Northern Lights

This book is a children's fantasy novel by Philip Pullman, standing as the first book in his His Dark Materials trilogy, which I've never read before & intend to finish over the next week or so. As is my wont with serieses, I'll reserve my commentary and reflections on characters, overall plot, themes, etc until the post about the last book and here concern myself only with providing a quick spoiler-free sketch of the story so far.

   The novel opens in Jordan College, Oxford, albeit not in our universe but in an alternate reality where all humans are perpetually accompanied by their daemons - animal-form embodiments of their humans' souls. We are introduced to Lyra Belacqua & her daemon Pantalaimon, as her uncle Lord Asriel returns to Jordan from an expedition in the far north. It becomes clear that conspiracy is afoot, and after an unexpected gain (the Master of Jordan gives Lyra one of the only existing alethiometers; a curious arcane instrument which I will discuss in more depth in my final post about the trilogy) followed by an unexpected loss (Lyra's best friend Roger goes missing; she presumes he has been taken by a nefarious mysterious group nicknamed "the Gobblers"), Lyra is sent away from Jordan to live as the assistant to a glamourous & powerful woman named Mrs Coulter. However - just as she's starting to adjust to the high-class lifestyle, Lyra notices that the tendrils of conspiracy don't even leave her safe here - so she runs away, ending up in the company of the gyptians (a community of people largely comparable to gypsies in our universe, only with barges instead of caravans), who she urges to go north to track down the Gobblers & rescue Roger (along with the many other children, some of them gyptians, who have been taken). The icy wastes of the far North then play background to a rollercoaster of captures & escapes, near misses & fatal mistakes - we meet Iorek Byrnison, an armoured bear, and Lee Scoresby, a Texan aeronaut, and Lyra & the gyptians do their best to muddle through the deepening dangers of the conspiracy they're uncovering, including whatever roles in it Lord Asriel & Mrs Coulter seem to be playing.

   I read this in two big sittings. Pullman writes extremely well & I found this a highly compelling page-turner - as an adult! Had I been exposed more fully to these books when I was of their target audience age (say, ten to thirteenish maybe) I'm confident they would have displaced The Franchise That Must Not Be Named as my go-to rereads. Strongly recommended. Stand by for posts about books two & three.

War in the Museum

This short story by Robert Rath follows everyone's favourite pair of rival bickering necrons, Trazyn the Infinite and Orikan the Diviner (of The Infinite and the Divine novel fame). Trazyn, whose quasi-eternal life's effort is to construct and fill a series of planet-sized museums with stasis-trapped specimens of cultural and historical value, may have bitten off more than he can chew with his new acquisition of a tyranid splinter fleet, complete with its hive tyrant. Once his attempt to rehydrate the damaged tyrant is nearing completion, psychic tweaks between the supposedly-locked tyranid horde start manifesting, and in no short order they're all awake and rampaging through the museum. Trazyn must commandeer the aide of a Mechanicus magos and a pair of Sisters of Battle to help him defend himself while he makes for the control room to try to save his precious displays - only then Orikan turns out to be there already, causing mischief.

   This is a fun little story, but you'll get a lot more out of it if you've already read the novel I linked in parentheses above. Undead soulless metal killing machines they may be, but Trazyn and Orikan consistently prove they're far from boring.

On Liberty

This book is a long essay by John Stuart Mill about the moral, social, political and psychological elements of liberty. It wasn't a particularly tricky read but I would struggle to summarise his ideas beyond: liberty is good for both the individual and their society; liberty of the individual in terms of their capacity to hold their own opinions free of coercion and to do what they will insofar as this harms no others is of profound value to the stability and ethical virtue of a society and these rights should be protected politically. He obviously says more than this but it all boils down to over-verbose circlings rhetorically of this core notion. Despite being written in the Victorian era the vigour of his argumentation feels astoundingly contemporary - indeed Mill as a philosopher of liberty still has much still to hope for in the 21st century, when such basic political assumptions as are enshrined in this text are losing that enshrinement when it comes to our basic political institutions. This isn't a particularly practical book, but neither is it an abstract series of obtuse or irrelevant speculations - Mill doesn't tell us where liberty comes from or how it is best used, he simply makes the case, in great detail and using very long sentences, for its being a personal and communal value and practice of profound importance to human flourishing. 

the Lord of the Rings: book three

This book is the third part of J. R. R. Tolkien's timeless classic The Lord of the Rings series. As with previous more recent posts about these books, these are ones I've read before, so please dig into my blog history through category tags or the dated archive to see my fuller thoughts and/or summaries on the themes/plots of this story - I experienced this again through the ongoing mission of YouTuber Tolkien Trash to read the whole trilogy to her audience a chapter a week, a task which I have to say she is performing excellently.

Galatians Study

This book (available for free online from that link) is a Bible study by Tim Keller working through Paul's letter to the Galatian church. I've been working through it with my dad over the last few months, and would highly recommend it as a small-group study resource. The Galatian epistle is a potent little depth-charge of a book anyway, but Keller's insightful commentary and selection of passages from other theologians (especially John Stott and Martin Luther) who have written about the letter make this study extremely edifying and fruitful for thinking through Christian discipleship in powerfully provocative and helpful ways.