Counterfeit Gods

This book by Tim Keller is a fantastically rigorous, counter-cultural deconstruction of probably our three biggest idols in contemporary culture: love/sex, power and money. Throughout he maintains the really helpful standpoint of not only showing why the pursuit of such things as Ultimate Goals is not conducive to healthy biblical living, but have deep-rooted & insidious negative tendencies within even the secular realms of psychological well-being, social justice and long-term human flourishing too. His discourse is replete with examples herein, and lends itself well toward equipping a discerning reader to better identify where idols are being worshiped or followed in their own lives as well as the lives of other individuals or entire cultures around them; as with any theological topic as dense & nebulous as "the god-shaped hole in the heart" it's far from a comprehensive survey of contemporary idolatry, but as a general introduction that isn't academically challenging and maintains Scriptural and pragmatic groundings, it's a really solid text on the subject and one I'd recommend strongly for Christians' fleshing out of relevant apologetics.

the Sheffield Anthology: Poems from the City Imagined

This book is, as its title may suggest, an anthology of contemporary* poems written in, about, or by people from the greatest city in Yorkshire (and therefore Europe); and much like the city itself, it's an exceptionally diverse collection, ranging widely in theme, style, length, and [sorry] quality.** I did find that reading them aloud in a strong local accent did make basically all of them better - but common sense aside, there's more than a few that did leave strong impressions on me, talking about everything from walks in the Peaks and the joys of multiculturalism and crumbling old graveyards and homeless people on West Street and trees and rivers and students in pubs and bus drivers and the scrub-dank backdrop of post-industrialism that seeps through this city & deeper through t'memories of its longer-lived inhabitants. If you like poetry and love Sheffield, there's guaranteed to be several pieces at least in here that'll tingle you somewhere.

   Because that above paragraph is more like an unasked-for spout of Sheffieldy things but also I'll be damned if I'm going to actually write out meaningful reflections on the book as a whole because that's not really a plausible stake given the variety therein*** - I'll instead just provide a list of all the poets who contributed to this book, in alphabetical order, with those in italics being the fine folks who then edited together t'anthology as a whole: Anthony Adler - David Annwn - Charlotte Ansell - Simon Armitage - Ann Atkinson - Angelina Ayers - Elizabeth Barrett - Paul Bentley - John Birtwistle - Matt Black - Joe Caldwell - Clare-Jane Carter - James Caruth - Liz Cashdan - Debjani Chatterjee - Matt Clegg - Jarvis Cocker - Martin Collins - Stanley Cook - Sarah Crewe - Amanda Dalton - Beth Davyson - Russell Dobson - Berlie Doherty - Jenny Donnison - Mark Doyle - Carol Ann Duffy - William Empson - Suzannah Evans - Neil Farrell - Veronica Fibisan - Roy Fisher - Leah Fleetwood - Cliff Forshaw - Andrew Forster - Michael Glover - Sally Goldsmith - Cora Greenhill - Alan Halsey - Geoff Hattersley - Jeanette Hattersley - Lewis Haubus - Ray Hearne - Rob Hindle - Jenny Hockey - Alex Houen - Gary J. Hughes - Karl Hurst - Chris Jones - Donna Jones - Maria Kardel - Linda Kemp - Christine Kennedy - David Kennedy - Jenny King - Agnes Lehoczky - Margaret Lewis - Yann Lovelock - George MacBeth - Jack Mann - E. A. Markham - Roger McGough - Ian McMillan - Allison McVety - Julie Mellor - Bo Meson - Geraldine Monk - David Morley - Helen Mort - Andrew Motion - Fay Musselwhite - Beverley Nadin - Daljit Nagra - Sean O'Brien - Conor O'Callaghan - Alan Paine - Lesley Perrins - Adam Piette - John  Quicke - Karl Riordan - Peter Riley - Rony Robinson - Shelley Roche-Jacques - Ann Sansom - Peter Sansom - Seni Seneviratne - Susan Shaw - Diana Syder - David Tait - Bryn James Tales - Sarah Thomasin - Katharine Towers - John Turner - Carolyn Waudby - Christine Webb - Linda Lee Welch - Ben Wilkinson - Noel Williams - Tony Williams - River Wolton.

   As much as I'd love to provide an in-depth analysis of each poet individually based on their work as compiled in this anthology, my arm is about to fall off and nobody reads this shit anyway. Goodnight

* So none of these feature, more's the pity.

** Don't @ me, most are pretty decent and well over a third are genuinely good-to-great poems, but there are also far more than an entirely-forgiveable share of poems that have virtually no literary or imaginative depth to them and are little more than (-[insert place name] [insert anecdotal memory of activity there] [mention local history nugget or item of reputation associated with aforementioned place name] [oops, add some adjectives!]-), and like - while yeh, these technically are Sheffield-related poems, but I could've stood to see a fair bit more editorial grit. Even the pieces by people literally employed by universities to teach poeting are, in my opinion, miles less noteworthy than the best poetry book to come out of Sheffield in recent years as far as I'm aware.

*** Also because I started reading this book in maybe autumn of 2018 and have only today finished it, so doing anything remotely comprehensive (as per standards I've occasionally been known to hold myself to for these posts) would basically require re-reading the first two-thirds or so, which I'm not going to do solely for the sakes of this blog.

Phoebe

This book, a story* worked out of some hardcore biblical scholarship by Paula Gooder, is an innovative imagining of a snapshot of life in the early church, told through the eyes of a woman called Phoebe, who was a deacon of the church in Corinth and widely accepted as the person entrusted with the task of delivering Paul's letter to the Roman christians.

   I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped, largely down to the writing style. It has a chronic case of telling-not-showing, repeats chunks of character and plot information so often that in places it feels almost patronizing to readers' presumed memory or capacities for reading fiction, is painfully bland in places despite clear efforts to inject humour into some parts, and to top it all off the only character who doesn't come across as totally 2-D is Paul - who doesn't even feature in any single scene of the book** and is left as an enigmatic figure of communal who-know & hearsay.

   All that lit-snob pedantic savagery aside, I do completely understand and support her scholarly choice to minimize creative license in reconstructing a navigable 1st-century Rome & hypothesizing the personal history and context of Phoebe, and despite the poor execution of it in text I do think Paula Gooder has successfully spun a wholesome, believable, gospel-centred tale out of all her academic notes.**** I'd recommend this book to some folks - in fact having finished it I'm lending it straight to my mum - only if going into it with open expectations. I'm pretty confident that most people going in looking for a novel-type story will be rather disappointed, but people looking for a resource that helps engagingly flesh out Christian life in the context of the very young church, in particular the impact of Paul's pastoral theology on relationships across social divisions (slaves and freefolk, Jews and gentiles, etcetera) within the Christian community, then I think this book does actually provide a unique resource to help deeper imagine oneself into that.

* Not a novel. For which I'm happy to broadly forgive all complaints listed above regarding her narrative style.

** For both theological & historical reasons, I'm very glad this happened to also be the sole redeeming feature*** of the prose in and of itself.

*** Other than the gospel, obviously, which needless to say the story itself and numerous characters within it do strive to convey clearly and properly. But as great as evangelism in prose form is, Gooder can't take creative credit for coming up with the nub of that bit.

**** The story's 216 pages long for 85 pages of notes/references/etc. Hearty enough a ratio to wipe away any last expectations that this was a novel, don't you reckon?

Eisenhorn

This book (or in fact whole trilogy of book in a single slick volume) is another absolute stonker by Gaunt's Ghosts author Dan Abnett - this time, still in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, following the career of Imperial Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn, as he slowly and all but inexorably shifts from being a diehard puritan toward the radical edge of all those sworn to defend the galaxy against the scourge of Chaos.

   The trilogy herein, Xenos, Malleus and Hereticus, alongside the two shorter stories  that accompany it, comprise in my opinion by far the most psychologically and philosophically interesting fiction committed aboard the Games Workshop franchise, and it's a strong rival to most other sci-fi favourites of mine. Gregor's terse narration reflects and conceals his gently changing character - attitudes, allegiances and all, the whole thing woven so deftly to not give away a single "OH SHIT" moment before it's Far Too Late, and by then you're shivering at how obvious it is in retrospect despite never having seen them coming.

   I'm genuinely on a bit of a hyped-up binge recently, but I'd only read this once before and I was only fourteen so I didn't remember it particularly well; I don't remember having enjoyed it as much as this time then either so maybe I've just got a bit more warp-taint as I've aged. Is it excessive if my To-Read Pile gets bumped slightly for the time being while I blitz through another of Dan's omnibus trilogies (also about a growingly-radical Inquisitor?)

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

This book* by John McWhorter is a scintillating romp across the history of Albion, and the surprisingly wide array of people who've arrived, lived, died, fucked, killed, spoken and written there. The central premise is delightfully simple and is consistently paid off more and more with each chapter - ENGLISH IS WEIRD AS FUCK. Generally most Anglophones are, I think, aware of this basic reality, but prefer not to think about it, as attempting to untangle the logic of some of our most commonplace grammatical quirks can be as totally disorienting as if one had just been presented with an ancient unsolveable riddle. Who's to blame? Nobody really - it's just a shambles, with Celts, Jutes, Angles & Saxons, Danish vikings and those bloody French all getting variably involved, twisting shared syntactical formats almost-but-not-quite to breaking point Over & Over Again, the regular speakers of this malshapen mongrel language child basically just keeping calm and carrying on. And here we are. Fascinating stuff. Also poignant ground for that strange phenomenon that as one ponders the natural histories of language it is difficult to not also toy with a smallish variety of anarchistic axioms. Whatever they are.

* Confession time - I didn't read this book. I got it for free on an Audible trial (and then uninstalled it forever because fuck you Jeff Bezos) and listened to the whole thing while on a walk across northwestern Sheffield's outskirts. Given the nature of the book I'd 100% recommend listening to it rather than reading it because McWhorter himself narrates it & as you'd expect from an archaeo-philologist he genuinely knows how to pronounce all the stuff in Middle English, Old English, Old Norse and whatever else, and so you really get a feel for how the sloppages of evolution went down.

Dungeons & Dragons: Player's Handbook

This book (available online as pdf in many places, if that link doesn't work any more give it a google as good grief don't Wizards of the Coast charge a lot for the real deals) should, I hope, be pretty self-explanatory. It's one of three core rulebooks for the fifth edition of an outrageously effective Satanist sociocultural plot than works through the indoctrination of children, and vulnerably nerdy adults, through emulation of what some may consider "fun". I jest. I'm the Dungeon Master for our campaign, so I need to get into the habit of telling casual lies. No! Stories! Anyway, if you've never had your pickle tickled or boat floated by D&D-etc then I'm hardly going to convince you here, so go away and find some better more entertaining means of getting an introduction if you want one.

the Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet

This book by Rubem A. Alves is an absolute masterpiece of experimental poetry-prose blended theology. It is beautifully crafted, so eloquently argued that you barely notice the intellectual cogs spinning until you're caught up in their imaginative wake like a thrall to transfixing, almost blinding in places, truth: God is love, and life, and all good, and we get by grace to participate in his nature through faith, acceptance as we are accepted... I'm rambling but this central point of enliveningness as central to the Gospel imperative makes up the core of this book, only Alves unpacks it in such glorious terms that it seems petty, redundant even, to try to do better justice than a zealous quasi-anonymous blurb.

   Strongly recommended for people who are spiritually exploring the world more; you will meet an incredible Jesus presented here even if you've never opened a Bible... I'm stopping short of saying this book is 'divinely inspired', but then what is divinity, and what is inspiration? And if you cannot show me how to draw the line between the two, then I will remain trusting the enforcement, theologically speaking, of that boundary to God and Him in Trinity alone.