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.