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.