Paradise Lost

This book, the classic epic novel by John Milton, was a bit of a surprise. I mean, I knew it was about the Fall of humankind as described in Genesis 3, and I knew that Satan was the main character - but that's pretty much the extent of what I knew about it going in. Little could have prepared me for how truly, deeply, epic it actually is - and I'm using that word "epic" not in the modern sense of "yeh just really great" but in the traditional sense of scale and scope. Here we have depicted, in floral prose and incredible monologues, the war in Heaven that precedes the rebellion of Satan against God - and this war is descriptively depicted at quite some length, as are the metaphysical realms in which it takes place. A powerful work of imagination that has had an immense impact on the subsequent developments not only in poetic form but actual theology. I would recommend this book to anyone with a modicum of interest in what I will term "moral-theological" poetry, with no caveats as to the beliefs of the reader - even non-Christians will find Satan a compelling, if still ultimately evil, character. Adam and Eve likewise are well-developed and the reasoning around their being tempted by the Devil (and obviously succumbing to this temptation) is extremely cogent. This book wholly deserves its status as a classic. The only real gripe I have with it that I can think of is that Milton makes heavy usage of references that you basically need a degree in Classics to understand, so get a version with explanatory footnotes.

the Book of Chuang Tzu

This book, along with the Tao Te Ching, is one of the foundational texts of the ancient Chinese religion/philosophy called Taoism; traditionally credited to Chuang Tzu*, though in actuality he is unlikely to have written more than the first seven chapters of its thirty-three.

   When I read Lao Tzu's work I reflected that I could no longer in the spirit of intellectual honesty consider myself anymore only a Christian - but that I must be some kind of Taoist as well: and on reading Chuang Tzu's philosophy now too, I wholeheartedly embrace this polyreligious side to my own life and mind. The work presented in this book is utterly unlike any philosophical system or idealized religion anywhere else - it performs its functions through extended usage of parable, often humourous** and somewhat absurd, never less than thrillingly thought-provoking. Many of his little stories revolve around natural phenomena and processes and how they relate to the Tao; many are to do with governance or management and the follies of humanity in regard to these; quite a few are simply sideways (generous but still) jabs at Confucianism, which are among the most radical in their philosophical position. I will make no bones about the fact that this book is one I am completely unequipped to be able to summarize or even overview to any degree that really does it justice - I can only say that this text has stuck in my brain and fundamentally altered my perceptive attitudinal modes of being in ways that very few other things have, perhaps nothing other than the Bible itself. Which is odd, considering that while it has a great deal to imply about the nature of faith, goodness, transcendence, etc - Chuang Tzu says virtually nothing about what Western thought would call God. Instead focus is given to the lived experience of humans as creatures, in their quest for meaning and purpose, failing to find it anywhere they do not surrender themselves to the overriding principles of the Tao - and though "wu wei"*** is a core concept in the work, much of what the thinkers who composed this book have to say is actually of a deep and profound practicality in reference to activity, thought and spirituality.

   I absolutely loved this book. It challenged me throughout, while also liberating me into a bigger sensitivity toward the world and its contents and contradictions. It made me think, made me laugh, made me aware of my smallness as well as my potentialities - all the while being nothing less than a superbly well-written series of supremely idiosyncratic anecdotal little happenings, ponderings, reflections and recollections. If you are the least bit interested in Chinese history and culture, in philosophy or spirituality more generally - I cannot recommend this book enough. Chuang Tzu may not have written the whole thing but his spirit pervades it, and in truth he has become one of my few favourite thinkers from across all time and space.

* For an excellent all-age accessible introduction to this dynamic historic personality, check out this delightfully and appropriately idiosyncratic Chinese (with English subtitles fortunately) cartoon series documenting his life, work and influence.

** I shit you not, in places it is actually hilarious. You'd never laugh this much reading, say, the Talmud, were you to approach them even with the same spirit of openness.

*** Wu wei means "actionless action", "non-action" or something like that - it's a complex phrase to translate, but essentially means not striving toward a pre-determined goal, instead merely being content to follow the natural flow of events and things as they are in themselves, and acting only when spontaneous context compels you to act freely. I think, anyway. If you're a Taoist sage reading this and want to correct me please do so in the comments, though given the inherent notion within the Tao of not contending, I recognize you are unlikely to do so.

the Holy Bible

This book* is, you probably need no explanation, the foundational Scripture of Christianity, the world's biggest (and my primary) religion. It is the most widely-translated and best-selling book in human history. I haven't listed an author for this book for three main reasons:

1. It's not "a book" so much as sixty-six texts, some a page long, others spanning large chunks, all organised together into what is more like a library
2. Many of the texts in the book are either anonymously composed or their authorship (as attested by Judeo-Christian tradition) is contested by scholarship
3. As a Christian it is my belief that the Bible is the divinely-inspired word of God, but it feels odd to list my Creator as a mere author

   What's it all about then? In a nutshell, God's liberation of humanity. In less-of-a-nutshell though, I will try to give a succinct and satisfying summary of the overarching narrative found in this book. Hold onto your hats, this is going to be a long paragraph. You probably know the rough shape of how it starts - "in the beginning" God creates the universe, including humanity. The first humans, Adam and Eve, live in total harmony with God, each other, and the world; that is, until a serpent persuades them to do the one thing they have been told they cannot do - eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil - and in punishment they are pushed out into a world that now suffers, as they do. They have children and populate the Earth, etc. The next big things that happen are that God, in frustration at the evil humanity is perpetrating, decides to wipe out humankind with a flood - survived only by Noah and his family, and two of every animal to repopulate the wild; next is again humanity acting out of a sense of cosmic superiority and trying to build a tower to Heaven, which results in God scattering them into a whole host of differing nations and languages. Then we meet a man called Abraham, to whom God promises land, innumerable descendants, and great blessings: so we follow him for a bit, then his son Isaac, then Isaac's son Jacob, who meets and literally wrestles with God and is thus renamed Israel (and yes, I did hear the Bible-novices among you just go "ohhh!"). Jacob's dozen sons settle in Egypt, where they multiply to such an extent that they are made slaves by the Egyptian state. With the help of God sending ten plagues on the Egyptians, a man called Moses liberates the Israelites from slavery and leads them into the wilderness on their journey to the land promised to Abraham: along the way, God legislates a system of laws for them, including the Ten Commandments (which I'm assuming you've heard of) alongside a meticulous programme for appropriate sacrifices and such. Moses dies, but under the leadership of his second, a man called Joshua, the Israelites conquer and settle the promised land. Then things fall apart a bit. Everyone starts eroding in their respect for God's law, and even under the stewardship of a string of prophetic/military leaders called judges, they rebel against it again and again. Eventually the Israelites decide they want a king to lead them, like the other nations; God says this isn't a great idea but nevertheless concedes, but (aside from a short but high-impact Golden Age under the reigns of David, who wrote a great number of poems about the God-ward life, and wise thinker Solomon, who built the temple) the Israelites, just as under the judges, fall into cyclical patterns of rebellion and repentance - with even their kings becoming [a-bit-more-than]-occasional idolaters, tyrants and so on. To nudge Israel back onto the right track, God starts sending prophets - some, like the early Elijah, to confront ungodly kings directly; others like the later Ezekiel and Jeremiah to mourn the godlessness of Israel and expound messages of redemptive hope. In the prophets we read of God's judgement against the nations surrounding Israel as well as against Israel herself - in fact, several of the prophets foretold that Israel would be colonized by the Babylonians and Assyrians, which she was.** Prophets like Daniel continued their work of realizing God's plans for them even during this period of exile; and we begin to see the emergence within God's speeches the specific promise of a messiah, a redeemer, who would wholly and totally liberate Israel from sin and death. Eventually the Israelites are allowed to return home and rebuild their temple, and this more-or-less concludes the Jewish section of the Bible, known in Christianity as the Old Testament - called such because here comes the New Testament. This next (much shorter) Christian section of the Bible begins with the coming in Bethlehem of a man called Jesus, whose birth had been promised to a woman named Mary, a faithful virgin. Jesus grows up and becomes a radical peripatetic rabbi - accruing an enormous number of followers (a core twelve hand-picked by him at the start of his ministry and many more just following him as he goes along because they were intrigued and liberated by what he had to say), healing people, casting out demons, telling parables, pissing off the religious authorities, etc. In a bizarre twist, despite their devotion to him, Jesus's followers didn't really understand who he was - that is to say, the messiah promised in the prophets; especially in the prophetic writings of Isaiah, who had foretold that Israel's messiah would be misunderstood and rejected by them, and ultimately killed. Next, you guessed it - Jesus is killed: betrayed by one of his disciples, taken before the religious and political leaders (at this time in Israel's history it was a Roman colony) and condemned to crucifixion. However our story continues; three days after his death several female followers of Jesus find his tomb empty, and sure enough he then reappears, resurrected from the dead, to his disciples - with the express intent of assuring their conviction that yes he was and eternally is the messiah, and sin has been defeated, and the disciples are to kick-start the task of bringing this good news to the world. Jesus ascends into heaven and the disciples go about their God-given task, only to be heavily persecuted by the Jewish religious authorities and met with ridicule by the predominant Hellenistic culture surrounding Israel. A member of the suppressive class, a man who came to be known as Paul, was challenged by a vision of Jesus, and became a co-worker with the disciples in spreading the good news of Jesus's death and resurrection. Most of the rest of the New Testament is letters written by Paul and other disciples like Peter to various churches around the Roman Empire, exhorting them to continue the work of spreading the good news and developing the huge theological points implied by Jesus's teaching, life, death, and undeath. Finally we close off the whole thing with an apocalyptic series of visions revealed to Jesus's disciple John about the consummation of God's plans for world history.

   I hope that was enough of an introductory overview. Whether you're an ardent Christian fundamentalist who thinks everything I've just talked about is the utterly-literally-true history of our world, or a hardcore skeptic who thinks some (or quite a lot maybe) of it is little more than fanciful myth; it cannot be denied that in the Bible is a wealth of wisdom and historical reflection that can deepen and sharpen our hearts and minds. Reading the Bible is ideally an inherently radical act of self-emptying submission to the truth of God, in our efforts to make sense of its narratives and teachings.

   So, there's an excellent Christian quote by I-forget-whom; "one should visit many good books, but live in the Bible," and I hold to this as an approach to literature. I read parts of the Bible as a regular part of both my devotional life in relationship with God and my philosophical life in all my seeking for a satisfyingly-developed and coherent worldview. The reason I'm doing a post about it now is that I finished reading it cover-to-cover - and while throughout my life I've probably read most of the Bible multiple times or at least once, this was the first time I've worked through the whole thing as a singular entity.

   Would I recommend this book then, verily the book of books? Yes, cautiously, with caveats. It is a complicated library, that spans a narrative of over two-thousand years, and many parts are pretty impenetrable even to people who have devoted their entire lives to studying them; to get the most out of the Bible it is probably recommended (certainly is by me) that you read it alongside commentary, theology and doxology.*** And while I do believe that engaging with the Bible can, in the hopeful light of the Holy Spirit, lead one into a real meaningful relationship with our God - it has to be approached with a certain degree of humility and open-mindedness; as a non-believer who is diving in to try to find justificatory ammunition in their efforts to repudiate Christianity will likely be able to find a lot in there for their purposes, but this would be a misuse/misunderstanding of the text.**** This book is neither a moral rulebook nor a philosophical treatise on reality - it is primarily an account of God's relationship with humanity through the specific lens of ancient Israel, coming to its climax in the life and person of Jesus, who was God incarnate. Come to the Bible with an expectancy that God will meet you halfway and testify to you about Himself, breaking into your heart with liberating conviction, and you're on the right track.

* Over 150 translations of the Bible are available for free from that link. The version I finished was the New King James Version, though for the majority of my reading I tend to use either the English Standard Version or the New Living Translation; as I'm not familiar enough with the breadth of versions out there I can't make any solid recommendations as to exactly what would be the best fit for you, so try out a variety, but for newcomers who have never read the Bible and would like something both accessible and accurate to the ancient texts from which our modern forms are translated, I'd go with the New International Version.

** A quick note on "prophets" - the contemporary understanding of this term has been boiled down to a bastardisation that merely conveys predictions about the future, in a similar kind of category to "seer" or even "wizard". But in the biblical sense, a prophet is someone with a particularly close relationship to God who seeks to share this relationship with those around them by both denouncing the godlessness of others' lives and pointing to the hopes of redemption and true betterness when people return to right relation with God; visions of the future are merely the means by which God's promises and goodness are mediated from eternity into humankind's experience of time.

*** For starters, though there are many theological and doxological texts that I've reviewed for this blog, I wouldn't highlight any one book as I don't know how or where you're going to start your Bible journey - but this YouTube channel, the Bible Project, has some truly fantastic resources for getting to grips with particular books and concepts.

**** Any problems, intellectual or moral or otherwise, that you have with either the Bible or Christianity, are too wide-ranging for me to address here - but if you have a bone to pick do so in the comments and I'll do my best to reply with honesty and humility.

2020 overview

Another year gone - another 95 books read (one of which I wrote myself, so whether I "read" it is a point of debate, because I certainly have, but not in order and more just while it was going along), which is by far my record, beating 2017 (which was my dissertation year and everything) by over twenty - and thus, another yearly recap post (see here for last year's). Admittedly a significant number of those read this past year were very short children's books, but I've got a solid number of challenging books under my belt too. Covid aside this has been a much less dramatic year for me than the last few have, so I don't have too much autobiographical plonkage to spew at you here, so I'll refrain from giving any and just get straight to the meat of the post.

• A book I wrote myself - The Improbable Interplanetary Revolutions of Naomi Moss
• Page-for-page most stimulating Christian book - playing
• Overall most stimulating Christian book - the Cloud of Unknowing
• Best Christian prophetic provocation - Punk Monk
• Best Christian living primer/reminder - the Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet (although Holy Habits, the Soul of Wine, the Prodigal God and Counterfeit Gods also deserve a mention)
• Best Bible study - Romans 1-7 for You
• Best Bible meta-study - the Book of the People (although in a comparative religion sense, you cannot beat the Lost Art of Scripture)
• Most concise Christian exhortation - Talking about Jesus without sounding Religious
• Most creative Christian apologetic - Phoebe
• Most comprehensive Christian apologetic - Rumours of Another World
• Most philosophically edifying - the Path
• Most spiritually questionable - either the Gospel of Judas, the Corpus Hermeticum or Living Dangerously
• Best poetry book - can't decide between witness or the Waste Land. Oh, and The Sheffield Anthology definitely deserves a mention, as probably do Budapest to Babel and Mary Wilson
• Best children's poetry - Rhyme Stew
• Best (okay, only) Doctor Who-themed poetry - Now We Are Six Hundred
• Worst poetry - Phantasmagoria
• Best book about poetry - Poetic Diction
• Best fantasy/sci-fi novels - Stardust, the Dying Earth, and A Wizard of Earthsea & its sequel the Tombs of Atuan (and though I don't think I entirely or even particularly understood it, I did also very much enjoy Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - conversely, I fully understood and somewhat enjoyed Axiom's End)
• Best non-fantasy/sci-fi novels - either A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or Fight Club - with an honourable mention to the Man Who was Thursday 
• Darkest yet funniest novel - All My Cats
• Steamiest novel - Reckless
• Best humour book - Pistache, with the runner-up being either Husbands: Don't you just love 'em? or Sloth Life (with an honourable mention to All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome)
• Best comic or graphic novel - Watchmen
• Weirdest comic or graphic novel - either Ozma of Oz or this Spiderman story
• Best children's book - Little Turtle Turns the Tide, with Jeremiah Jellyfish Flies High  and Holes as close runners-up. Honourable mentions to Fox, the Diary of a Killer Cat and Emil and the Sneaky Rat; and in Christian considerations also A Pair of Sinners and the Tale of Three Trees
• Best probably-intended-for-children non-fiction - Daredevils & Desperadoes
• Best play - Arcadia
• Not a great non-fiction book but it includes discussion of the play mentioned above so there's your tangential reason for the inclusion of this book in my recap - Life in the Garden
• Most daring non-fiction - Ten Days in a Mad-House
• Most practical non-fiction - How to Argue with a Cat
• Best audiobook - Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue
• Best thing to read if you want to become a detective - Know yourself through your handwriting
• I started playing Dungeons & Dragons properly this past year, as DM no less, and would heartily recommend this activity to anyone - for which you should probably check out the Player's Handbook and Dungeon-Master's Guide (and if you want to go really nuts, swap it up for a sci-fi world with Dark Matter)
• And finally I'm not sure how to categorize this but it's a book by (in fact the only book by) Neal Cassady so it warrants inclusion here - Grace Beats Karma

   As for my intentions to try to read less by white males and more by women, people of colour and the queer community (don't @ me for missing out your favourite minority, I can't list everyone), I think I'm doing better than I have in previous years, but the sad fact remains that most of the books I own are by white dudes, and I'm not going to not read them just because of that sad fact. In any case, the effort continues.

   That's it from me folks - happy New Year and may 2021 bring you many blessings.

   Peace & love

   Isaac Stovell