Of Mice and Men

This book by John Steinbeck* I honestly don't know how I ever let slip past my readership during school, as it's an undisputed classic of American humanism; the lead pair painted as raw, believable and deft such that the overall emotional power in these characters is astounding, despite their relatively simple sketches. The turbulent desperation faced by the little man during the Great Depression is palpable on every page, and for enormous-yet-childlike Lennie & his streetsmart guardian George this is, harrowingly, no different: their quest for some semblance of security is everything. It's fairly short for a novel - and I found it unputdownable, finishing it in a single horrified heartrending sitting. A singularly powerful work meditating on men, our mortal smallnesses, bignesses, hungers and thirsts and fears.

* Its title I always assumed was a Shakespeare borrowing, but it's actually from Rabbie. 

Thief of Time

This book is the twenty-sixth Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, and stands as one of my favourites from the whole series that I've thus far eaten. [sorry, read.] It follows a tight ensemble of characters magical, mystical, temporally-abnormal, immortal, disco-ordinated by the shocking revelations of how tasty chocolate is, and/or even relatively normal and just disgruntled by all the weird goings on - even though 'normal' goings-on in the Monastery of Time* is a bit of a stretch. Anyway, no time to give purported summaries of a story that

1. I don't wanna spoil

2. is so fkin weird I don't think I could

3. will make you laugh so much you won't care

* Basically it's a timeless haven in/atop a mountain where Monks live whose duty it is to pump time from places/times where it's less needed to places/times where it's more. Yeh - fair warning, if you're not a fan of Steven Moffat's legacy, this isn't the Discworld novel to get you started. Lots of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey & blink-or-you'll-miss-it infodots

a Generous Orthodoxy

This book by Brian D. McLaren is another truly pivotal vägmärk on my walk with the growing strangeness of my relationship with Christ's body, the Church - as I feel it probably has with a great many of my brothers, sisters and non-binary siblings in the community of us worldwide.
   In it, he dedicates a chapter each to exploring why he can, in the fullness of gospel truth, consider himself to be each of the adjectives in the subtitle of the book: missional, evangelical, postprotestant/protestant, liberal, conservative, poetic/mystical, Biblical, charismatic, contemplative, fundamentalist, Calvinist, anabaptist, Anglican, incarnational, Methodist, catholic, green, emergent, depressed-yet-hopeful & unfinished: - many of these, which are used here as adjectival labels, are more commonly seen and adhered to as "in-group" border-maintenance tools by denominations, and though before reading this book and probably the main thing that led me to reading this book was a sneaking suspicion that if Jesus is truly God's son and the Church his body then humanly-constructed/maintained denominations are kind of a bullshit idea, having now read & digested it I think perhaps there is something else there, something deeper, weirder - so strange, beautiful, sad and perfect that only God could have planned it - that our endless splitting of hairs and ideologies in the bizarre evolutionary tree of Christian history has not led to an inevitably entropic end - but that each strand, each twig, let off freely to pursue its own inklings may do so within the full assurance of Jesus's goodness & promise, to someday, and I pray this might be soon but only God can say - to return home, to a Church unified, where the insights and perspectives of all may be reconciled in Truth and good faith to one another - all having something to share, much to learn, and a great deal more that actually unites them all that they can remind each other of in all joy.
   It's with this book that I can in my brain-heart now rest easier in no longer feeling like I was properly "part" of the ideological-theological community I'd been inhabiting since my home-church joined it nor really a participatingly-up-to-speed part of the one that has since adopted me - I am in Christ, and the labels ultimately, while they don't entirely not matter, don't define me in my being in Christ - and as such I am free to see, and benefit from the insights of, any group that falls under any adjective one might think fit to append to their own particular cell in the great historical body of God's son. How liberating is that?

A Secret History of Christianity

This book by Mark Vernon is a fascinatingly erudite, mindblowingly holistically-applicable and thoroughly thought-provoking exploration of the work of Owen Barfield - probably the least well-known of the main Oxford literary threesome of the inklings, though the other two better known members of this club both cited him as of key inspiration early on in their artistic and intellectual careers.* In it, we're taken on an invigorating mystical romp across the history of an element absolutely central to the metaphysical efficacy of this predominant world religion: that all good, true and proper parts of one's life have their root and essence in the shared life of God - something as bafflingly simple as endlessly complex, a perennial truism that lies at the heart-core of all religions, if not in doctrine then I believe in pragmatic reality; yet it's a notion the sincere realisation of doesn't seem to have been very far up the pastoral or otherwise priority lists of most Christian leaders across the history of the Church and its faith.

   Barfield's work is incredibly potent, drawing on language, psychology, social and historical and cultural considerations, philosophy and poetry in its purest sense - Vernon re-examines the person and teachings of Christ through the lens of Barfield's analysis of said mystical truth; and the theological and practical out-worked upshots herein are massive. World-shaking. The raw powers of inner reflectivity and the human imagination, when enthralled to True Goodness & Beauty, as given in the gospels, is incredible - but to see the scope of such raging paradoxes in their fullness one must accept the mystical element for what it is: once discovered and thusly inhabited, it is not something, I don't think, one can easily then just step back from, if at all, as it is of a profundity, breadth, joy, seriousness, playfulness, creativity and noisy silence that to enter the psychospiritual headspace, the lived consciousness talked about by Christ and Barfield and Vernon, utterly transforms everything about who you think you are and how you think you can be in the world. Which shouldn't sound like much of a surprise, as this is the core promise of Christianity as a faith: but I hope it doesn't sound like a callous barb to say that my gradual apprehension of my lived experience of this fact, the secret hiding in plain sight in Christ's apostolic succession, has been far more like the 'second birth' of a transformative, actual conversion than the course of personally walking with God that led to my being baptised as a pre-teen. Can you become a Christian twice? I'm not even sure the answer to that matters. I've been very lucky to have grown up with such exposure to the faith, but in all the honesty of my heart and mind - I feel luckier to have meandered to the extents I have on that walk so that Jesus found me all the more truly and powerfully somewhere on the border-lands.

   I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in consciousness and the human experience, regardless of what credence you may or may not lend to the Christian faith. Vernon's writing is accessible, entertaining and illuminating, and while readers who come at this book from within a church may find it opens up some strange wondrous new doors, it may also be for you very hard going because the perspective of gospel reality in here is so wild: and for that reason I think readers who remain skeptical of most organized forms of Christian community and faith will find this a refreshingly original, and starkly eye-opening take on the whole matter. I'm going to add some of Owen Barfield's stuff onto my reading pile, then probably read this again relatively soon...

* These being of course J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis - and it shows.

100% unofficial Jeremy Corbyn annual 2019

This book was a Christmas present last year from my youngest brother. I don't think he's read it. As its title suggests, this is a kids-style hardback annual book chock-full of puzzles and trivia and exactly the kind of funny, weird graphics you wouldn't expect your eight-year-olds to be getting Marxist-propaganda'd by the Ultimate Boy from. Of course, I am also writing this after the December of the year which the annual was for and so it comes with an added, six-foot-deep skin of painful nostalgic irony. Maybe next time...

Feminism for the 99%

This book is a manifesto by Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser and Tithi Bhattacharya - and I'm going to be honest, I think if the ideas contained herein got popular traction it could have the kind of impact in the twenty-first century that Marx & Engels' Communist one had on the nineteenth/twentieth - albeit, given the nature of the internal cohesive integrity and built-in safeguards that such a well-developed feminism comes with, I'd hazard it may do so with massively lower risk of spilling out into less-than-ideal post-revolutionary autocratic orders.

   Alongside the postscript chapter which explores the co-current crises of capitalism, ecological sustainability, and heteropatriarchal normativity - and lays out some really helpful pointers for how our ongoing efforts for global lasting justice & peace must involve reimaginings of these things as well as the socioeconomic means of reproduction; the book is comprised of eleven straightforward theses:

1. A new feminist wave is reinventing the strike
2. Liberal feminism is over - it's time to get over it
3. we need an anticapitalist feminism - for the 99%
4. What we are living through is a crisis of society as a whole - with capitalism at its root
5. Gender oppression in capitalist societies is rooted in the subordination of social reproduction to production for profit - this needs turning back the right way up
6. Gendered violence takes many forms - all of them entangled with capitalist social relations. We vow to fight them all
7. Capitalism tries to regulate sexuality - we want to liberate it
8. Capitalism was born from racist & colonial violence - feminism for the 99% is anti-racist and anti-imperialist
9. Fighting to reverse capitalism's destruction of the Earth - feminism for the 99% is eco-socialist
10. Capitalism is incompatible with real freedom & peace - our answer is feminist internationalism
11. Feminism for the 99% calls on all radical movements to join together in a common anticapitalist insurgency

   Pretty radical no?

   I found the arguments and evidence laid out as they were herein mapped extremely congruently onto my current thinking, so it's likely that if you're a sympathetic/regular reader here you will too - certainly a book to be digested and thrown [with generous accuracy and a context-apt gentleness] at Marxists, liberal feminists, those rare but pesky anarchists who aren't also anti-racists & radical feminists, etc.

Garfield Minus Garfield

This is a book* collecting several strips from this webcomic by Dan Walsh, which is in turn an extremely simple ripoff of Jim Davis's gargantuanly-popular** strip - each strip having been subjected to one single edit: Garfield is removed. The comedic effect of this, leaving Jon Arbuckle's horrendously sad life to speak for itself, is consistently far funnier than the original comics they're edited from, coming close to sublime in many of the strips.

* This is an almost totally superfluous aside but this post is short enough that I may as well add, it's my brother's book as I got him it for Christmas or something years ago, and I was delighted to notice he's not only kept it but promoted it to that greatest rank a book can aspire to - small shelf near toilet. I flipped through the whole thing in a single shitting.

** And Really Not That Funny, if you ask me.

Depression & Other Magic Tricks

This book, a collection of poetry by Sabrina Benaim, is broadly themed and toned as you'd expect from the title: a hard-hitting series of world-weary sarcastic-yet-sympathetic reflections on what we do when the Black Dog comes to visit, how we put up with it, explain its housekeeping to others, feed it, take it for walks, etcetera. I felt myself quite deeply reflected in some of these - the minutiae, the tiny borderline-inexplicable agonies, the moments of unadulterated bliss when the fog lifts for a minute or a day - Benaim has written a highly-relatable collection here that never skews or preaches its perspective but paints instead a dynamic series of complex murals, yet laid out in clear strokes. Powerful comfort reading for anyone who has also found themselves adrift in conversations with a doctor or parent or in half-imagined hypothetical reworkings of memories and encounters; sometimes there's just too much noise underwater to make sense of it all, and we fail and feel worse for doing so, but when writers like Sabrina manage to articulate these sinks or cliff-edges in recognisably intuitive chunks of sheer language - it basically is magic, and it will let its reader feel far less alone in the world for hearing so done well.

Sign my Citalopram

This book is a collection of conversational poems by Hannah Chutzpah produced by The Spirit of the Rainbow Heron, a Sheffield-based mental health advocacy group. I really enjoyed this book, it being one of those rare cases of poetry collections that are generous enough to play down the literary subtleties and so make a less intellectually taxing read, but that utterly drip with authenticity, relatable quirks, and character - I teared up at a few and laughed out loud at a few others, and it's really not often a poet will make me do both in the same book. Dealing with themes of self-confidence, power and permissiveness, the narratives in this collection are drawn brilliantly and slice neat wedges of psychological & sociological insights into social interactions and the mental health implications bubbling along under the surfaces of these; overall the book makes for an extremely life-affirming read and did to me the best which anyone can hope their poetry does for anyone else - making them feel less alonely odd in the world, giving them true things to latch onto that are far from unattainable by helping unlock them in the reader themself. Not to say humour or art or attitude alone can cure any mental ailments, but if you're a sufferer and you've never tried to read your way out into some happier less turbulent places, give it a go - you'd be surprised.

the Selfish Crocodile

This book by Faustin Charles, illustrated by Mike Terry, is about (oooooooo spoilers) a crocodile who tends to regard his own interests above those of his fellow river-dwellers, until one day he gets toothache, and a mouse helps, and suddenly he starts opening up. That's it! How wholesome is that? Brilliant, right? The pictures are juicily detailed, adding layers of character onto prose that A. doesn't even rhyme & B. isn't that good but overall makes for a pretty good kids' book, I suppose.

We're Going on a Bear Hunt

This book by Michael Rosen, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, is an undisputed classic of 90's kids' literature by a grandmaster of the genre. Repetitive rhythmic scheme of text and washy adventurousness of pictures all meld together to make this a reading experience that for children anywhere between 2 and 7 years old proves it for almost endless re-readings; it's about a family going on a bear hunt across a variety of natural obstables, and [SPOILER ALERT] they find a bear... Definitely one to recommend.

Slinky Malinki: Open the Door

This book, by Lynley Dodd, is part of the fantastic Hairy McLary & Friends series which I loved as a child and this ridiculous mad cat Slinky was always my favourite of their whole ensemble. The pictures are full, loud, exciting - and the rhyming-couplet text tells in pitch-perfect detail the short-lived escapades of a housecat and parakeet hellbent on all kinds of domestic destruction while their owner is out and about. A great one for kids.

A Quiet Night In

This book by Jill Murphy was one among a series of elephant-family books I had as a kid* and to my surprise my parents retain. It's a pretty boring story, consisting of a family of elephants, whose dad is having a birthday for which the mum is planning [title]. The kid-elephants get variously antsy and annoy their mum while waiting for dad to get home from work, only to all fall asleep as soon as he arrives, and the parents end up having a quiet night in anyway. If any moral can be taken from the story it's that parent life is awful and kids are the fucking worst. I certainly sunk in exactly this from reading it as a juvenile. Whatever. Maybe worth a shot for the tiddlies?

* If you're wondering why I seem to be reading loads of children's books at the moment, I'll remind you that I've temporarily moved back in with my parents, who for a day or two a week babysit a toddler called Isaac, which was weird enough, but he's now old enough to form his own shortish sentences, and having become well accustomed to his being referred to as 'Little Isaac' while I am 'Big Isaac', the sheer power with which he can demand I read him stuff must have bolstered his ego of late - as recently he marched into the kitchen to declare "I'm big Isaac now!" which I can't really argue with.

Reasons to Stay Alive

This book by Matt Haig (much like this one but moreso) is a mishmash: part personal testimonial about mental health and what happens when it goes extremely wrong in context of one's life; part rambling disjointed (at least he's constructed it to feel like that but it flows like triple-ply clockwork toilet paper) meditation on all of this, and how it is going to be differently similar for everyone 'experiencing' it from whatever point of view.
   In a straightforwardly practical empathetic sense I honestly don't think I've come across a better descriptive walkthrough of what it's like to suffer depression and/or anxiety, and similarly the reflections (drawn from both reliably-common-sense research and Haig's own brush with a suicidal inkling) on supporting loved ones going through this are probably some of the more grounded, helpful and well-put bits of advice I've seen given to General Readers on the subject.
   I've been put off reading this book for the last couple of years despite seeing it all over the place on bestseller lists* because - frankly, because I've been scared of the degree to which my own mental health is not entirely stable and I resented the idea that anyone would need to receive reasons for this Very Obvious Thing from a book. But all that said and thought, I found this book so moving and raw and real and just honestly humanly hopeful that I'd recommend it with gusto - particularly good for friends or relatives of someone unduly-acquainted with the black dog.
   For people in such a situation themselves it may help but first up I can't make book recommendations over the Real Important Shit of 1. getting help BEFORE the situation becomes dire & 2. see 1... Mind and the Samaritans both offer free support and can be a real lifeline.**



* When 'how-and-why-to' guides for not killing yourself are bestsellers, it should maybe be a bit of a clue that you live in a somewhat Fucked society. Meh

** Not to disparage though as I've got a hefty hunch Haig's book has probably gone some significant way toward saving many lives. Which - you never know whether you may have helped someone in some way like this before either. Or maybe you do. Mental health can often be a silent killer and so if you know someone who is struggling - don't wait for things to stew, be better as a friend & help each other through this shit

the Little Book of Colour

This book by Karen Haller proclaims, per its subtitle, that it will informatively equip its reader to better transform their lives utilising the psychology of colour. I didn't even know there was such a thing - apart from, of course there is, and it's mindblowingly subtle & powerful in its everyday constant potency. The kinda thing you never think about until you do then you can't ever unsee it - or remove from your daily awareness of such a basic thing as colour some residual echoes of the backdrop; each colour's psychological hefts - which are affected partly by cultural context and personal taste, but weirdly there's a deep-rooted similitude in how colours affect people's brains. What it may make someone think or feel is impossible to neatly predict, as everyone processes things differently and most common colours have widely variably symbolic purposes in different cultures - but I learnt from Haller that each colour actually triggers particular neurological responses and these are pretty consistent across human diversity... which means that carefully chosen & crafted combinations of colours tend to induce reliable effects in those perceiving them.* Visually delicious and accessibly written, this was a fascinating surprise: I bought it for my sister's birthday & ended up reading it all in about an hour and a half on the coach before she got it.

* Obviously yes, there's a good two or three chapters exploring meaty applications of all this theory in workplaces, home decor and personal fashion.

Slinky Malinki: Catflaps

This book by Lynley Dodd takes pains to deeply explore the sociological complexities of a neighbourhood's-worth of cats when they congregate nocturnally to sit on fences & make noises. I can't say from experience how reliable this image is, as though having had a pet cat in the past I don't ever remember it sneaking out in the small hours to meet other cats and sit in prominent places to mewl, screech and whine until people threw shoes at them, but maybe that's just me. In any case - as with all of Dodd's oeuvre, this is a top-notch kids' book with lively characterful illustrations and rhyming-couplet text that rolls off the brain so well that I basically was able to recite it upon rereading despite it being a good two decades or so since I've read this one. Worth a punt as a children-gift.

You've never seen a doomsday like it

This book, another [see other two] poetry collection by Kate Garrett, is as punchy as it is liberating in its core philosophical attitudes. The poems here are apocalyptic, not in the fire & brimstone cliché sense but in the original meaning of the word - apocalypses being uncoverings of new or hidden knowledge. Variably these unveilings can be of kinds which may upend, uproot or uplift our entire hitherto lives: old habits forgottenly conquered, old chains burst free from, old ignorant darkness lit by the fires of sight and reality - however things might turn out in the longer term, it makes these heavings no less intimidating or uncertain a thing or time to pass through, and here Kate dances the twisting line between fortuitous or calamitous change with a shrewdness and learnedness that is truly exhilarating. Short as it is, I took a while to read this for that very reason.

Stickleback

This booklet is a mini-collection of four poems by Kate Garrett, exploring the joys, pains, and oddnesses of being pregnant with a child you know is suffering congenitally from a heart condition. Not something as a wombless person I'm ever going to experience but as I myself was born with a similar defect to Kate's youngest* it was a stimulatingly empathic read and I've gifted the booklet to my mother having finished it - she's not a big poetry reader but I reckon she'll find much of comfort and sympathy in there too.

* Kate, among the million other awesome things she does in & for the poetry world, runs a blog compiling pieces broadly about these themes to raise money for children who need heart-related healthcare. I've been lucky enough to not only survive my ills of birth so far but had a poem titled Salvation published here, which uses my condition as a run-on metaphor to talk about my spiritual wellbeing and journeys therein.

Why I am not going to buy a computer

This book, a Penguin Moderns release comprising two essays by American pastoral poet Wendell Berry, is a brilliant, enlightening and challenging read on diverse topics brought together into a powerful tangible whole.

   The first [eponymous] essay is a very short but deeply cogent manifesto, on modernity's over-reliance on information technology, and how amid the changing nature of work by these tools, Berry, a farmer and writer, ruminates on the primacy of the pencil over the keyboard for his latter craft just as he prefers time-tried hand-work over surrendering to the growing preference for new-fangled gadgetry in the agricultural field.* What struck me on bristling at some of his arguments is the sincerity, well-meaningness and eloquence with which the case is made; some double the number of pages taken up by this essay are given over to printing original letters sent into the magazine where it was published and several of these questions (it must be said, varying in relevance & graciousness) are given fullish appropriate responses by Berry - however he also mentions that numerous letters received about thus were directly critical & presumptive about his relationship with his wife, particularly regarding the nature of domestic work; touching a personal nerve, the responses herein go on to form;

   The second, Feminism, the Body and the Machine, is more an academic freestyle on defending the basic nuances ignored by feminists, would-be's & aren'ts in the (admittedly shallow) critique of Berry's domestic-economic situation blurted in response to some lines of his above piece. His arguments in this are wide-ranging, complex and yet I think quite convincing - and while I found much I thought I was going to disagree with him on during the reading by the time he'd wrapped it up I found myself apologetically onside. Well worth a read on its own merit as offers a really interesting male perspective on current (or maybe, generationally, arguably just pre-current-ish) gender norms & how these link in with spheres of political-economic and technological reality & attitude.

   Overall these two brief pieces bring a fresh-yet-bucolic vision to long-standing debates; and however much you want to scream at this patriarchal Luddite - give him a read and think for yourself. Definitely a recommended little book if you're into exploring the quiet hidden interconnections of the tools, personalities and structures making up modernity.

* No pun intended.

Truth and Authority in Modernity

This book is a fantastic little submachine-gun-magazine of pragmatic ecumenical twenty-first century theology done as close to perfectly as we're likely to get - by Lesslie Newbigin, who I definitely need to check out more by. I'm going to hammer this one out really briefly because Newbigin is so kindly deft a writer that even a work as philosophically insightful as this 83-page banger can, I'd hazard to think, be summarized properly in a post short enough that I won't even need to scroll down during its composition. Though I've thought that before...

   Enough rambling!

   In part one, we are walked through the theological basics of God's authoritativeness; as well as various factors in modernity's suspicion of this. He then further explicates the external and internal means by which authority can be 'knowingly' affirmed; as well as linking concepts, faith, and grace - and by far the best Christian perspective on postmodernism that I have seen or read anywhere, hands down.

   In part two, he takes us through the conceptual & actual mediation of divine authority, which happens through four chief channels: Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience; none of these can be fully ignored through conglomerations of the others, nor can anyone rightly expect divine authority mediated only through one or two to hold much sway.

   So then in part three, he finishes with some reflections on how Christians can attest to the truths of Christianity by mediating God's divine authority through these four channels, with some fantastically practical pointers given as to how to do this effectively in our post/modern contexts.

   Hey! I did it! A post that thought it would be short and was short! Seriously though, this should be compulsory reading for all pastors, preachers, Christian thought-leaders and whoever else. It's just jam-packed with applicable truth, and you can read it in a couple of hours. So you may as well take the full afternoon, and read it thrice.

Rainer Maria Rilke: selected poems

This book is the Everyman Pocket Library Poets collection of poems by the early-20th-century lovely lonely genius, Rainer M. Rilke (yes, the very same). Translated beautifully from their original German by Stephen Spender & J. B. Leishman, here are collected work from several of Rilke's own volumes and publications; six from The Book of Images, twelve from New Poems, his Requiem for a Friend, a small curation from between 1908 to 1926, a handful plus cut-outs from his longer pieces in the French poems, the whole series titled The Life of Mary, the whole Duino Elegies sequence, and a good 33 or so from his run of Sonnets to Orpheus.
   Any efforts by myself to try to cram a disrespectfully brief outlining theme, content, etc with regard to all these is already redundant; even translated (which I must again mention as the retention of complex & subtle rhyming schemes can't be an easy thing to do) some of these have gotta be among the most emotional, colourful, nature-bound, reverent, thematically ambivalent and humanly spiritually comforting that I've read in recent times and it's made me want to devour his whole oeuvre.

Look Out! It's the Wolf!

This book, written and illustrated by Emile Jadoul, is a charmingly cartoonish tale of a community of animals who are all warning each other that the wolf is on his way somewhere; [SPOILER ALERT] turns out all the other animals were throwing him a surprise party. Not particularly narratively interesting but given its target age of reader I don't see this as much of a hindrance as it's otherwise well-crafted and the pictures are the best bit for my money.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

This debut novel by Gail Honeyman is a rarity for me; A book read Because it was Popular in the Contemporary shopshelves.* It's a weird book and I loved it to bits. Dealing with the heavy topics of mental health, childhood trauma, abusive relationships and unrealistic expectations born of self-coddling, it's actually much more fun that I've just made it sound (although in the places where it deals with these more head on, boy is it stomachumping). Our eponymous narrator's life is outrageously sad, yet what's harder to bear is just how totally Normal & Fine she maintains to be: her perspective is unlike anything I've read in first-person fiction and made me feel so many strange mixes of sorrowful & amused; the closest description I can readily think of is imagine Mark Corrigan with a (darker**) Dickensian backstory. The cast of other characters are remarkably well-drawn from this odd vantage point and overall it makes for an incredibly easy page-turner full of enough to prompt a shockingly healthy blend of sadness & hilarity.

* I'm not a strict hipster honest I've just got a shitload of exigent reading to do that is typically older existent published material & whose recommendation comes not from 'No. Copies Sold' but from either-both my own esoteric curiosities and/or the book's historical influence.

** Cards on the table, I'm not too sure how dark your average Dickensian backstory is, I've never read any of his work past a few pages, cos they're too old & too popular #LOL

Scarface Claw

This book by Lynley Dodd hits all the right notes one would expect from a children's book about an unfriendly cat. He prowls around, hisses, scratches, intimidates dogs and a few other cats, then gets terrified at the end, which is always fun. Spoiler alert I suppose? As with the whole series by this author/illustrator a great go-to for young readers.

Jesus: Ph.D. Psychologist

This book by Tom Bruno was a hard and highly rewarding read. Regular followers of this blog may know my mental health isn't always great and neither is my faith, so reading a book that basically lays out my personal Lord and Saviour as being the perfect archetype of psychological wellbeing was a bit too close to like conducting rather aggressively on-the-nose theological therapy on myself. Needless to say I made lots of notes, had lots of arguments with God, prayed a lot, cried a lot, and came out the other side somewhat less lost in my own head and somewhere closer to stability of thought and feeling rooted in a more settled personal effort to offer my life to Christ each day, each moment. Which, my goodness, I probably can't credit this book alone as having done because lots of other shit has been kicking off in my life during the span of reading this, and I've been reading lots of other stuff too, but I may as well give credit where credit's due.

   Bruno writes clearly, using actual psychology alongside stories of Jesus' life and teaching to illuminate the wholesome principles laid out in each chapter - which explore how Jesus (despite being a mere carpenter from a backwater town under Roman occupation 2000 years ago) may be deserving of an honorary doctorate in psychotherapy for the following pointers:

• Take the inward journey
• Focus
• It is up to us
• Have purpose in life
• Keep the inner child alive
• Work through your fears
• Know yourself
• Ask for what you want
• Stay in touch with your feelings
• Don't worry
• Keep your heart pure
• Learn how to transcend the valleys
• Stop blaming others
• Work a program
• Retain a dynamic view of life
• Use your gifts wisely
• Manage your anger
• Retreat before you charge
• Take control of your life
• Believe that you can change your life
• Stop searching for happiness
• Be thankful
• Plant
• Love may be difficult
• Empower people (especially women)
• Love is the priority
• Speak as a man to men
• Forgiveness must be a part of your life
• Accept people where they are, and challenge them
• Seek truth and freedom
• Keep in contact with the highest power
• Know how to listen
• Stop chasing what you can't keep
• Loosen up and laugh
• No quick-fixes

   After these digestible chapter-insights, there's a final chapter exploring the nature of discipleship on the sinner's human psyche and how liberating it can be to love, be loved by and imitate Jesus Christ, who acts as the catalyst for all growth into mental and spiritual health. There's an appendix helping programmatize this for a flexible range of personal struggles too, though I haven't used this. It looks similar to what Alcoholics Anonymous use though so it's probably got a strong track-record.

   Overall, the book is a treasure trove of practical insight into how being better attuned to, and in control of, one's own behaviour and reactions, in the flux of feelings and ideas and relationships and an ever-changing sinful world, can help us not only draw nearer to God but achieve deeper and sturdier mental wellbeing. Each chapter has a few really helpful reflection questions at the end of it too, so you can work your shit out in real time as you read through. And no, you can't borrow my copy, it's full of far too much of exactly this.

the Inner Voice of Love

This book by Henri J. M. Nouwen was another raw example of God throwing unexpected reading recommendations at me which were precisely what I needed to read. Looking for another book by Nouwen on discernment, I stumbled across this, and realizing it was a journal he'd kept in the depths of a six-month spiral-dive into depression and only allowed to be published eight years later after realizing his insights gained from the period spent in darkness helped mould much of the spiritual core in his later influential works, decided it was the best place for me (who had not been as far-gone as Henri when writing this but in a pretty grim place most of the past year or three) to get an introduction to the man. "I moved from anguish to freedom, from depression to peace, from despair to hope... All the agony that threatened to destroy my life now seems like the fertile ground for greater trust, stronger hope, and deeper love", he writes on the blurb, and this struck a chord with me on the ways God had already intervened and developed my relationship with him in the danknesses of the period I hope to be starting to emerge from. A deep thinker and profoundly god-hearted feeler here wrestling his way through one of those curveballs our brains can sometimes be wont to throw us; certainly worth a read, especially for Christian readers who struggle with depression, or want better to support others who do.

The Truth

This book is the twenty-fifth Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, and concurrently a corker. It follows an ambitious-yet-directionless young black-sheep-of-nobleman's-family William de Worde, who goes on to tap with outrageously chaotic degrees of success, failure, and every surreal inbetween, the hitherto-previously-unmet need of Ankh-Morpork for a newspaper. It's laugh-out-loud-funny in more places than there are pages, with a wacky supporting cast and textbook-Pratchett seamless plotting & dialogue; and if the title theme didn't give it away also offers an enduringly prophetic fable about Truth, truth, profit margins and populism... A fantasy comedy for our times, indeed.

There's a Hair in my Dirt!

This book, written and illustrated by the inimitable The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, is another of the old kids' books left at my parents' house that I've binge-read out of pure unfettered nostalgia, and of the three so far thusly describable it is by far the best on a number of levels.*

   It features a family of anthropomorphized earthworms, the child of whom promptly sets off the story by making its eponymous complaint. The father worm responds by telling him a fable about the true nature of nature, in which animals don't always understand what other animals are doing, trying to do, or even for, and the anarchic cycles of ecology roll ever onwards, illustrated through myriad amusing examples with rich visual humour (the main character of this story is a nature-loving maiden called Harriet, whose final attempt to save a mouse from a snake results in her [SPOILER ALERT] getting a virus from the mouse, dying, and rotting, hence the hair in the dirt). The young worm finishes his reception of the tale with an emboldened sense of a worm's place in the world, then finishes his dinner.

   Very very very funny, surprisingly educational, and you can spend longer looking for all the detail-jokes in the drawings than it would take you to read the text. Certainly a book to crack out for kids who say they like nature, but aren't nearly morbid enough in their worldview yet to display that they properly understand its workings.

* Larson being a favourite humourist of the scientific community, this even features a celebratory foreword from esteemed ecologist Edward O. Wilson, which must be a first for a kids' book.

Wonderful Earth!

This book by Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen* follows almost exactly the same gist as this one, and I read it for basically the same reason. However - it is notably better in three main ways:

1. The illustrations are far richer and funnier (and some of them even pop out, fold or move, which is just well exciting for young readers),
2. Instead of just saying "and God made the animals etc" it goes into a great deal of fun and idiosyncratic detail about the sheer crazy variety of these animals,
3. The final two pages lead into a reflection on humanity's created role as the stewards of God's Earth, and how badly we've fucked this up through rapacious industry.

So yeh, on an indoctrinating-children-into-religious-metaphysics level, I'd recommend this one more than most comparable products because it will turn kids into depressed nature-loving radicals like me. Maybe. Who can say?

* The same bestselling duo behind Percy the Park-keeper and Kipper respectively, for all you late-20th-century British children's books aficionados.

Anarch

This book, the fifteenth Gaunt's Ghosts novel by Dan Abnett, is about as heart-stopping and thrilling a conclusion to a series as I can remember ever reading. While the Big Twists were dampened slightly by my own guessing them a-book-and-a-half prior and halfway through respectively,* the combination of slow-burn plot and punchy characterful action is masterfully written as is the gritgore horror of the Big Bad Guys - and [PARTIAL MAYBE SPOILER ALERT] I'm glad to say my favourite scout-sergeant got probably the single coolest fething showdown** I've seen on the plasma-screen cinema that is my imagination. Hats off. And while it would feel like a natural end to the series, who knows?

* Not to say most readers would. I'm just overly paranoid about what Dan tends to do with his characters, and to be honest I've probably got a bit of warp-taint in me, which helps on this particular front of expecting the brutally ridiculous.

** If not coolest moments outright, but that's just daily porridge for Oan.

the Gruffalo

This book, by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler (a thoroughly-competent team of childrens' book production if ever there was one), you've probably already heard of as a modern classic. It follows a mouse* through the forest as he debates with various animals why they shouldn't eat him because he's friends with a scary monster (who the mouse proceeds to seemingly invent over the story's course), who then meets said monster - and it all goes rather well for them both. Rhyming couplet text, exceedingly juicy illustrations and the final twist all work in tandem to make this probably the most enduring kids' book of its decade. You don't need my recommendation, this would be by default a great lump for anyone under the age of 7 or so.

* In the more recent film adaptation played by Martin Freeman, who I can only say is perfect for this role in an otherwise also-well-cast-and-producedly excellent film version

The World that God Made

This book, by Jan Godfrey and illustrated by Peter Adderley, is essentially a child-friendly paraphrase of Genesis chapter 1 (albeit with better or at least more colourful pictures than most Bibles). I've recently moved back into my family home and was surprised to see it's still here, and read it in two minutes out of pure nostalgia. It's alright I guess, for its target audience, and if compared to similar books long-sat upon the same stretch of shelf it sticks to the gist without trying too hard to indoctrinate small children into anti-science views, so I can't really decry it too much.

The Warmaster

This book, the fourteenth of the Gaunt's Ghosts novels by Dan Abnett,* more than lived up to the high-bar expectations set by its predecessors. Dark and grim as are all stories told in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the characters are as well-fleshed-out as ever and the stakes for our beloved Tanith First regiment have seldom been higher - Chaos-worshippers and Imperial stalwarts alike screwing together a tightly-driven plot that is as deft as it is unpredictable. My one gripe is that it ends on a gigantic cliffhanger which by dint of my now having finished this one compels me tomorrow to visit my local Games Workshop to get a copy of the next instalment.

* A writer who has never failed to entertain me. I will tell this tangential story here cos I may as well own it (even though in past years it has been a fact I've tried not particularly hard to share with friends or acquaintances); when I was a teenager I loved this series of novels to such an extent that when faced with the medically-informed possibility of death and offered something along the lines of Make A Wish Before You Pop It my chosen dream-fulfilment was to attend Games Day, meeting there not only the creative teams behind my much-loved armies (orks & tyranids, go hard or go back to Terra) but also had lunch with Dan and was privileged to talk at length with him about the writers' life, inspiration, and just how damn good of a universe to write in/about 40k is. He was incredibly kind & accommodating to this morbid nerdy adolescent - and though I didn't realise it directly at the time, inspired me lots to simply write. So if you're reading this, Warmaster - thanks, and expect a solid mention in the acknowledgements if I ever get my own novel finished.

Tao Te Ching

This book* is a collection of eighty-one short poem-chapters about life, the universe, and everything. Purportedly written by Lao-Tzu, who himself may or may not have been a real dude (although if he was real he was definitely a dude), it is an extremely ancient text and forms the basis of the philosophy-religion known as Taoism, which was of immensely influential stature in the development of much Chinese culture and thought.

   This is the first time any of the books I've reviewed on here has actually been any core religious texts, and I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it clearly hasn't stopped my try to write some kind of thunk. Maybe not? So much could be said that would be pointless in this case. You should read this whole book and maybe meditate for five minutes after each chapter - they're only very short. You could read the whole thing in an hour. But you might never understand what it was talking about unless you are already open to the Tao; that is the essentially mysterious ridiculousness of what I am currently doing, an endeavor to "explain" what this book is "about"...

   Let me just say this: having read and pondered this book,** I do no longer in full or clear conscience think I can consider myself to be, in the religious sense, *only* Christian, but that I must be at least somewhat a Taoist also, and further that if any readers of this are confused or enraged by this heretical presupposition - I would suggest it is because your mental faculties are too familiar with the ways of errant human civilization above the Tao which is the eternal Way of Nature, under and above all, compatible with and containing of all, the fundamental explanation and essence of what is***: how do I know? Like this!

* That link leads to a website which supplies seven different translations of the whole text - although the one I read was Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo's translation. Given the nature of ancient Chinese's linguistic differences to English, and the consistent levels of ambiguity present in the poetic-philosophic text itself, the perfect translation has been elusive, even though this little book is the world's second-most-translated text in history after the Bible.

** I must admit also that initially when I started reading this I found its sheer evasiveness offputting, and ran away to get a beginner's introduction to the underlying philosophy in the manner of examples with A. A. Milne characters, and frankly I'm glad I did, it really helped, and I was able to approach this text with a deeper appreciation of the gists which underlied and animated the nuanced flow of the book itself.

*** If you're "so Christian" that Lao Tzu and Winnie the Pooh can't convince you, then how about C. S. Lewis?

the Tao of Pooh & the Te of Piglet

This book (or rather pair of books, their having originally been published separately but are nowadays generally distributed as a two-in-one compendium, just like their  founding inspirational scriptures of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner), by Benjamin Hoff, is a delightfully accessible and remarkably profound introduction to the general kind of shape and texture and colour of the principles of Taoism.

   Replete with extracts from A. A. Milne's beloved original classics (as well as illustrations from these) as well as from the writings of Lao-Tzu, Chuang-Zhu, and a number of other ancient Chinese sages, Hoff adroitly demonstrates how Pooh lives in harmony with the Tao of the Hundred-Acre-Wood and its various inhabitants in ways that we could learn a great deal from in our crowded rushed modern world; while Piglet's very smallness and oft-fearful-but-never-insincere eagerness to help or reassure insofar as he can encapsulates much of the Taoist virtuosity of Te... all this in ways I would be doing both the philosophy and Hoff's wonderful children's-fictional exposition of it a grand injustice to try to give a pat summary of. But I must say it was quite wonderful to have characters like Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, Kanga, Tigger and Roo, in their deceptive charming simplicity, be shown to quite perfectly embody the positive or negative or fluid aspects of un-Taoist living or un-Tefull being that pervade and restrict so much of the natural mystery of living and being, particularly in our over-intellectualized over-systematized technological mess of what we consider passes for contemporary civilisation.

   Pardon my rant. I kind of gonzo'd this post in an attempt to avoid falling into the very same kind of Heffalump trap that I'm trying to gently warn about, and which Hoff, through Christopher Robin's assortment of imaginary friends and various evasive apothegmic koans or jokey anecdotes about Confucius, will kindly and accurately help you to see wherever they may pop up in the footsteps in the snow you're following round and round the copse. Anyway, this is a fantastic entertaining enlightening book and probably the best introduction to Taoism I could, in my inexperience, recommend to a Western reader.

"Safe Metamorphosis!!"

This book is the first full poetry collection from Otis Mensah, himself Sheffield's esteemed Poet Laureate and an incomparable jazz-rapper. His words (which I'll get to) are bolstered with an enigmatic series of illustrations by George William Stewart, Luke Featherstone, and Miroslav Kiss.

   Okay - the title, what's that about? Imagine there's a spacestation, and everyone on it has never left it but knows they need to - how terrifying! So, once the moments inevitably come for people to be shuttled onto their capsules and shot out into the inky void, a few cheery veterans of this process, who know the pains and processes of going from embryo to Full Moth or Whatever - shout sarcastically as these pods fly past "[title]!" Which is a weird image but a comforting one when you know who's shouting it and why, and Mensah's book fulfils that role perfectly.

   The poems in here are profound meditations on identity, change, anxiety, technology, trust, creativity, race, class, loss, love, and so much more. A few of them genuinely have prompted more genuine philosophical questing in myself than many full books of "Actual Philosophy", and do so with a readableness and perspicuity that gave me pang after pang of poet envy** for the skill with which he spins vivid metaphors off their own axes again and again in truly an alchemical application of uncluttered language. Just rereading that sentence I am not in the slightest shocked that I envied this skill [that of uncluttrdness] LOL.

   Poems to be read aloud - for sure, as each quivers to their brims with audible zigzags wordplay and little resonances that bring even more life from the verses penned. Though if you want to hear them in full fat you'd do no better than to see this brilliant artist*** live. His book, like mine and Raluca's, was initially a self-publication, so unless we're in a fortunate future where this has been picked up for mass-distribution, you may struggle to get you hands on a copy, in which case I can only apologize for now for getting you all excited about how bloody good this collection is.

* Check out his hiphop on soundcloud - he's a bona-fide lyrical genius, and his backdrop beats are sick to boot. Also to make a completely unnecessary claim-to-fame I feature very briefly in one of his music videos, and do somewhat regret the mustard cardigan as it may have been too loud for the surrounding colour scheme. Liam, if you're reading this, sorry for over-yellowing the aesthetic.

** Difficult to pick an overall fave - but 'Speak Light into the Dark', the untitled one [signed no name], and 'No-one Here Hears Me' are just unfetteredly incredible & spoke to me with so much poignancy that I got paranoid I was misreading certain lines because it seemed too close to certain trains of thought I'd been trying not to own.

*** And an absolutely lovely man, I'm not name-dropping I genuinely know him through Sheffield poet life stuff

Adulthood is a conversation about what we used to do as kids

This book* by Raluca de Soleil** is an absolute treasure. Some quivering with righteous and articulate rage, some fluttering like reflective sage moths between the light cast by the drives to expressively unify oneself and the shadows cast of traumas we should rightly be wary of how we talk about, more still dancing wholesome pirouettes of singular pure poetic "well, and that's like how that is, right?"***

* Because she self-published I wasn't sure where the best place to direct that link was. If you're interested in trying to get your hands on a copy probably best to ask her via message on her artist facebook page.

** A true poet-peer of mine on the Sheffield spoken word scene. In fact we both had our first ever open-mic experience at the same event, a Mental Health Matters night called Speak Your Mind; we were both very nervous, until we smashed it and weren't anymore, and I'm delighted to still belong to that wonderful community; "not with entitlement, but safety and uncharted possibility" [quote from one of her's].

*** Of course right.

the Lotus and the Cross

This book is an imagined conversation, by Ravi Zacharias, between Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha - without wanting to deride its author too much, I think anyone will easily be able to instantly recognize that to faithfully and authentic-seemingly construct such a conversation would be an immensely delicate task of anyone's imagination, even without "taking a side" - which Zacharias does, for the Christian camp. That said it is not a dogma-heavy dismantling of Buddhism - or at least not as much as it might well have been if, say, certain other evangelical thought-leaders had written it - and while I think Zacharias's ultimate finished work in this book is a relatively generous, nuanced and thoughtful one, I do not believe he truly grasps the nature of Enlightenment as Buddha taught it, as to my own hunching there would be substantively more fruitful overlap between the thinking and praxis of the two were they to actually have met and talked; it concludes not with an intellectually-humble Kingdom-seeking consideration of possible both-ands, but Zacharias putting the nails into the "Buddha wrong, Jesus right" signpost - which is fair enough given its authorial purpose, but all things considered I think is a very ideologically blinkered way of dealing with both camps - insofar as one wishes them to actually come to respectfully and honestly understand one another, which is presumably sort of the point of writing a book like this.

Another thing, that has virtually nothing to do with this book but which I'm going to talk about on here because I need to process my thoughts on it and this blog has always sufficed as a place to process similar thoughts and this post seems to be a poetically apt place for the discourse I need to shart.
   I've left my church.
   This was an incredibly difficult decision, as I've been going there since the age of eight - in 2002, when the church itself was also young; I was baptised there, and pretty much all of my significant discipling relationships up until my joining Church Army's Research Team have been through it. My reasons for choosing to leave are many, complex, and deeply difficult to talk about - but I've been dithering over whether to go, and then when to go, and then how to tell my elders that I was going - for probably several years by now. But as you'll know if you read the recap post for 2018; my spiritual development has been accelerating a great deal and is rather unpredictable as of late - part of this has been through the nature of my work itself, part through ongoing exposure to a greater diversity of Christian expressions - as I've said in previous posts I've joined the Anglican Mission Community of which my work is a part - and even found myself visiting quiet corners of Christendom that I two years ago never would've dreamed myself to be seen in; and underneath or alongside all of this, is another aspect of my changing identity that has felt all-but-impossible to raise in TCH - even though if I'm being honest with myself looking back I should have heard the warning klaxons in my own heart years ago. So yeh, and yep I'm writing this in summer 2020, as this whole mess was probably the main bulk of reasons why I developed such an awful blog backlog, because my mind-heart was just not in a place where I could easily reflect on anything relevant to the posts I needed to write because it was all too fresh, too harsh, too painful and sad: but - I can't actually remember exactly when it went down, but some time during May or June of 2019, already having had a thoroughly unhelpful conversation with my elders about the fact that I'd joined the Church Army Mission Community and so I couldn't in good conscience 'sign up' to the formal TCH membership, as this denies anyone who does so from being part of any other Church communities - I came out as the gender non-binary problem-child that I am to my head elder and told him up front that I knew, Acts 29's position on gender-stuff being as it was, that to remain even a non-member but attender in the church I'd grown up in would entail the constant expectation from them as my pastors that I would someday repent of my personal identity - and this was not a situation I felt was healthy, or thus acceptable, so I'm leaving, sorry, please... thank you.
   I'm not writing this to make any kind of victorious or vindictive point. I'm fucking heartbroken.
   I just need some place to put this whole story down, as none of my brothers and sisters from TCH are likely to want to hear it, and few if any of my closest friends outside of church life would be able to grasp the emotional point of it, and the only other people I could talk to about it would have been in the office from which I've just been fired, or else my parents, who left the same church several years ago, but for very different reasons, and I'm not 'out' to them yet and I have no idea what they'd think. Anyway, it's all so close to the bone, that even now [as time of writing being summer 2020 I've had some time to process all this but it's still raw as heck], when I am 'out' to my parents, they just don't seem to give much of a shit and I'm not really sure what they think of what I told them of my actual triggering reason for leaving the same church. But - what's in the past is in the past. Jesus is good, and God's great grace is sufficient for all. Even genderqueer Quaker shitshows like me.

the Universal Christ

This book by ecumenical thought-leader Richard Rohr is an astounding treasure. It dives into the wholesale glorious mysteries of the biblical gospel, reminding us of the meaning of 'Christ', the freedom of forgiveness, the reality that Creation was God's testimony to us of heavenly truth long before scripture was written, the nature of spirit and incarnation, the sheer uncontainable universality of grace and peace and love...

   I don't have anything particuarly clever to say in reflection on this book. It simply pulled off the boots of my own Christian faith, shook them upside-down to dislodge a few large lumpy pebbles of English-evangelical intellectual cowardice and tribal complacency, then gently eased them back onto my feet as a liberating send-off back to the Jesus I had always known but now saw afresh. It is written accessibly enough for non-theologians, even non-Christians, and has a moral sensibility and wholesome common-good heartiness that I defy you to not find beautiful, challenging, and totally eternally counter-cultural: this is not Rohr's ideas unfolding themself but the very basics in implication of the gospel of Christ crucified and risen. A dazzling pragmatic inclusive truth, that has so long since been contained and constrained by overthinking underliving Christian commentary, the stultification of which Rohr here does a supremely excellent work in decolonizing Christ-consciousness from, yet never descending into partisan critique.

   I am giving this book to my mother and buying another copy to lend out.

Plum

This book, a collection of poetry written both recently & way-back-in-her-youth by Hollie McNish, is as lively and entertaining as I was worried it wouldn't be. I saw Hollie live last year and her delivery of spoken word is just so full and engaging that for some reason I'd developed an apprehension that reading it written wouldn't be as good. To be fair it's not, but that's not the point cos they're still good poems. Aside from all that fluff I do actually really like her audacious choice to include stuff she wrote when much younger - there are recurring themes of growth, failure, learning and changing across the wide variety of topics reflected upon, and seeing the stark gear-shifts on certain matters with age really helps a lot of the gaps in between her poems hit home harder than they otherwise would. Thoroughly enjoyable.

transforming

This book by Austen Hartke was a breath of wonderful fresh air after reading a totally different book on the same theme. Discerning readers may well write this off as basic confirmation bias, where I read a book about a thing and it argued for a conclusion that I wasn't entirely comfortable with so I discounted it and read another one which argued for something that I was more comfortable with, so I took this one to be better - and you may well be right. I'm not infallible, gender is complicated as fuck, and I've been on the fence about coming out as non-binary for the best part of a year.

   But in all honesty, Hartke is a better authority on this issue than Vaughan Roberts, given that he has experienced first-hand the community and theology alienation from evangelical Christianity that Vaughan is all too keen to say 'yes well this is not ideal' but then makes the kind of theological points that keep transgender and non-binary people from actually feeling comfortable in church; he has also approached the issue with much more than a cursory intellectual rigour - and draws on perspectives from church leaders, churchgoers, trans and otherwise, as well as a rich variety of scientific and social theory, but all grounded very much in a contextual and generous reading of scripture,* considered through the lenses of everything from the ambiguity of the Creation narrative poetry to the person and ministry of Christ and its carrying by his apostles to the varying significant re-namings in the Bible to the gender-bending roles eunuchs played and how they were still very much included in the early church.**

   Ultimately this a highly affirming and challenging book about the sovereignty of God, the fluidity of Creation, and the necessity of unity in the Church - an absolute must-read for Christians who are personally experiencing transformational elements in your life and gender identity, and should also be compulsory reading for anyone with any speck of pastoral responsibility, as there are guidelines on how to be meaningfully inclusive given as an appendix which go far beyond most of what I'd seen before.

* Even given my own views and latent identity, the depth of the tendrils of evangelicalism I've grown up in made me feel somewhat uncomfortable at parts of his argument. Though I suppose this could be a good thing, as it has maintained and renewed my vigour to not just settle for 'an answer' but to keep reading and exploring. That said, the general points Hartke makes are probably the best Christian perspective on the issues around gender fluidity that I've read so far.

** Transphobic Christian readers will do well to note that Philip didn't even demand the Ethiopian to grow his cock-n-balls back before receiving salvation!***

*** It was only upon googling this passage that I noticed for the first time that another Ethiopian eunuch features in the Bible, and pulls Jeremiah out of a dunghole.