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This book is the debut pamphlet of poetries by Jonathan Kinsman (who as well as being founding editor of the cracking journal Riggwelter Press runs the Gorilla Poetry spoken word events I've been frequenting), which is literally so good it won the Indigo Dreams prize for poetry pamphlets. I don't know how they judge these things or what & was up against but to me it seems like it probably deserved to win whatever the case.

   & is a collection in which poetic language use is pushed to its fullest, drawing out huge emotional sprawlings; where the connectivities of selfs, others, words, objects, feelings, actions, and the intangible moments of choice and uncertainty which peg all these components of reality together are pinpointed with a deftness of phrase that would be uncanny if you noticed it (which you do upon re-reading, such is the craftspersonship), which you might well not because the headspace these poems pull you into, with an at once intimate and yet detached immediacy, is deliberately kept fluid - you follow trains of thought and narrative which sometimes meander gently, sometimes twist sharp corners and skid off toward a previously-unseen horizon, always providing an exactly right space in which the poems unfold in their self-contained entireties. As such it's the longer ones which I would pick as favourites if I were in the habit of doing this (which regular readers will maybe know I'm not); iterations of self and it's like this are just superbly subtle and poignant as they go on, recursively exploring an amount of conceptual nooks and crannies to a poetic subject which you probably couldn't come up with yourself in a solid hour of coffee-fuelled brainstorming, and here Kinsman neatly encapsulates all these variegations and ruminations in (one would think) impossibly concise and breathtakingly potent nuggets of verse.

   It goes without saying I enjoyed this pamphlet a lot. If you want an introduction to perhaps one of Manchester's most interesting new up-and-coming poets, look no further.

Life Together

This book (available for free as online pdf in that link, you're welcome) by Dietrich Bonhoeffer* is probably among the most concise, helpful, practical, gracious, context-flexible and biblically-rooted explorations of Christian community I have ever read. In five short readable chapters exploring the nature of community, the typical or ideal day when with others or alone, ministry, and confession and communion, Boffers offers us a rich and life-affirming gospel tapestry of where our selves and relations may go wrong, and how we can try to help them go right by being truly grounded in Christ - individually and togetherly. A must-read for folks in church leadership & membership alike.

* An incredibly inspiring man in 20th-century Christianity who was martyred by the Nazis for opposing their - being - well, Nazis, I guess. Also the person alongside whose name I was first ever introduced to the term theologian, because Tim Chester's cat was named after him and obviously this demanded an explanation, because "Boffy" is a weird name, and even weirder when you're told what it's short for.

Socrates: A Man for Our Times

This book is a biography of western philosophy's foundational figure by Paul Johnson - and my goodness, is it excellent. Dealing with his ideas deftly, and embedded in their original contexts, he brings the man to life that even Plato barely manages to fumble; the picture painted of ancient Athens, the raw challenges of Socrates's credo that one's life should be examined, directed with meaning and purpose, that it is open at all points to moral or intellectual challenge for not living up to its own purported standards; his monotheism, his reputation as a soldier and athlete, and statesman of the democratic society - or how these images of the man were skewed by philosophers and playwrights toward ulterior political or cultural ends after his willing submission to the death penalty for his "blasphemies"; even his amusingly-sketched relationship with his overbearing wife and their life of happy poverty - this is historical biography done to perfection, thoroughly entertaining to read but you can virtually smell the rigour of research on every page and I learnt more about Socrates through this one book than in that whole module of ancient Greek philosophy that - actually, now thinking about it I didn't take when I was an undergrad... OK maybe I'm thinking of Keanu's refs, but you get the point. Anyway, one last punt - the subtitle; Johnson does throughout pepper the text with considerations of how the life & thought of Socrates parallels those of numerous other thinkers across the history of western life & thought - and though in my view didn't expand this as fully as I'd have liked to see does draw some really interesting contemporary application points out of it all. Definitely worth a read for anyone who's a fan of philosophy, history, or both.

the Physics of Star Trek

This book by Lawrence Krauss is, as the title suggests, a hard-thunk scrutinizement of the biggest & best elements in science fiction, through the particular lens of Gene Roddenberry's creations, to see how well, if at all, such things square up to the realities of actual existing scientific reality as we understand it. As someone who's generally found it somewhat of a mind-mangle to get the general laws of physics into my head anyway, but loves science fiction, I actually found myself learning a great deal about actual real science from the derived applications of this book - Krauss writes extremely clearly and is a brilliant educator on his subject - which shouldn't be a surprise, the man's an eminent professor, not just your average Trekkie who's done a wikipedia trawl degree. Oh, did I mention there's a foreword by Steven Hawking?

   In terms of content it's split into three broad chunks: the first dealing with wormholes, relativity, "warp"-speed and all that quantum spacetime jazz; the second dealing with matter - thus by extension the implications of teleportation, holograms, and whatnot; and the third a more deep-speculative dive into theories around alien life-forms' possible, and probable, existence.*

   I really enjoyed this book - as mentioned I learnt a lot about physics from it, and all in rather practical ways, as my motivations for reading it was primarily research for my own science-fiction story that I'm working on. But I'll not toot that horn here - this book I'd give a hearty recommendation to anyone with a healthy skeptical approach to pop-culture and enjoyment of scientific learning, though I wouldn't necessarily recommend it all to closely to most Trekkies unless they're also intellectually humble enough to have numerous what might be sacred cows diligently and systematically sacrificially dissected before their very eyes...

* Though, with apologies to Roddenberry's ghost, Krauss does conclude much alongside my own personal gist that should we ever discover or encounter extraterrestrial life - it seems thoroughly unlikely that they will look & live Pretty Much Exactly Like Homo Sapiens but with Different [ears/skintones/foreheads/etc] and [x/y/z] Cultural Quirks.

Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity & Integrity

This book by Christine Korsgaard is quite possibly in my top three or four philosophical books I've read, period. I had read sections of it alongside this a few years ago when I was doing an undergraduate essay on conceptions of agency in practical reason, earmarking it as a book to revisit and properly digest later on - this time not for mere academicalism but to properly imbibe of and benefit from the potency of insights she makes herein.

   Synthesizing ideas from Plato, Aristotle and Kant, alongside her own formidable weight of intellectual reflective handling of such diverse themes of psychological behaviouralism, the questions of what makes a person effective at being a person, how we respond at all to things like goodness or rightness; the ground covered here is incredibly holistic in scope and yet holds together into a cohesive train of argument that never dithers on the fences of empty philosophizing but consistently returns to the fertile soil of pragmatic, day-to-day human lived application - which is what all true philosophy should be and do, imho. I'm not going to pretend a cogent synthetic summary of the ideas contained herein is at all within either the intentional or possible parameters of my writing this post, but to give a roughly hazarded breakdown of what I think she's getting at in this book - it is the very question of what it means to live well, how a human person can conceptualize themselves in practical ways in relation to ideas about goodness and reason in a world so often devoid of either in the immediate circumstances; and how constantly choosing to cultivate one's own identity in line with notions of goodness, rational truth and whatnot ultimately shape the meaningful essence of our identities - how well we do this developing what she refers to as our integrity. She does shine some excellently critical lights into the murkier what-if corners of our failures to do this as well - with such problematic elements of human being as ignorance, moral failure, and incoherent aspects of our constituted beings all being dealt with generously and in my opinion rather satisfactorily. One small gripe I would take with it is that she deals primarily with autonomy and agency in these senses with regard to the individual, and so much of the kind of organic intersubjectivity that shapes, for good or ill, our capacities and efficacies in the pursuits talked about in this book aren't given the scrutiny I would have been keen to hear her delve into - but this is a small trifle when one considers how much truly helpful ground she has otherwise covered - no doubt that side of things is something she has talked about elsewhere,* or may someday.

   As you'd probably guess from an Oxford University Press book, it is pretty dense reading and though Korsgaard writes excellently and this is much more accessible than a majority I think of typical books in this kind of ballpark, it would still be a bit of a hard go for those who haven't delved previously into the mindfields of psychological philosophy - but I'd say probably most people seriously willing to give their brains a bit of a workout could handle this book relatively easily, so long as you don't expect it to be the kind of thing you can just bash out in a few afternoons, and are happy to google the occasional word. And yes, I would very much recommend this book to basically anyone as the insights contained in it are so life-givingly pragmatic and reasonable that it would be an excellent book to anyone - so if you'd like to take the plunge and give your own grasp at being a coherent person a long hard thought-stare, I heartily recommend Christine Korsgaard's work as a springboard - and though I can't say I'm a scholar I'm confident enough this is a good starting point.

* I am speculating here - sadly, as I am no longer a student of any university, my access to philosophy books is now considerably more limited, as they're bloody expensive, and they won't let me in the student libraries with quite the same degree of welcome as I once had.