the Dragon in the Library

This book by Louie Stowell is the first in a series of three novels following a ten-year old tomboy called Kit Spencer who gets peer-pressured into going to the library with her friends Josh and Alita, only to stumble upon magical secrets (of the variety that you can probably guess from the title) and commence training with head librarian Faith, who is also a wizard. Beyond that I won't spoil the plot, other than that the Evil Businessman Bad Guy is a very entertainingly Dahlesque villain. The prose is sharp and accessible, the story is well-paced and exciting, the arcane lore is actually quite well-explained and internally consistent, and the illustrations by Davide Ortu are pretty delightful and add a lot of character.

   Overall this is a cracking little children's novel - I bought it as a fifth-birthday present for my niece and pre-read it to make sure it was appropriate, but I reckon this would go down a bomb with any imaginative kids between the ages of five and nine or so. Would recommend.

the Damnation Document

This book is - well, it's actually a report from the organisation called thirty-one eight - who are specialized in investigating abuses within churches. I'm including it on this blog as it was at least as long as many books I've read and has far more content. As regular readers will know, I am a committed Christian - and as more attentive readers may know, my relationship with the church I grew up in deteriorated quite viciously toward my exit from that congregation.

   I'm not going to make a huge song-and-dance about everything in this post. I left The Crowded House for my own reasons, though I'm sure they were folded into manifold other factors going on within that church that made it spiritually unsustainable for me to stay. Anyway, the title of this post is simply what I've been thinking of this report as - I read the first quarter of it way back when it came out and broke down in tears, but I've finally psyched myself up to read the whole thing so I could have a coherent backwards opinion. And I am sure I made the right choice in leaving. This is a book review blog, not a church-dissection blog, so I'm going to eschew any personal commentary here; if you are interested in what was awry in my home church the link is right there above.

Hapworth 16, 1924

This book - well, it was never published as a book, rather as a Very Long Short Story in the New Yorker (the whole text is available from the link above) - by J.D. Salinger - is easily and without a doubt the worst thing he ever had properly published. I really wanted this to be good; you see, it's Buddy Glass copying word-for-word a very long letter his elder brother Seymour (who is, from this at least, though reading this has somewhat soured that, one of my favourite characters in all of fiction) sent from a summer camp in 1924, when Seymour was apparently seven years old.

   It already strains belief. The letter is well over sixty A4 pages long if you copy-paste the text from the link above and fart it into a Word document or similar. However clever or eccentric seven-year-old Seymour was, however injured his leg may have been, I simply do not believe that he would have devoted so much time to a single letter to his mother who he would have seen in a week or two anyway. Realism aside, the tone rankles. Seymour as the author of this letter is very obviously not a child and is very obviously Salinger himself attempting to pre-empt some bizarre precocious fantasy. There are extensive passages where this Literal Child at length objectifies the female camp warden's wife and thinks about what it would be like to pleasure her. Then there's the final forty percent of the letter, which is a "request for reading material" - deeply pedantically specific, unquantifiably esoteric, and of course far too much for even a very clever seven-year-old and his very clever five-year-old brother to get through in a handful of weeks at summer camp, where there are other activities, other children, etc. I really don't know what Salinger was trying to say with this piece. It really has forever soured my impression of the Glass family, who I always had prior found fascinating sources of curiosity as quasi-realistic character studies - but this letter and the portrait of the child supposed to be writing it paints, really just makes me sad. It's like J.D. had no clue what real people were like, were supposed to be like, were supposed to like, were supposed to do, say, write - and he just goes off on this nitrous tangent that's so ridiculous it would be comical if it weren't so long and taking itself so seriously. This letter did not make me laugh or even smile once in its fifty/sixty page length (once I'd copy-pasted it from that website and farted it into a .pdf so I could flip through it on my Kindle); and though Salinger is far from what I would consider a comic writer, everything else I've ever read by him has at least had a certain levity and humour to it that gives the impression that it was written by a human about humans. This doesn't. This is just sad. This is like some grand gesture of literary experiment that nobody asked for because everybody knows they wouldn't like it. And I didn't. Sorry, Seymour Glass. I hope your leg got better after all that - but I hope you got your sad arse out of bed and made friends with some other actual children at that summer camp instead of sitting around pretending that you can read French and Italian and German well enough to interpret those historical texts you requested to a degree that satisfies you. You know, Seymour - when I read this, I thought you were one of the most interesting characters I'd ever come across. But having read this letter to your mother, so devotedly re-typed by your brother Buddy, I feel nothing but sorrow for you. And not in the way that I would even want to comfort you. I can see myself watching you blow your brains out in that hotel room and I would feel nothing but relief that at least you weren't bothering the banana-fish anymore.

   That's almost certainly harsh. But he's not real, he's a character - and for Salinger to create a character of such complexity and mystery and depth in a handful of glimpses, only then to give us an extensive diarrhoea of a letter from this very same character that reveals him merely to be nothing but an imagined caricature of who I can only presume the author wished he had been somewhat like as a child so that he may have come closer to some kind of a spiritual fulfilment - I mean (oh man, don't even get started on Salinger and religion, he was Not to be Trusted with it in the slightest instance) - ugh. Jerome David, can you hear me? Nobody can know everything. Not even someone who did know everything could solve every problem just by knowing how. Calm down. Shut up. And in your grave if nothing else regret having made the New Yorker publish this embarrassment of a "story".

the Book of Enoch

This book* - or probably more accurately collection of books - is typically referred to by scholars of ancient texts as 'the Book of Enoch', given the Judaic tradition that has followed them for centuries despite spurious archaeological evidence. Though most archaeological evidence referring to specific people is probably spurious going that far back.

   The claim is that this is a collection of texts recorded by Noah's (and therefore Abraham's, and therefore David's, and therefore Jesus's, etc) ancestor Enoch - during the period of post-exile-from-Eden but pre-Flood strangeness upon the Earth. And strange it is. I won't even try to give a close summary as there is a great deal happening in these chapters and if you're intrigued in the slightest I recommend going to the link above and reading the whole thing for free; but I will give a few flappy hints. Enoch is approached by renegade angels who have been teaching dark arts like astronomy and metalworking to humans; they ask him to help defend against the wrath of the Lord who wants to punish them for rebelling against him. Enoch sides with God. The rest of the (really quite longish) book is a series of spiralling visions where Enoch is shown both earthly and heavenly realms in a past and/or future sense; the metaphors are so dense it's hard to tell really what's going on. There is a section later in the book where several passages of metaphor do seem to prophecy events of the Hebrew Old Testament, using animals as stand-ins for the characters - but I don't know enough about Judaic tradition to confirm this.

   What I can say for certain is that the vast majority of Christians I know from my circles have never heard of this book, let alone would be able to interpret it properly. The text only survives because it was preserved in proto-semitic communities in Ethiopia well before 1000 BCE. So whatever else we might want to think, this is a very old text: and it warrants scholarly and prayerful interpretation. I'm still on the fence myself as to whether I consider it scripture - a big part of me keeps screaming "of course it can't be scripture, look how weird some of it is!" and then the other part of me keeps replying, "um, hello? Ezekiel? Revelation?"

   So.... yeh. This is an ancient text worth thinking about, for whatever it may turn out to be.

* There's a bunch of translations out there on the web and I want you to be on the same page as me reading-wise, so I've specifically linked the Andy McCracken translation above, stored in my own Google Drive as I know the sites that host these kinds of documents can often be somewhat temperamental.

Anarch

This book is the fifteenth, and most recent instalment of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. I have read this one before since I started doing this blog so there is a post about it already, but I didn't really put much effort into overviewing the story there, and besides I promised that on this new read-through of the whole series the final post would give more of my honest personal reflections rather than mere summations and hints. So, I may have said that previous books in the series were the most harrowing or the most intense - and I stand by those assertions - but this one is the most truly traumatic. This one picks up mere moments after the last book closes: Gaunt is both in his element and floundering about trying to make his element work in his new role with the war council, and most of the Tanith First are still defending a hopeless scrap of almost-indefensible land of very little tactical value. Things are a mess: Rawne has abandoned post to go and defend the traitor Blood Pact general who, everyone's pretty sure, Sek is trying to have killed again; Major Pasha has been sent to defend a Mechanicum research outpost where a significant Chaos artefact is being held; scout-sergeant Mkoll is nowhere to be seen. What's worse, Yoncy keeps talking to her big brother Dalin about woe machines (remember them? from Verghast?) as they're hiding in the cellars of the city palaces where all Imperial command forces are currently stationed. What ensues in the rest of the book I will not say outright, except for that there are four main strands - 1. with Pasha's group, trying to defend (and then retrieve) the artefacts from Very-Hard-To-Kill daemon troops sent directly from Sek; 2. with Rawne's mob, trying to keep the traitor general safe from other Very-Hard-To-Kill daemon troops sent directly from Sek; 3. with Mkoll, who is off doing his own thing trying to infiltrate Sek's base of operations as best as he can; 4. with a bunch of civilians and a handful of Guard looking after them in the palace cellars (and trust me, this is the subplot that gets traumatic. I'm fucking thirty years old and I had to sleep with the lights on for two nights (of course it didn't help that there is building work going on next door and a lot of their tools sound like bonesaws)). There are a lot of major losses in this book, and all of them hurt. Except for one. I won't say anything about the context - but when Gaunt's daughter gets her first canonically-confirmed kill, I cheered. Also, it should be said - this is the first time in a Gaunt's Ghosts novel that an Inquisitor has been actually helpful and not just a deceptive political shithead. Made a nice change.

   Okay, so that's a summary of that one.

   But I said I'd give some reflections on the series as a whole. Well, I think what's so great about the Gaunt's Ghosts saga can be broken down into three primary factors:

1. Honouring the grimdark: Warhammer 40,000 is the franchise archetype of a 'grimdark' setting. That means there are not meant to be places in this fictional universe where you can go to find hope, or peace, or joy, or even rest. It is total horror and war and carnage. And I think Dan grasps that with both hands; by making the Crusade that is the backdrop of this whole series one against Chaos specifically, it means that there isn't some mindless alien threat of dumb orks or hungry tyranids, or mindful alien threat of hopeful t'au or hope-deprived eldar, or wherever on this spectrum necrons would go; it's Chaos, and they're primarily human. Though, rather than being recognisable as human, they have given themselves to dark daemonic powers - and so there is an uncanny horror to all the conflicts that our protagonists find themselves in. It's one thing to shoot a greenskin in the head because it was about to chop you to bits for nothing but fun; it's one thing to fire a plasma rifle at a kroot because it was about to dismember you for 'the greater good'; it's another thing entirely to have to defend yourself any way you can against a slavering, mutated beast that you know full well was less than a month ago a perfectly normal citizen of the neighbouring hive-city. Dan has stared into the grimdark and concluded that Chaos is the worst enemy, and the way he writes it, you have to agree.
2. Humanising the Imperium: in his prologue to the first omnibus collection of these novels, Dan stated that he didn't want to start with Space Marines, because they're so super-human he wouldn't know how to characterise them. So he started with the Guard; the humble, unaugmented grunts of all Imperial combat. And I wholeheartedly think this was the right choice. I mean, obviously since, he's written many of the stories in the Horus Heresy series, as well as several standalone books, about Space Marines - and he manages to characterise them while retaining their superhumanity - but as a starting point, the Guard is where you go. I mean, First and Only kickstarted the entire Black Library. It was his, and their, first novel. And the series remains going strong to this day nearly two-and-a-half decades later. Don't get me wrong - the dystopian horrors of the Imperium and its necessity of constant war still shine through in gut-wrenching ways. But despite it all, Dan's characters still manage to make each other - and you, the reader - smile, or even laugh, when there is a respite from the bullets and shells.
3. Taking liberties with both the above, and whatever the feth else Dan wants to: what kind of writer follows rules to a T exactly? No kind of writer, exactly. If he wants a story that's a bit safer and a bit sillier, while still being a grimdark war story, he'll give you Blood Pact. If he wants to include superhuman characters to show their contrast against the rank-and-file guardsmen, he dumps three Space Marines into Salvation's Reach, or five Chaos Marines into Traitor General, to show off the sheer disparities in capability of these kinds of being; or he'll give you a powerful psyker as in the Inquisitors from several different stories or the tragic [redacted] being from Only in Death. Warhammer 40,000 is a very big very messy universe lore-wise, and I am sure that if Dan wanted to finish the whole Sabbat Worlds Crusade on a triumphal note but then have the Tanith First go off and fight a wholly different enemy - he could pull that off as well.

   That's all you're getting for now. If I ever feel the urge to re-read these again, and I'm still running this ridiculous blog, they will probably be much shorter posts. Although, I don't know - Dan may well still have a dozen or more books in this series up his sleeve. And who knows where they will go. I mean, they still need to win the Crusade, right? Or then there was the Warmaster's promise that when the Tanith liberate a world and the moment is right, they could settle on it in exchange for their home planet, and that's gotta happen at some point, right? RIGHT?

The Warmaster

This book is the fourteenth in the Gaunt's Ghosts series by Dan Abnett - I have read this one since I started this blog, so there is a pre-existing post about it if you wanna check that out, but I probably have some new stuff to say since when I last read this one it had been nearly a decade since I'd read the previous instalment, whereas this time I've read the whole series (nearly, so far) in about a year. In this one, the Tanith First - though having been presumed long-dead by Imperial Command since their warp-drive went slightly skew-whiff and they lost ten years during retranslation into real-space - arrive on the forge-world of Urdesh, where both Saint Beatti herself and Anakwanar Sek himself are present, so you can imagine there's a fairly major number of intense skirmishes going on. While the Tanith First-and-Only (newly reinforced with an influx of volunteer troops from both Verghast and Belladon) are caught in the thick of the fighting, having been tasked with defending a wide-open area between a residential scrub and the docks, where their only support is artillery that's useless once the enemy gets too close - the chief driving conflicts of this book are political. Gaunt's old friend Lord General Van Voytz is pleased to see the Colonel-Commissar back from Salvation's Reach after a decade of doubt - but there are deeper machinations at play. The war council is growing tired of the unpredictability and reclusiveness of Warmaster Macaroth, the man who has been in charge of the whole Sabbat Worlds Crusade since (well, just) before the start of this series of novels. And they're hungry for a replacement. And they've nominated Gaunt, given his war record and reputation for no-nonsense behaviour. Without giving too much away about how it all goes down, Gaunt goes to find Macaroth to try and have a frank conversation, which is apparently quite successful in achieving - something. The book ends on a cliff-hanger - well, two - with the First in a perilously pinned combat situation with Blood Pact forces in the south side of the city, and Gaunt in a curious new roles amongst the ever-political war council.

(also, I don't want to give spoilers for the next one yet, which I will have to do in the post for that one for the sake of catharsis, but - if you've not by the end of this book figured out that there is something Very Very Wrong with Yoncy - then your grasp of subtext is such that I'm amazed you bother to finish reading any fictional works at all.)

Salvation's Reach

This book is the thirteenth instalment of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. In this one, the Tanith First are tasked with a top-secret mission from Crusade Command itself - they are to infiltrate a place* and retrieve as much useful data as they can from it and destroy as much of the rest of it as they can. Obviously, this is an extremely hard mission, so the Tanith even have three Space Marines tagging along with them.** With no spoilers, the mission doesn't go to the exact plan, but it goes to plan well enough to be considered a success - even if a stow-away spy gave away their ship's location early on and there was a resultant space battle*** that could have risked the lives of many senior Imperial commanders - and they get away largely intact. There are a handful of upsetting character losses, but one of these was a long time coming and is couched by the fact that it's defended by a heroic sacrifice; and really the only major takeaway from Tanith losses in this one is "absolutely feth Meryn."

* I couldn't think of a better word and didn't want to fatten that sentence up too much by describing what it actually is. Salvation's Reach is an area of remote space where the wreckage and junk leftover from millennia-worth of void-battles has aggregated together under its own gravity, collided, fused, and become a misshapen small-planet-sized Thing floating about far away from anything else. The reason it's of interest is that Anakwanar Sek, the chief lieutenant to the Chaos commander Gaur, in this current Crusade, has been using the place as a secret lab and testing ground for all manner of warp-craft, war machines, and new terrible means of killing and traumatising Imperial forces. So there you go.

** It's a minor point, but one of my favourite things in this book is the fact that Nahum Ludd manages to assert authority over these three Space Marines even when they're in the thick of combat-readiness. Pretty badass for a junior commissar.

*** This is also one of my favourite bits - the Chaos ships that follow them out of the warp all shout their own names over and over through the vox, like giant metal evil Pokémon. The best of which has to be TORMAGEDDON MONSTRUM REX! - I mean, if that isn't the silliest most extreme names for an evil spaceship you've ever heard I don't know what to say to you.

Blood Pact

This book is the twelfth in Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series - and while still harrowing and full of threat in many places, I think this is probably one of the most entertaining of the bunch. It reads like a bloody Guy Ritchie film, with all the various playing faffing about and colliding and trying to second-guess each other against a backdrop of apathetic violence. This story is, with very little stretch of exaggeration, Traitor General in reverse: that is to say, Imperial forces are holding a traitorous general from the Blood Pact (an elite Chaos force) prisoner - and a crack-team of Chaos infiltrators have come to Balhaut (where as it happens the Tanith First are on a well-earned break after the horrors of Jago) to come and assassinate him. I know I'd read this before but for some reason remembered hardly anything of what happens in it - sure, there are moments of extreme violence and horror - but it's also a very funny book. The meddling of the Inquisition again rears its head with interesting consequences, and the band of outlaw Tanith who contribute heavily to saving the day are probably my favourite subplot. I also really appreciate Gaunt's commandeering of an agoraphobic coroner to help them win out over the loyalist Blood Pact infiltrators. A lot of fun. And no serious losses on the Good Guy front! I know that's a spoiler but it's very rare to have a Ghosts novel where you can genuinely relax in knowledge of that. One final thing - I know in his Inquisitor novels (see Eisenhorn, Ravenor, Bequin etc) Abnett has shown us intriguing glimpses of the non-frontline "normal life" of Imperial worlds before, but it's cool to see how the Tanith First adapt (or in Rawne & co.'s case, refuse to) to life among such relatively safe normality.

Only in Death

This book is the eleventh in Dan Abnett's increasingly-stomach-wrenching Gaunt's Ghosts series, and in my opinion it's probably the best of the lot. I mean, it's so intense, that I started it out of why-not-ness immediately after finishing the previous instalment - and then, feth sleep, I read the whole damn thing in one sitting, only getting up to pee or refill my canteen.* Sent to the arse-end of the dusty planet Jago, the First end up tasked with guarding a mountain fortress called Hinzerhaus - which deserves special mention, as it's No Joke the main character in this book. Hinzerhaus is creepy as all fuck. This book is incredibly atmospheric and 97% of that comes from Hinzerhaus. (Well, okay, quite a lot of it comes from an old friend who has been sent off to become incorporated into the Imperial psyker forces as well, but I won't spoil that.**) It may feel like something of a slow-burn, this one - but when things get going, they Get Going, and I genuinely felt "they all might actually die" with a seriousness I'd not felt since Vervunhive in book three. Anyway, I'll stop rambling here for want of not giving spoilers - except to say 1. I hope Maggs got therapy, 2. Baskevyl was the MVP of this book by a long shot and everyone would've died if it wasn't for him, love it (one of my favourite characters), and 3. the chapters with Mkoll and Ezsrah on their little quests is just - ah, *chef's kiss*. Yes, this is the best Gaunt's Ghosts novel. So far, anyway.

* Which I only did once. Having drank half a litre of water over about two hours, I then spent the next eight hours carefully rationing my next half a litre, out of solidarity with the regiment. If you know, you know. I did get a little dehydrated but I think it added to the experience.

** Although I wish I could. You deserve a warning. The fate of that character made me openly weep it was so sad and touching and just fethed-up in the way only something in 40k could be.

The Armour of Contempt

This book is the tenth Gaunt's Ghosts instalment from Dan Abnett, and it's probably the most horrific - not the most upsetting, merely totally grim & dark in its portrayal of war in the grim darkness of the far future. Here we get to see the Tanith First-and-Only (with newly-incorporated Belladon troops) return to Gereon to finally liberate it from Chaos forces. The narrative is kind of split in two - one stream follows the main regiment as they try to make contact with whatever remains of the resistance, so they can help them overthrow the incumbent Chaos leadership; the second (and far more intense) follows those members of the regiment who have been on RIP (retraining, indoctrination and punishment) protocols and are therefore assigned to be - eh, yeh, essentially cannon fodder in the worst front of the whole planetary assault. This book more than any other Ghosts novel is full of sucker-punches: you'll think something awful is about to happen and then it hasn't, or you'll think safety has been achieved and then BAM-feth. Witnessing what has become of Gereon after so many years of Chaos occupation is tremendously disturbing. And again there is another heart-breaking loss at the end which I won't spoil. One uplifting thing I will say about this book is the reintroduction of Merrt as a major character - he quickly went on to become one of my favourites. Oh, and there's meddling by the Inquisition, which Gaunt's lot haven't had to deal with for a while, but it's entertaining to see how they handle it.

His Last Command

This book, number nine in Dan Abnett's increasingly-upsetting Gaunt's Ghosts series, takes place about a year-and-a-half after the Gereon mission. Despite an extremely rocky path getting back into Imperial safe-space, Gaunt and his team find yet another major problem to deal with: in their commander's absence, the Tanith First-and-Only have been subsumed into a Belladon regiment under the control of one Colonel Wilder. Which would be enough to contend with, if it weren't also for the fact that the Sparshad Mons antique "city" thing the Guard are trying to clear Chaos forces out of is a completely insane place, and terrifying monsters keep appearing out of nowhere. Gaunt and his team's reappearance disturbs things not only for Wilder and the Belladon but also for the Tanith and Verghastite troops who had assumed them all long-dead. This vein of doubt and discomfort runs throughout the book, as does the increasing apparency that - having survived on a Chaos-held world for fifteen months, these prodigal comrades are on another level of proficient in dealing death and destruction. The Guard win the day, but it's a close call, and one only made possible by the heightened specialisation of the Gereon team and their return into the Imperial intelligence networks. The ending of this book is heart-breaking, even if it's characters you barely know.* Is that a spoiler? Probably. Sorry.

* True fact - this was the first Gaunt's Ghosts book I ever read. I found it in my local library, a fourteen-year-old who had been painting and playing Warhammer 40k for about four years, but had never read one of its books - and even with no familiarity with the characters or context, the sheer scale and depravity of war I was exposed to in these pages blew my tiny young mind. Needless to say, I read it twice, took it back, paid my late fee, and as soon as I could afford it started buying up the whole series from the start. And part of me still wishes I hadn't, because however good they are, Dan keeps stabbing me in the feel-bone.

Traitor General

This book is the eighth in Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts saga, and let me tell you it's the most harrowing yet. Not by a long shot the most upsetting, but the most consistently intense and unnerving throughout. Gaunt and a small crack-team of elites from the regiment* are tasked with a top-secret mission to infiltrate Chaos-held world Gereon, meet up with the local resistance, and then find and eliminate - oh, you guessed it from the title? - an Imperial Guard general who has turned traitor. This is a hard swallow, this book. The portrayal of a human life under the Imperial regime is often bad enough but under Chaos - it's fething insane. Anyway, I won't tell you how the team get on with their mission, but I will say that this book contains some of the most outrageously badass scenes in the entire series, and also introduces one of the coolest characters, Ezsrah ap Niht, into the regimental fold. So there's that.

* I won't say who, but you wouldn't be at all surprised, if you're familiar with the series so far, that it includes Criid, Varl, Larkin, Mkoll, Bonin, Brostin, Rawne, and Mkvenner.

** I mean, Mkvenner could probably have done this whole book on his own. He is ridiculous.

Sabbat Martyr

This book is the seventh of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. Fuck me. I can't do this. Yes I can. So. The Ghosts are sent to the tactically-insignificant world Herodor - where, to everyone's surprise, the reincarnation of Saint Beatti herself is present to lead the crusade into glorious victory. Except Gaunt doesn't believe it's really her. Regardless of whether it is her or not, the Tanith and Verghastite troops have to contend not only with a typical Chaos assault of the main hive-city, but also with a subversive ploy by the archenemy to assassinate the Saint using a small coterie of incredibly-dangerous specialists. And while the ensuing fights that the Ghosts and these specialists get into are incredibly cool and punchily well-prosed, again, this book ends with a loss that puts George R.R. Martin to shame for its sheer miserable wastefulness.

Straight Silver

This book is the sixth instalment of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. Yes, I've finally calmed down from the fuckeries at the end of the last one to come back to re-reading my way through. I may regret this. Alternatively, I may just force myself to get through them all as fast as possible so then I can just sit back and let the trauma fade for several years before I feel the need to revisit the series. Anyway, here the Tanith First are sent to Aexe Cardinal, where a horrifically-overblown trench war has been raging for decades. Aristocrats are in charge, which makes for a delightfully Sharpe-ish* butting of heads over tactics, priorities, and whatnot; aristocrats also make up a hefty proportion of the non-Guard troops involved in the war, which largely explains why it has been going on so long. Incompetence and cowardice are on full display, and Ibram Gaunt is in full swing as a leadership-empowered Commissar - which doesn't make him or the regiment very popular. I have to say that the depictions of a trench war in this book are absolutely heart-rendingly gross; they made me feel the realities of what an absolute shitshow that kind of thing must be like far worse than any World War 1 film ever has.

* Dan always has said that the inspiration for doing the Ghosts was "Sharpe in space".

The Conquest of Bread

This book by Peter Kropotkin is one of the seminal founding texts in our modern understanding of anarcho-socialism. I had previously read it as an impressionable sixteen-year-old - but now with a much deeper education of politics, economics, and philosophy - I genuinely hold to the ideas herein far stronger than I had then.

   This book is a masterfully mathematically inarguable treatise on how anarcho-socialism can be the most efficient and humane means of organising a political economy along egalitarian lines. I  realise that given the age of the book the numbers comprising its core arguments are in sheer need of an update for the 21st-century, which given how much things are changing these days may again need another update every two or three years to come - but the underlying principles remain solid. Kropotkin's assessment of industrial here is timeless; the ideas about social organisation, to the workers as to their capabilities and to the citizens as to their needs is a core tenet of "small c" communism; this is a model of how a political-economic body could function sustainably for the best of its members with no impingement on those around it can flourish.

   This book was a key text in my rational radicalisation as a teenager - and having re-read it so many years later it seems it still makes a great deal of sense. Capitalism is worse than a virus; it is simply unnecessary. Once the means of production are consolidated, for the workers not to be in democratic control of them implies an undue influence that is not in the best interests of the surrounding society. We, the proletariat, must demand control in such manner - or industrialised societies will never get over their "hill" of liberalism and embrace the truth of political and economic equality.

   There are many more ruminations on this great book that I could lay forth but I think the key points have been made. Revolution, whether democratic or sectarian-violent - are inevitable - but they best way to guard against that is to issue such structures to the workers in the first place. In 2023 it seems like a silly argument to make, when "artificial intelligence" is already starting to cannibalize the jobs of artists, writers, translators, coders, and so many more - but does not that simply drive home the urgency of such a revolution?

God in Creation

This book is the second (after this one) in Jürgen Moltmann's systematic theology series; as you can tell from the title, this one deals with creation doctrines. Though Moltmann approaches the topic quite innovatively from an ecological perspective - placing God and creation in relation to each other within their own spiritual and natural ecologies. This book took me a long time to read - if I must admit, I started reading it way back in late 2017 when I was still working at Church Army, but found it too difficult; but since getting nudged back onto Moltmann in more recent years, and having found his first book of systematic theology relatively manageable, I decided to embark upon the rest of his series, and found it somewhat workable, though it was a real mental test compared to most of the other Christian literature I read.* In any case, I have now finished it, and found it profoundly enlightening on a number of half-baked questions I've always had about creation but had never articulated, as well as a number more of things I'd never even wondered but now having been made to think about them am astounded that most Christians seem to be able to slide along without deep doubts in their cognizance about such things. Moltmann is that kind of theologian; he thinks into the weird corners and flushes them out with ecumenical sources, biblical wisdom, and fat old logic.

   It would be completely disingenuous of me to say I can summarise what Moltmann says in this book. I hope the introductory paragraph is enough to entice you as to the aim and style of his book in his overall systematic theology project, and following from here I will give a very brief list of the chapter subjects covered in this volume.

1. The idea of God being in creation as an introductory chapter
2. Specific considerations of the significance of this in the ecological crisis**
3. How God, and we, know creation
4. God as the creator
5. How time relates to the act of God's creation
6. How space relates to the act of God's creation
7. The duality/unity of heaven and earth
8. Evolution in creation
9. Human beings as God's image
10. Embodiment and the soul as the end of created works
11. The Sabbath as the feast of creation
12. An appendix comprising various symbols of creation

   Many of these might seem quite dry, or even irrelevant, to what you might consider core themes or issues in creation doctrine; but trust me, once Moltmann gets his teeth into one of these things, it becomes interesting as anything. And illuminating in ways you had probably never imagined. But anyway. So that's it for Moltmann on creation - merely volume two in his systematic theology series. Since finishing this one, I have acquired volumes three, four and five - Christology, pneumatology, and eschatology respectively - so I suppose I'll see you again soon for breakdowns of those.

* Maybe that says more about most Christian literature than it does me or Moltmann... you make your mind up.

** I have to say, it is fucking affirming to have such an adept theologian tackling creation issues through the lens of the "ecological crisis" way back in the 1980's, when that kind of language has only just barely entered the mainstream consciousness now in the 2020's.

Sourcery

This book is, it should need no introduction - one of the inimitable Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. And in this one the incompetent wizard Rincewind finds himself caught in a baffling and threateningly-apocalyptic scenario, as a new Sourcerer has turned up at the Unseen University and had turned the whole culture of magic on its head and inside out. It is up to out plucky hero to muddle his way through this without being turned into a piece of bellybutton-fluff or something - which could very easily have happened, given everything else that seems to be going on. I've read a fair few Discworld novels but this is the maddest so far. And if you have half an idea what goes on in a normal one that should shock you. I'm not reading them in order, mind you. But I am trying to read all of them, given enough time, and luck in charity shops. That said, Rincewind is always a brilliantly entertaining protagonist for the comic fuel of Pratchett's imagination, and this instalment in the ongoing exploration of Discworld is no exception: hilarious, mind-boggling, slightly scary, thought-provoking, all at the same time. There are no other authors who can do what Pratchett does. I would say read this, but really just flop open a page of all the Discworld novels that exist and stick your finger down at random and start there, and then repeat until you've read them all. That's more or less what I'm doing, and it seems to be fun enough.

The Cloven

This book is the third and final instalment in Brian Catling's utterly phenomenal series of novels, preceded by The Vorrh and The Erstwhile; and oh man was this trilogy worth sticking with, no matter how bogged down and lost I felt at times wading through its depths.

   Characters collide. Plot threads intertwine. Answers are unwrapped and mysteries implode back into the dark heart of the forest from whence they came. Angels go mad and back again. Humans find themselves thrust up against their closest relatives and hate what they see. War begins to raise its ugly head, and colonialists and locals alike begin to panic, to plan, and in some cases to abandon ship altogether and leave chaos behind. Nothing will be the same again - except the Vorrh itself, though even that will take time to rest and recover. But you, dear reader? You certainly won't be the same again.

   Having finished the trilogy I am now probably about 60-70% certain that I could tell you maybe half of what definitely happened in these books. But I don't care. These are not novels you read for surety, for comfortable solidity or easy solutions to the riddles posed. This is a trilogy that makes you feel like you are wandering through the Vorrh, slowly losing your mind at exactly the same time that your instincts are sharpening and your ancestral memory deepening. To say that this is a well-written trio of magical novels would be like saying that The Godfather series is a well-directed trio of mobster films. I have never read anything like this and I doubt I will again. These books made me laugh maybe once or twice per instalment, brought me to the verge of tears two or three times per instalment, but kept me in a state of suspended anxious confusion and tension for at least three-quarters of the whole length of each. They just don't let up, but they never tread the same ground twice either. I honestly think these may be some of the best fiction I've ever had the privilege of reading for their sheer immersive quality. Read these if you want an itchy mind.

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

This book, a collection of medical-theological reflections by eminent surgeon Dr Paul Brand edited together and fleshed out a bit by Philip Yancey, is an actually miraculous read. It will both make you appreciate the complex marvel that is the human body in ways you probably never knew if you're not in the medical profession, and further to this, its interwoven reflections (which I will talk about in a moment) really drive home the New Testament metaphor of the Church being the Body of Christ in fresh, compelling ways, that make this a powerful apologetic for the Church as the vehicle of witness in faith. It is also quite beautifully written, often dealing with intricate biological subjects but never getting bogged down in jargon; and when making its wider points it does so with a deftness and clarity that makes the book extremely easy reading. I finished it in two [not-even-that]-long sittings.

   The book is split into four sections, though there is initially quite a long preface by Philip Yancey which is excellent reading in itself, mainly reflecting on his friendship with Brand and how the older man was a source of much inspiration to his faith and also just a marvellous human all-round, doing much great research that revolutionized leprosy treatment in the 20th-century.

   The first of the four main parts is about cells. Their central metaphor here is drawing on the imagery the apostle Paul uses (see 1 Corinthians 12, the second half of the chapter) to talk about individual members within the Body that is the Church, and how each needs to perform its duty to the benefit of the whole; cells are the perfect metaphor to carry this forward. Seven bitesize chapters (all the chapters in this book are bitesize, part of what makes it so readable) deal with: the nature of this membership as individual entities; the specialization of those members; the innate diversity of the individuals all working together; the intrinsic worth of each individual member; the total unity of all members as one collective; the duty of service to the whole demanded by the whole of its members; and finally "mutiny" - which in cell terms means cancer (and this chapter uses this metaphorical understanding of the Body of Christ to talk about the hoarding of wealth/food/time in the global context of the Church in a world where there is so much need with such adroitness that it alone is worth reading the book for).

   The next, bones. Metaphorically here Brand and Yancey are talking about the doctrinal elements that support Christianity from its core - the Law, the character of God, and such. Its chapters deal with: the notion of having a frame from which everything else either hangs or is contained; the hardness necessary to deal with knocks and turns of life; the freedom enabled the human body by the marvel that is its skeleton (also this chapter contains a "positive re-spin" of the Ten Commandments that are just brilliant); the essential capacity for growth and healing; the adaptability to new contexts and activities; and finally we get a brilliantly insightful chapter that talks about the dangers of legalism by inversing the metaphor and considering creatures that have exoskeletons.

   The third, skin. In the Christian metaphor this is all about love, as you'll hopefully see is fairly obvious from the brief sketches of each chapter. They talk about skin as: something visible, by which the world recognises our outward form; perceptive and sensitive in relation to its environment and other things and people; compliant in its flexibility and durability; full of an immensity of inner interconnections that transmit information; essential to the physical and emotive experience of embodied love; and lastly capable of confronting threats and protecting innards.

   And finally, the body's capacity for motion. The metaphorical application is somewhat looser here, ranging from reliance on the Holy Spirit to keep us tapped into "the Head" of the Body (that is of course Christ) to the need for the Church to be on its toes in responding to things around it. Chapters: the concert of muscle activity that is movement; the balance between all facets of moving parts; why dysfunction occurs and how it can be remedied; the need for a stable, trusted hierarchy for effective function (this makes the shift from muscles to nerves); the guidance of the whole by the executive operation of the Head (or the brain, depending on what side of the metaphor you're looking through); and the capacity of the whole to be real, meaningful, as a human presence in another's life.

   I would heartily recommend this book to Christian readers as an illuminating work on what it can, or should, or does, look like to be part of the Body of Christ; moreover from that gospel angle it will bring you to an incredible perspective on the magical sack of electric meat that is you, your own actual body. Brand's memories of his medical exploits, in particular those from among the leper communities whom he served so diligently, selflessly and effectively, will leave you breathless. Similarly I would recommend it to non-Christian readers who all think this is a pretty weird metaphor, and Brand and Yancey's brilliant collaboration here will leave you scratching your head in wonderment but substantively better informed about why we use this phrase to talk about the Church - and what a perfect metaphor it actually is.

A Wilderness of Mirrors

This book by Mark Meynell is, as its subtitle puts it, a Christian apologetic via an exploration into "trusting again in a cynical world". And boy, is it timely. In fact maybe too timely - but we'll come back to that point later. First let's get a grip on what it actually talks about.

   The first part of the book looks into the legacy of fracturing trust in the modern age. In three heavily-endnoted chapters, Meynell talks about the failures on this front of our ruling authorities (although largely here drawing on historical examples, which is all very well, but I would have liked a bit more of a juicy socio-political analysis), our mediating authorities (informers and the like), and our personal authorities (or caregivers - though the chapter swiftly brushes aside both the medical and teaching professions within a single page and then is mainly charged with the failures of the church*).

   The second part is a short, theoretical pair of reflections on the loneliness-inducing alienation, lostness and paranoia that we can all-too-easily succumb to in such a climate. These chapters are fine enough I guess, but Meynell doesn't really say anything that hasn't already been said in far more insightful ways by both academics and meme-smiths, so I won't toot the horn for this middle section too much. I also think he entirely fails to address a few key factors that are driving our sense of alienation, betrayedness and paranoia - the rampantly shifting techno-social landscape, the death throes of late capitalism, the ecological crises, to name just three. You can probably think of more. A bit of legwork in talking about the sociology or political-economic theory of trust would also have been appreciated.

   But it is in part three that we get to the meat of the book - the Christian apologetic section. Firstly he deals with the biblical conception of original sin as both the starting-point and to-some-degree justification of such a culture of mistrust: this was an interesting chapter and made a lot of connections I hadn't seen before. The next three chapters are far more simply predictable: Jesus is the one we can trust; the Church is the society in which we can start to break away from patterns of cynicism; the gospel is the message and narrative we need to begin building a more trustful future. Nothing bad, but nothing original: especially in the final chapter, a few more pragmatic pointers about how to break through psychologically or socially into the cynical miasma of the postmodern world wouldn't have gone amiss.

   As I hinted in my opening paragraph, the real problem with this book is that it came out too soon. It was published in 2015, and while "post truth" was already a thing in certain academic circles at that time, it wasn't yet the predominant socio-political normativity - had this book been put together even three years later, let alone six and he'd have had all the Covid madness to break down to boot, it could have had a lot more to draw on and impactfully say. But that's a pretty cynical two cents to dig into a book which is a perfectly respectable Christian apologetic speaking into a vital issue in most of the contemporary western world. It's not great reading, but it's perfectly readable, if that makes sense. I'd probably only recommend this to you if you're already a Christian and you're specifically looking for a resource on how to engage the cynicism of our times; as exhortational as the final sections were for me as a believing reader, I really doubt they'd convince anyone who wasn't already convinced of the Truth beyond truth in a world where truth barely even exists anymore.

* Something I am all too familiar with, as the elder of my old church The Crowded House, one Steve Timmis (who, interestingly enough, wrote one of the blurb reviews on this very book - he describes it as "well researched, well written, and well worth reading" - I tentatively agree), was pushed to resign as CEO of global church-planting network Acts 29 and as leader of the church for persistent allegations of bullying behaviour and fostering a culture of spiritual abuse under his leadership. I have talked about my personal journey in all this in other posts which I'm not going to bother to link here, but if you're really interested feel free to search through my blog's (not inconsiderable, I know lols) history until you find the particularly long, whingy posts.

2022 catch-up

So, this past year I read forty-six books, which is far from my best, but better than last year. I'm still not managing to read as many books by women, people of colour or LGBT+ people as I'd like - I'm scuppered by already having bookshelves too full before I can conscionably buy more, even as much as I'd like to in order to offset my own reading biases. In any case, let's get down to an overview of some of what I read in the past year...

• Literally all of Dan Abnett's Inquisitor novels that exist so far - see Eisenhorn 1/2/3/4, Ravenor 1/2/3 and Bequin 1/2
• Dan Abnett's original sci-fi war story - Embedded
• Dan Abnett's original fantasy thriller - Triumff
• Dan Abnett's [un]original dinosaur drama - Extinction Event
• Yeh I've been re-reading a lot of Dan Abnett this year, get over it
• Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series - where I got up to book five and then my heart said "nope" and I put it on hold for the foreseeable future
• Don't worry that's it for Dan Abnett in this year's list
• The first two instalments of the maddest best fantasy trilogy I've ever read - Brian Catling's The Vorrh and The Erstwhile
• An underwhelming biography of the most important man ever to live
• Some reasonably interesting insights into Daniel the prophet's relevance to modernity
• Corrie ten Boom's absolutely bonkers prayer journey
• Four galleries worth of The Far Side, alongside its prehistory
• Che Guevara's manual on Guerrilla Warfare
• A grotesquely bad culture-war-christian manifesto - ech
• George Orwell's positively-intentioned but thoroughly out-of-date guide on spotting political fakespeak
• Sarah Bessey's incredibly edifying Jesus Feminist
• Richard Rohr's magnificent guide on how to join The Divine Dance
• And then Jürgen Moltmann's far more intellectual dive into the Trinity
• A fun graphic way of interpreting biblical data - see here
• Richard Keyes's ruminations on what church should be: Chameleon or Tribe?
• Pope Francis telling Catholics to get their environmental shit together
• Three of Plato's most significant historic texts ever - probably
• That great moment where Ludwig Wittgenstein "solved philosophy" but nobody understood him so every other philosopher had to keep going anyway
• Sheffield's absolute boss-man ex-mayor Magid Magid on The Art of Disruption
• My favourite of the three Roald Dahl novellas I read over Christmas - Matilda

So - that's it from me for this past year, and I'll be sure to keep reading random stuff and updating this blog as often as I can be arsed so there's some record of all the random stuff I'm reading... that's why I'm doing this, right?

Peace & love

Isaac Stovell