentially paralyzed when it comes to actually putting those informed understandings into action. He writes, "every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move." Rebellion in such a culture is essentially unthinkable. Readers familiar with old Søren won't be surprised to hear that he concludes that the only way for individuality and society to healthily balance each other out in any meaningful sense is the rediscovery of true religion.

   This is by far and away the most accessible Kierkegaard text I've read to date - it's not technical philosophy and should be easily readable by anyone with an above-your-average-American vocabulary. A final thought - though written in the seemingly alien atmosphere of mid-19th-century Copenhagen, this prophetic text speaks to the cultural, political and psychological snafus of 2025's dim/bright crazy/inevitable future presents with sparklingly uncanny accuracy & profundity. And did I mention it's very short and is online for free? Go read it.

* Kierkegaard's polemic here has left me considerably more favourable in my view of C. S. Lewis's takes on democratic equality, which as I've said left a lot to be desired when I read them in their own context.

Lays of Lost Thoughts

This book (available from that link as an online .pdf for free) by my late friend David Brookes is a phenomenal collection of poetry consisting of material written between 2016 and 2025. Before I talk about the book itself I want to talk briefly about David. He was a semi-regular attender of the spoken word night I host; I didn't know him as well as I would have liked but I liked him a lot. Softly spoken & articulate, considerate & generous, wise beyond his years & extremely easy to talk to however small or deep you wanted to go - he was a great guy and a much-valued part of our little community. So it was with great shock and sadness that I heard last month that he had taken his own life. I am publishing this post exactly a month after his memorial service. Heartbreakingly, mere days before he left us, he uploaded all of his work to his website as free .pdfs; alongside this poetry collection is a collection of short stories (which I aim to read very soon) and a monumentally ambitious five-part epic imagineering a lost mythology of the British Isles, complete with gods, monsters, heroes, and the like (which I will read at some point and which I thoroughly regret never having had the chance to talk to him about when he was alive, as it looks utterly fascinating); I urge you to check all of this out as David was a profoundly gifted writer.

   Which brings me to the book. All of the poems herein are free verse, and this collection is a dazzling testament to the power and profundity of that medium; contained within is also a breathtakingly marvellous breadth of expression. The poems range in theme from love & loss to the natural & cosmic to history & memory and more - I really struggled to select ones to mention specifically in this post as I could very easily highlight every poem in the book, but I've tried to limit myself to about 30-40% to leave a bit more wiggle-room for surprise when you go and read it yourself, which you absolutely should. In the opening few poems we get the bleary wanderlust of Where Were We followed by the tentative longing of Spools of Wool and the sheer wistful beauty of Listening to Your Recorded Presentation on Mortuary Practices in Medieval Byzantine Anatolia (which I read at our spoken word night in tribute to him after we'd heard the news). Then we get the simmering heartwrenching jealousy of There is a Burning Cold I Feel and passionate physicality of Yours Are Not the Cold Touches, the tender parasociality of The What That Happened to Brendan Fraser and even tenderer (if possible) silence of We Are Good at Looking at Each Other. After these, the blunt cynic realism of Paterson, and a delicious contrast between the indignant quietness of Look at You and the chaotic lovingness of The Riot of You. Then the demure nostalgia of Mosborough Moor and the detached pain of To the Marble in My Mouth, the familiar care of I Can't Help Her, the grimy determination of Scour, hopeful gratitude of Rievaulx, and remembered adventure of Wild Swimming. Catching up to current events, Invasion is a sensitive expression of solidarity with Ukraine, following which is the ponderous brilliance of Jabberwocky Prayer (one of my favourites). Flea Bomb almost leaves you personally itchy - you definitely feel the residual guilt, while Gold White has a gorgeous blending of love and nature imagery, and then Playlist (a found poem constructed out of collaged song lyrics) displays a deft selective precision. The final section of the book is called Songs of Extinction, each poem dedicated to a species of animal that has gone extinct within living memory - so treated are the desert bandicoot, the gloomy tube-nosed bat, the laughing owl and western black rhinoceros. Tragically, the final poem in this section and indeed the whole book is titled Self-Portrait as Animal (extinct by choice), and functions as something of a poet's farewell letter to a world that has given all it can to make life worth continuing. Serious content warning to readers who get to the end of the book for that one as though it is a beautifully written piece it is also a heartbreakingly honest portrayal of anguish and annihilation.

   This is a difficult post to write, but I think it's probably the most important post I've ever written on this blog for the simple fact that David deliberately bequeathed his work unto the wider world before his departure, and it would be a tragedy if his memory were not kept burning as brightly as possible by sharing and enjoying and being inspired by the brilliance of that work. So please, if you have even the slightest fondness for poetry (and his style is as wide as it is deep - precise yet pliable, erudite yet never indulgently elusive); go download this book and read it at your leisure. And lest it not be said, be kind to one another. You never know the intensity of pain someone might be plastering a stable face over. I've been torturing myself with the thought that had I been just a bit friendlier or more intentional or encouraging I might have tipped the balance and David would still be living and laughing and breathing and writing. But I know from his memorial service that there were many people far closer to him than I who were far better positioned to be that kind of support and it still wasn't ultimately enough to assuage everything that pushed him to where he ended up. That said, we all walk our own roads and bear our own burdens, but company is always nice and is more often than not helpful in the struggle. So share, and listen, and love. Nobody makes the world a better place simply by leaving it.

For the Emperor

This book is the first of three in the first* omnibus collection of Ciaphas Cain stories by Sandy Mitchell - I'm reviewing each novel in the omnibus in a separate post as that only seems fair (and boosts my numbers for blog purposes).  As I do with all series, I'll do brief posts for the first couple and then a longer more reflective post once I've finished this introductory trilogy.

   Alongside the titular novel is a prelude short story called Fight or Flight, in which we are first introduced to Cain (a commissar whose dazzlingly heroic reputation is very much at odds with the reality of his character as a cunning coward who just wants a quiet life with as little mortal danger as possible - however life in the Imperial Guard never seems to quite grant him this - an amusing subversion of the genuinely heroic nature of most other famous commissars from the Warhammer 40,000 universe**) as he is introduced to his new placement with the Valhallan 12th Field Artillery, assigned a smelly aide called Jurgen, and narrowly avoids being consumed by a tyranid incursion.

   The novel itself picks up a few years later, as Cain is newly placed as commissar to the amalgamated mixed-gender regiment of the Valhallan 597th and sent to the remote backwater world Gravalax where Imperial citizens have been trading, heretically, with the Tau Empire. War over such an insignificant planet is not deemed worthwhile by the Guard so this mission is, at first at least, primarily diplomatic; wanting the humans to stop, or at minimum reduce, their problematic relations with the alien races, in such a way as to avoid violence (all of which is very much fine by Cain) - a goal set straight from the Inquisition itself. However events conspire as to raise the stakes, and Cain finds himself at the heart of a shambolic mess of risk-whichever-way-you-turn, only for things to get less confusing but even worse safety-wise when a genestealer cult is discovered who have manipulating developments from underground (quite literally - the second half of this novel largely takes place in a tunnel complex). The resolution is more of matter of muddled luck than anything authentically courageous or clever, which I suspect is par for the course in this particular commissar's career. I look forward to the next instalment.

* At time of writing there are ten Ciaphas Cain novels and many short stories out, and while I have no doubt I would enjoy reading them they're very low down my priority list given how much else I have to read - within the same universe I'm going back to my focus on the Horus Heresy.

** Looking specifically at you, Ibram Gaunt. And I suppose Yarrick.

Against Method

This book by Paul Feyerabend is one of the most important and certainly the most radical books of philosophy of science to come out of the twentieth century. It forms almost a perfect sequel to Thomas Kuhn's book in the same field - only, where Kuhn gave us an objective "what happens and how" of revolutions in scientific fields, Feyerabend here gives us a more subjective "what could maybe happen, and how to do it". To use a comparative metaphor, Kuhn wrote of scientific revolution like Marx wrote of its socio-economic equivalent, while Feyerabend writes of it like Che Guevara, chock full of grassroots incitement to properly-informed action and ample tactical advice (using Galileo's career as prime example).

   I won't go into depth with a summary of what he talks about in this book as it spans a huge arena of the history of science, its present and future capacities, and the dynamics at play in determining what we may consider progress in all of this. To give a very brief summary of the main point of the text though, I will say that Feyerabend sees the only sustainably trustworthy epistemological approach to science as that of anarchism. That is to say, when approaching theory, fact, experiment, and so on, the only reasonable guideline to guarantee that progress can intuit itself into the field's grasp on its object is: "anything goes." I like this a lot. It's a healthy reminder that even the most open-minded empiricists can, and do, get bogged down in the accumulation of the best thinking of all the open-minded empiricists who came before them, and thus often cease being effective open-minded empiricists. Epistemological anarchism is an approach that rightly inspires terror in the hearts of academics who have devoted their careers to the minutiae of issues under particular paradigms; however as an approach deigning to liberate and guarantee the continual advancement of any kind of knowledge, it's very difficult to argue with given how unpredictable are the paradigm shifts in any given field of study.

   If you're interested in the philosophy of science I'm going to assume that you've already read this, but if you're merely a scientist who has given relatively little thought to the epistemological conditions of your work, I'd highly recommend this if you want a revolutionary energising shock.

the Lord of the Rings: book two

This book by J.R.R. Tolkien is one I've read for this blog in the last few years, hence the link going back to that post - I'm re-experiencing the series in audio form read a chapter a week by the delightful Tolkien Trash, which I'm still very much enjoying. Check out her channel for some of the best Tolkien-related content YouTube has to offer.

the Structure of Scientific Revolutions

This book by Thomas Kuhn is probably the most significant work in the philosophy of science to come out of the twentieth century. In it, Kuhn skips around the history of scientific endeavour to sketch a theory of how progress in these fields happens. Science of a particular era subsists in what he calls a paradigm, a collectively-agreed-upon web of assumptions, problems and techniques that define the scope and limits of the field at that time. It is only when a particular paradigm begins to encounter anomalies that it is unequipped to explain, and thus enters a period of crisis, that hitherto unthought-of methods and speculations emerge, and thus a scientific revolution (think Copernicus overturning the Ptolemaic astronomical system, or Einstein going so far beyond Newton that the previously accepted physics became a redundant rump) takes place - the paradigm shifts, and new modes of understanding become possible, new questions become salient, and new experiments become required to continue advancing the frontiers of knowledge. I was pleasantly surprised by how readable this book was - I'm interested in science but don't read much of it as I find myself either feeling alienated by the abundance of jargon or patronized by the author's obvious overcompensations in avoiding jargon, but Kuhn avoids both extremes and explores this whole nest of topics in an accessible and enlightening way. Absolutely highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the history and philosophy of science.

Titanicus

This book is a Warhammer 40,000 novel by Dan Abnett - yes, I know, another one. He's my fave, what can I say. Only this one doesn't revolve around the plucky Imperial Guard or morally-questionable Inquisitors; this one is about the Titan Legions themselves. The god-machines - walking cathedrals of destruction.* I'd been aware of this novel when it came out seventeen years ago, but simply wasn't that excited about it - I mean, Titans are so ridiculously big and overpowered that how can you have any serious stakes in a story about them? Turns out I was wrong. The way you have serious stakes in a story about Titans is by A) making the enemy have even more Titans than the good guys and B) throwing in a healthy spattering of ground-level ordinary troopers and even a civilian or two so you can skip between perspectives and view the ridiculously big overpowered explosions from behind void shields 150 metres in the air or from a terrifying Normal Person's-Eye View - and Dan does both of these brilliantly. There are at least five or six separate plot threads going off within this book, and while only overlapping intermittently, they all wind up contributing somewhat to the overall resolution, and all get wrapped up largely satisfactorily. While for me this is nowhere near the re-read value of Gaunt's Ghosts, it was still a thumping good read; and it's always fun to see the Adeptus Mechanicus up close, they're so weird as a faction that I find them disturbing and fascinating and hilarious and tragic all at once, and Dan captures new angles of them in exciting and surprisingly relatable ways.

* The simplest way to explain them to non-40k initiates is to ask "have you seen Pacific Rim? well yeh, basically that, but moreso, and fighting entire armies instead of the odd kaiju or two."

the Booktime Book of Fantastic First Poems

This book, edited by June Crebbin and illustrated by Emily Bolam and Nick Sharratt, is a collection of poetry aimed at getting children to read and enjoy it. I read it having seen it lying out at my parents' house after my niece and nephew had been to visit, and rather enjoyed it. All the poems, which are split between the two categories of "animals" and "nonsense", are understandably very short; and the book features inclusions from many well-regarded children's poets - John Agard, Eleanor Farjeon, Michael Rosen, Ted Hughes and Rose Fyleman all get at least one thrown in, although a fair few of the poems included here are anonymous. Overall a decent little book to introduce children probably aged 3ish to 7ish to poetry.

Point Me at the Stars

This book is the second collection by Noel Williams; like his first collection I was given a copy of this by my friend Ian (whose own book you should also check out). This is a much shorter collection, but the themes are far more consistent - these are poems about distance and closeness, isolation and ambition. Heron-dream speaks of that which is tantalisingly out of reach and Appreciating physics applies this same feeling to belief; the later poem Reality check brings to mind knowable comforts in the midst of desperation; and the final in the collection Nocturne with lake and astronomer seems to be considering the loneliness of perception. A concise and powerful little book of poetry - would recommend.

Out of Breath

This book is Noel Williams's debut poetry collection. I was given a copy by my friend Ian, whose wife was a friend of Williams before his recent death. This is a diverse and powerful collection, and I really enjoyed reading it. The opening poem, Snow on the edge, is positively pregnant with expectation; leading into the quietness of On the verge of the M40 and the stillness-yet-adventurousness of The island, the morose fatalism of Daphne, the summery atmosphere of Sunburn and the paranoia of Safe house, the wistfulness of Refraction, the defeated undefeatabilitiness of Heartbeat, the impressive quasi-haiku sequence that is A rose of broken stone, then a pair of sequences that take on a sombre anti-war tone in Till Death and Kim Phuc, and finally the indefatigable hope of the closing title poem. The sheer breadth of emotionality in these poems is startling, yet they all have a similar human warmth to them that breathes through the deft control of their language. A collection well worth reading.

For the Hypothetical Aliens

This book* is a poetry pamphlet by Ian Badcoe, a friend of mine from the spoken word events I host. As the title suggests, this collection straddles the hazy line between science fact and science fiction, as such being intended as a statement of human identity to any alien races we may whenever encounter out in the cold, wide galaxy. I really enjoyed this little book - from the loneliness of the opening poem A note on broken hearts to the following considerations about the Drake equation, then the concise empathic statement of Personal space probe and the hyper-optimistic magic of She knows whereof she speaks, a litany of pop-cultural examples of how humanity comments on itself via imagined alternative races, and finally ending with a banging mic-drop moment in The shapes of things to come. Badcoe's poetic style is dry and precise, lending itself perfectly to the material's themes; I hope that should we ever encounter aliens for real, someone will have the wherewithal to lend them a copy of this early in the communication process so that they have a bit more context for where we're coming from and what they may meaningfully expect of us.

* Unfortunately it's not available from anywhere online, so if you want a copy I recommend getting in touch with Ian himself and asking if he has any copies left to sell. I'm sure he'll oblige if so.

Logic

This book by Wilfrid Hodges is an introduction to the field of elementary logic. I bought a copy of this way back in 2012 after my interview at Oxford university, having found out that this was the standard textbook for first year logic in the philosophy strand of PPE that I had applied for - then I didn't get in, so I never got round to reading it.* Until now. Formal logic straddles that bizarre border between philosophical and mathematical kinds of thinking, but despite maths being far from my best subject I found Hodges's distillation of the core principles, methods, and tools at play to be well-paced, accessible, and engaging.

   We start off with the very basics - sentences as expressions of beliefs, how we determine whether one of these is true or not, ambiguities and borderline cases entailed herein, how these simple constituents of thought can be built up into more complex forms, and how one can test these for logical consistency and validity. Moving onto the next level up, we are introduced to logical analysis and its truth-functors, the process of converting sentences into tableaux, and the formal language of propositional calculus. Then we work through designators, identity, relations, and quantifiers, all the while relating all of this back to everything we've learnt so far. The penultimate section puts it all together in predicate logic, before finally ending on a section that considers the problems that logicians are still wrestling with (as despite having been an established field of philosophy/mathematics since at least Aristotle, most of the major advancements have been made only in the last three or four centuries and there are still areas displaying niggling room for improvements to be made) and where these may, or may not logically be able to, go in the future.

   Aside from being an extremely user-friendly introductory text, never assuming you to be familiar with a term or concept or technique not already covered by Hodges himself, this book really cements itself as of academic value by its inclusion in every section of several exercises relating to what you've just read. I tried to do most** of these throughout my reading, and was pleasantly surprised to note that I got on the whole (unsurprisingly with the margins slipping the closer to the end of the book I got) about 60-65% of my answers (all the correct answers are included in a very lengthy appendix) correct - which in university terms is a 2:1 so I'm pretty chuffed about that.

   Formal logic is not a field that being good at means you're going to be right all the time. That's not what logic is or does. Formal logic is a field that being good at does, however, mean that you're going to be secure in the validity and consistency of your own truth claims in the context of their premises as your beliefs. Logic is not an answer - not does it supply these; it is a tool for working out whether any given answer is commensurate with the questions being asked. Halfway through a complex debate it's hardly reasonable to hold up a finger to request a pause in the discourse while you break down every sentence uttered thus far in the established context into a predicate tableaux to make sure that both sides are debating logically. But the more familiar you get with the linguistic and Obvious elements at play in logical analysis the easier it will be for you to spot and avoid invalid or inconsistent sets of claims. Truth is Obvious when it is so, but why then does argumentation exist? Let beliefs be what they subjectively will be, and let logic never supersede itself to determine those but only govern its own realm - that is, of thinking well. And this book will help you get better at that.

* I went on to study philosophy and economics for my undergraduate in Sheffield, then a Masters in politics - so I got to do PPE after all, screw you Oxford... that said, I still wish I'd read this sooner after acquiring this, as it may well have helped me boost my grades anyway.

** Anything that could be answered by pencil scribbling in the margins of the book itself I devoted my full effort to - but a fair few of the exercises demanded a reader to construct truth tables or sentence tableaux or what have you, which are not the kind of things you can fit in the margins of an A5 textbook, and though I did attempt some of these properly, I didn't always have both scrap paper to hand AND the mental wherewithal to bother, so in these cases I simply read the correct answer in the appendix and then re-read the exercise and worked through it in my head until I was confident I understood why the answer was what it was.

Artemis Fowl

This book is a novel for younger readers by Eoin Colfer - the first in a very long-running series that I have no intention of reading the rest of, as I have too much else to read. That said it is a very fun book. Without wanting to spoil the story, a potted summary would be: twelve-year-old Artemis Fowl, our eponymous criminal mastermind, may have bitten off more than even he can chew after he successfully kidnaps a fairy. If I'd been aware of this series when I was within its target audience range (of probably sevenish to fourteenish) I would have absolutely devoured it - as an adult reader it still has a lot going for it, Colfer is a witty and deftly skilled writer, the characters are well-sketched and interesting, the worldbuilding is colourful and original, and the plot ticks along at a very consistently exciting pace. Highly recommended for children who like a bit more of a wry, punchy tone to their fantasy.