the Odd Egg

This book by Emily Gravett is a pretty charming little kids' book about a series of birds who try to incubate a particularly peculiar egg. Spoiler alert - it turns out to be a shockingly reptilian infant once it hatches... Nice detailed entertaining pictures, prose thoroughly smooth yet still dumpy enough to introduce children readers to lots of cool new words in the field of animals, hatchering, etc. Worth a grab as a present for any 2 to 6 year-old bibliophiles in your life probably.

Transgender

This book by Vaughan Roberts is, I say, trying not to despair, probably the first (and probably often only) thing most Christians will ever read about the complex and sensitive field of gender fluidity. While in terms of overall theological orthodoxy, I don't yet feel I could articulate much of an alternative perspective to his general points (and in terms of my general views on gender I'm not sure I'd need to), but there are* psychological, social and ethical points in which he seems to think a blunt sense of evangelical conformism to traditional binary gender norms overrides any/all complexities in relating to people who sit outside of this - evidenced by his platitudinous use of simplistic bible interpretation to sidestep genuine scientific ambiguities or questions around authenticity and identity or even feminist conceptions of justice. Of course, it's unrealistic to think a writer could do a top-drawer job in a 75-page A6-size book, which is part of the problem. He has not only hugely oversimplified the issues, but done so from an ideological standpoint which draws more on the patriarchal whinges calling themselves the Christian front in the culture war than it does on prophetically challenging people to properly engage with the issues (or - not to mention - the people implicated). As a devout Christian who has been wrestling with the decision whether or not to come out as non-binary for a while now** and looking for helpful faith-oriented literature to help me navigate, this book was profoundly less than useful or encouraging. That said, I know what the gender-argument landscape is like in evangelical Christian circles all too well at the moment, and so I can still probably say that this book might be a good starting point for people new to the issue who want to find out more - though I would also rather insistently add, don't stop here.***

* Lots of these. To the point where they largely underpin many of his core arguments and so isolating particular things to say 'well this is wrong because X' would not be plausible without a comprehensive intellectual dissection of his book, which I fully can't be arsed to give it.

** As to do so would fundamentally disrupt my relationship with my home church, and may be perceived by many I know as less to do with myself than being a 'screw you' to the form of Christianity I've grown up in as well as those involved in that community. I feel kind of safe enough saying this on here because nobody reads this blog.

*** [edit - June] I've just read this. Kind of comes from the opposite end of orthodoxy. I feel a lot more affirmed and based on a number of other factors have made the decision to come out at some point. Don't know how this will go. But anyway, if you read this, read that too. And then keep looking into it because nobody but God has all the good answers.

Knowing God

This book by J. I. Packer is a contemporary classic of practical Christian living literature. One's relationship with God is at the heart of anyone's religious life - and here Packer unpacks what this means, looks like, feels like, or doesn't (and how can we try to discern well where/whether these things are/n't the case) in Scripturally-grounded, doctrinally sound - but generous and challenging to the rigid orthodoxies we fall into when driven by fear of the world over love of God's supreme goodness - there is far more in this book than I could hope to summarize with a post such as this, but can wholeheartedly recommend this as a text that will help in anyone's faith journey if digested slowly, thoughtfully, and with self-reflection and prayer. It's been one of many recent landmarks in my personal spiritual growth but perhaps one of the most concretely helpful for its theological rigour.

2018 overview

Wow! I finally bloody got there - it's July 2020, but because I'm a time traveller, insofar as the majority of posts from the past two years have been written much later than the date which they're formally listed on [a long story, I had a backlog which got out of my hands], but can now say I'm pretty much caught up with this blog enough to give you my muchly overdue recap for last year's reading. So, while last year's containment of the reading for my Master's dissertation means 2017 very much remains my Personal Best in terms of sheer quantity of books read, this past year I read forty-nine, which is still pretty good - oh, and I wrote a book too, which might count for something? I know nobody reads this blog out of interest for me and my actual life, but it's a routine feature of these annual recaps so if you don't give a shit skip to the bullet points below. Still very much blessed to be working with the Research Team of Church Army - and I feel like I'm learning so much here, just by osmosis. The office's Anglican atmosphere has been an immensely different gear-shift to the evangelical atmosphere I've grown up in - I'm being challenged by God in a hundred tiny ways every week just unlearning and relearning what normal, or actual, Christianity is or can be. I've gone from part-time to full-time here, and this has been a significant change to try to adapt to as it's by far the most intensive routine I've ever had - but I'm loving it here, having joined the Mission Community back in November even; and as the rest of this post will evidence God has been drawing me deeper into knowledge of & love for Jesus in ways that have taken me by surprise for how new, yet natural, they are.

   Anyway, enough waffle. Now for some reflections on the books that hit home hardest this past year - in a range of ways, as per the usual format for these recap posts:

• Obviously I haven't read nearly as many books about Kurdistan as I did last year, but I will mention this excellent comic - Kobane Calling.
• Best children's book - The Snail and the Whale, by a mile. Though I did also enjoy I Can Fly.
• Best graphic biographical work - the Persepolis sequel [as I read the first part last year]
• A much-needed book for Millennials - OFF: after reading this I began experimenting with digital detoxing and honestly feel a lot better for it. Similarly Matt Haig's Notes on a Nervous Planet is an excellent little book about mental health which I think will benefit anyone, but many of its core concerns are big issues for my generation.
• Best popular science book - The Physics of Star Trek.
• Funniest book punch-per-page - We Go to the Gallery.
• Bleakest novel - Camus's The Outsider.
• The series of books for which I seem to have inexplicably written a 4299-word essay in the post for the final one of and as such you should be thoroughly warned before reading it - the post that is, not the book, which is Mostly Harmless.
• A book I was quite scathing of in my post but as the year has progressed I have found its insights actually rather meaningful: A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind.
• Most interesting contextualized poetry: Poetry, Conspiracy & Radicalism in Sheffield.
• Best overall poetry collection: &.
• Funniest poetry collection: Donald Trump's own beautiful wordcrafts.
• Not really sure what to categorize this one as but I really liked it and want to lump it in with this list - Confabulations.
• Best philosophy book - Self-Constitution.
• Best biography - Paul Johnson's Socrates.
• Most unexpectedly thought-provoking - A Philosophy of Walking.
• Most [actually, expectedly] life-affirming - Vagabonding.
• Least personally-theologically-adventurous - You Can Change & Total Church - the former being one I've read before, and though somehow I'd never read the latter in its entirety, it pretty much forms an unspoken [okay, and actually rather often spoken] doctrinal foundation to the pragmatic operations of my church, and so even when reading it for the first time it felt Very Familiar.
• Most personally-theologically-adventurous [at the time, anyway - I got further out as the year progressed]: Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son.
• As alluded to in the above section though - my working in the research team of an Anglican charity has broadened my theological horizons in ways that have been quite difficult to neatly quantify. It started with Seven Sacred Spaces, which got me really thinking about stuff in fresh ways: I was already reading Pollution and the Death of Man alongside The Prophetic Imagination at the time, and several things in my subconscious collided somewhat. Desperate to slow down my own journey to find reflective space for everything I was discovering about my own Christianity - The Rest of God was a great help, as was revisiting Screwtape with a totally fresh cognizance of my own participation in spiritual warfare [difficult to work somewhere called Church Army and not get a feel for that, or at least some rough inklings]; as was the ongoing work around Messy Churches, for which I did a fair bit of wider self-directed reading outside of office hours because I was finding the whole theological angles therein so life-giving where I was. By spring I found myself taking hugely wholesome lessons in my own faith from places I never would have thought to look - such as Jacques Ellul; or from places I'd long been thinking of looking but had never got round to - like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By summer I was well underway with a completely unexpected series of prolonged wrestles with questions about what the church is or should do next - contemplative devotional classics like Markings and The Imitation of Christ were great stepping stones here - then I went to New Wine, and met someone who claimed to have a prophetic ministry; I tell the story in this post. Something clicked, or was unleashed within me, and I found myself now empowered to seriously questioningly begin to unlearningly and receptively listen to the spiritual contexts I was in; Holy Listening and How to be a Bad Christian were of key aides in this period - and then October came round, and Extinction Rebellion were a new thing, and Rowan Williams, who is the Chair of Church Army, put out a statement in support of it - and everything else that had happened having happened I basically took this as a direct order and so got arrested on Lambeth Bridge. Whatever else is going on in my head and heart and bookshelf - God has handed me, wholesale, the pragmatic toolkits for thinking and being in ways faithful to this - I don't even know, journey? strange sojourn? - you know. Needless to say, by the end of this crazy single year I'd travelled far enough from where I'd been at the start of 2018 to read A Closer Look at New Age Spirituality - and only partly out of itching curious desires to be able to debunk it for being 'bad christianity.'

Yeah, maybe that was a bit more freeform than last year's recap. But the content of and context for my reading journey is ever-changing, and so this blog must change with it - or become a dull relic of routine, without meaningfulness in its intrinsic tracing of my own mad sub/conscious travels across the written word. I'm still finding it very much a useful personal exercise, so regardless for its total lack of readership it will continue - and as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the backlog is now pretty much handled, so I'm really hoping all the posts from summer 2020 onwards are going to be written at least within a day or two of the actual book's being read - as you wouldn't believe how much of a faff it's been to dig back through my own memory across a very strange couple of years anyway to gather enough reflections on the list of several dozen books I'd not yet properly transcribed my thoughts on... maybe you would.

   My intentions of reading substantively more works by non-white non-male authors fell a bit by the wayside, I'm ashamed to say - I'd like to lay the chief blame for this failure on the fact that I've mostly been reading stuff I already had, or that was in the Wilson Carlile Centre library, but that's a poor excuse and I know it. It remains an intention onwards into 2019.

   Anyway - happy new year.

   Peace & love

   Isaac Stovell