Let Them Eat Chaos

This book by Kae Tempest is comprised of a single 71-page poem, also released as an album of spoken-word-with-music,* by the same title.

   It is utterly brilliant.

   They takes us on a journey through the nexus of what it means to be an interpersonally-connected and socially-aware human amid the complexities, injustices, small joys and small hardships, big hopes and big losses, distractions, and whatnot, of the 21st-century world. There is a lot of incisive (punchy not preachy) political commentary and calling out of individualistic apathy. The bulk of the poem is a portrait of a street, in London, at 4.18am, in which place at which time exactly seven people, strangers to each other, are awake, for different reasons. Each of these seven, after a two-or-three page descriptive introduction, is treated to four-to-six pages of verse voicing their internal struggles. These vary massively in tone - from despairing at the gentrification of one's lifelong neighbourhood forcing one soon to move to bafflement at one's own incapacity to not fall into the same holes in a low-pay high-sesh lifestyle - but the thread connecting them (other than all being awake at 4.18am on this London street) is these individuals' disconnection from others. The poem climaxes with a surprise thunderstorm striking, and all seven rush into the street in wonder and excitement, see each other, and laugh, dance, hug, in the torrential rain. Kae ends the poem with an uproarious cry of pleas to the reader, to all humans, to wake up and love more - to value the stories and struggles of others, even those we don't know, to fight for justice against the powers that neglect it - because what is striving for justice if not effectively loving people who may be affected by injustice? Its language and imagery and juxtapositions reveal a great many of the intricate deceptions of politicised global consumer capitalism, culture under neoliberalism, and our socioeconomic relationship with our planet. Its portraits paint familiar pictures of kinds of people who live and struggle in London, as in the UK, as in most places, in this day and age - a world where community is being made redundant - and remind us that empathy is the key. The world is a complicatedly broken and brokenly complicated place, and any effort to make it less so requires that we, ourselves, first start genuinely respecting the lives, needs, narratives, struggles, contradictions, and basic human legitimacy, of others around us. Before the flood comes.

   This is a poem that, in anguish and rage and indefatigable faith in human goodness, tells us we can do better and we know it so we fucking should do better. It avoids being bleak and cynical, facing real problems through recognisable characters, and (also in the non-character-bits) walks the line such that the darkness is never being held too far from our knowledge of the possibility of light. It is an immensely challenging and ultimately heartening poem - a radical fireburst call-to-arms.** And it is fantastically fun on the ears.

   Yeh. Read this poem.***

* Worth listening to - the poem, heard in their voice and accompanied by the music, takes its fullest power. I can attest to this having seen them live in what was probably the largest and sweatiest venue hosting a spoken word performance in Birmingham that night. (Spoken word performances tend not to be in large sweaty venues.)

** Okay, not arms, the opposite of arms, love, but call-to-arms is the phrase. Just don't get the idea that this is supposed to kickstart some violent revolution, it's about genuine human connection being the root of both community and meaningful social justice. Perhaps a nonviolent revolution then? God knows we need one atm. Peace and love, dude.

*** In one sitting, out loud, if possible.

Summer Requiem

This book is a collection of Vikram Seth's poems. They explore themes of the individual's connection to nature through our own life cycles and those of the world around us - birth, death, decay, rebirth, renewal - how these are experienced psychologically as states of our being just as they are realised in actual natural processes and rhythms of seasonal change. This collection makes powerful poetic statements about transience that are quietly poignant, and delicately written. There are several strong* poems in this collection, and so overall I'd recommend this book, and probably** the other poetry of Vikram Seth, to anyone who enjoys a good meditative verse.

* My standard for a strong poem is pretty flexible - usually it just means one that was so enjoyable and/or heavy that upon finishing it I close the book upon my thumb, stare at the ceiling wide-eyed and make a noise life "whfff" for a couple of seconds before then re-reading the poem, aloud.

** Having never explored him as a writer, really. My parents got me this for Christmas.

the Revenge of Gaia

This book by James Lovelock is, hands-down, the scariest book I've read since I started this blog. Long-time readers will be familiar with my concerns about the environment: human societies have lost our relationship with the natural world, to the point that our entire economic systems as they currently stand are functionally incompatible with sustainable ecosystems (see this and this), and the only political movements calling out these issues on the scale they need to be called out on are marginal at best.

   Lovelock, as a climate scientist, has been one of the most prominent voices in the public sphere since the 1960s on environmentalism, and is still profoundly influenatial today, despite several notable areas of disagreement with 'mainstream' green types. His main claim-to-fame is for the 'Gaia' hypothesis, that planetary biological and geological systems (like Earth) are inextricably interconnected and self-regulating over extremely long time periods. He overviews this theory in this book, as well as the life-history of Earth within the scope of the theory, though other books by him focusing purely on the Gaia hypothesis and Earth-science will be more thorough on this topic.

   This book is concerned with the rapid destabilisation of Gaia's natural self-regulation: human civilisation has, to put it crudely, shat out so much waste that the typical means of carbon absorbtion are overwhelmed, so the planet (in the very short-term, geologically-speaking, but still long enough for a mass extinction of plants and animals and the probable deaths of billions of humans - mainly the poorer ones) is overheating. The scientific projections for the twenty-first century are downright chilling. James offers some generalistic overviews of how we need to reshape our food and energy industries, our entire societal use of technology, our entire economic systems - nothing too dissimilar from other environmentalists' Last-Prophet-Before-The-Flood pleas for large-scale social change and political action, which are still going largely unheeded.

   I don't know why I read this book. I already knew how utterly and completely our species has, as they say in Alabama (probably), "gone done fucked up." The only people who are likely to read this book will be dedicated environmentalists like myself who already know that massive radical change is needed, twenty years ago. It's probably too late to prevent a mass extinction (I mean, heck, it's already happening). It's probably too late to prevent dangerously runaway global warming that will force mass migration on scales never seen before in human history, runaway inflation on food, wars over water.

   If the contents of this book are interesting to you, don't read it. It'll just depress you without really telling you anything action-oriented that you probably don't already know. (Except that nuclear power doesn't deserve its demonised status.) Instead, go out and take direct action against the corporate-governmental schemes that are perpetuating the human destruction of our life support system, Gaia.

   That, or stock up on tinned goods and bottled water for a post-apocalyptic bunker.

   I'm doing both.

the Book of Laughter and Forgetting

This book is a novel by Milan Kundera, and beyond that, I don't really have a clue where to start in trying to talk about it. I guess I'll start with a semi-relevant anecdote for my own amusement.

   So - I've been reading this in short intermittent bursts for about a month but finished it last night (this morning?) in one 130ish-page sitting, sat in a small wind-protected nook behind the big pillars of the front of Manchester Central Library, having been stranded for the night. I'd been at a jazz-and-pizza-type venue with some friends, and was meant to be getting the last train back to Sheffield around 11.30ish, but upon arrival at the station was told it had been cancelled. The only alternative was a train leaving an hour later that instead went to Leeds and getting a connecting bus to Sheffield which would arrive at 3.30am. Too late. I decided to head back to the bar, find my friends, and crash on the wrong side of the Pennines for the night before getting the first train back the morning after. My phone then died. So upon arrival at the venue I'd not long since left, explained the situation to the dubious bouncer, got in, found my friends weren't there - I had no way of finding out where they'd gone. Fortunately, I had this book in my pocket, and so I meandered slowly through the city centre (even finding an unopened can of blackcurrant-flavoured cider on the street! score) casually people-watching, then settled outside the library to drink my floor-cider and read the remainder of this truly excellent novel. While sat there (for what was probably at least two hours) I had three interactions with passers-by: a group of Mancunian revelers (one of whom was drunkenly prancing along the library steps and slipped over right in front of me, at which I couldn't help but laugh - I don't think they knew I was even there until they heard me laughing at his fall, at which the slipper told me to "do one" and his mate said "have a good night dude"); a Spanish guy who worked in a kitchen on his way home from work (he stopped to ask if I had any rolling tobacco, which I didn't, at which he said "okay never mind", sat down next to me and rolled and smoked a pure-weed joint, and we had a conversation about working in kitchens and which cities in Northern England are good for finding jobs and so on); and a guy who sounded like a Londoner (who spotted a wine bottle on the floor near me and thought it was mine and approached to ask if I was finished with it and if not could he have some, at which I explained it was probably empty, being litter that had been there before my arrival, an explanation he still felt compelled to test by picking it up and shaking it, then when realising it was indeed just an empty bottle, threw it at one of the library pillars - terrifying both myself and his friend who assumed it would burst dangerously into shards of broken glass, but fortuitously it bounced at a harmless angle off the stone cylinder and landed spinning whimsically on the pavement nearby). Bizarre interactions with strangers aside, it was actually a very easy place to sit and read - and once I finished the book I re-pocketed it and headed for the station, where I tried (and failed) to get a few hours' sleep before my train.

   What does this anecdote have to do with this novel?

   I'll tell you.

   Firstly, and completely superficially, this novel was the book that I spent the bulk of this anecdote's timespan reading.

   Secondly, amusement and memory are key themes of Kundera's novel, though I'll admit that too is something of a tenuous link.

   Okay, so I should probably talk a bit about the book itself. But I'm reluctant to. There is simply so much content and meaning and thematic fields I could start unpacking from it only to realise I could never do justice to even a rough summary of what this book is about. The best I could probably do is to simply transcribe the blurb:

   "This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single unique situation the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance."

   What this interior is, I think, is an immensely complex one to disentangle - it's about why we laugh, why we forget, all the different reasons why we may do either and what all that says about tragedy and life and darkness and joy and being comfortable with our own lives at any given moment. This is explored through political commentary (Kundera wrote this in artistic exile from his Czech homeland which was at the time still under Soviet rule) about freedoms and art, razor-sharp social satire about sexuality and shame in patriarchal societies, and portraits of characters that achieve astonishing psychological depth in the short time we spend with them to delve into many of the emotional mechanisms that make us tick, cry, laugh, forget, run away, dominate, submit, pretend to laugh, try to force ourselves to forget, and many other things.

   I don't know.

   This novel is one of those that starts off slow - but stick with it: as it builds it provokes so much thought, like an exponentially-spiralling crescendo of artistic depth of meaning that can never reach its zenith because the nature of the zenith is, in its purest form, somewhat unknowable, but we feel we are riding the successive seven sections of this superbly-crafted book upward upward upward toward insights and truths that, in truth, I don't think are even actually there - but Kundera executes this spiral in such a way that the reader is able to make dozens of tiny interconnected realisations of their own as they read along. Laughter and forgetting may well just be about absurdity, meaninglessness. And if so, then that lends a tremendous amount of meaning to the blank slates we ourselves bring as observers of them as themes.

   I wouldn't recommend this novel to everyone - while it's funny in places and saturated with beautiful metaphor and imagery, it's heavy, it's kind of depressing, character and plot aren't as important to the structure of the book as theme, and I think many people simply wouldn't enjoy it at all because they're not used to doing any of the legwork that excellent literary novelists like Milan Kundera expect of readers who fully engage with their works. But don't be put off. This is the kind of novel you can finish in one sitting alone on a wintry night outside a library in Manchester - a riotous delicate waltzing profundity of a book.

A Small Key Can Open A Large Door

This book, edited and published by radical collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, is about the Rojava Revolution - the profoundly improbable and surprisingly successful living experiment in direct democratic egalitarian governance taking place in the 'Rojava' cantons of Syrian-but-now-semi-autonomous Kurdistan.*

   Anyway, I'm hoping to do my MA dissertation about this, as it's a remarkable hotspot of revolutionary struggle - perhaps embodied best in the fact that their voluntary female militias have constituted for several years now some of the key frontline fighters against Daesh (the so-called Islamic State) - so this post's shortness is indicative of the fact that I will be reading a lot more about Rojava, where Kurdistan's radical alternative to solving its own historic problems opens questions of possibility for many other global problems, where autonomous community-level democracy, female empowerment, economic equality, religious and ethnic tolerance, and sustainability all converge in a sociopolitical project that defies conventional wisdom and expectations with aplomb. It's fascinating. I'll talk more in-depth about the topic, and offer some more reflective and critical thoughts on it, as I continue to read about it, which won't be long at all.**

   This little book is a pretty good introduction to what's happening at Rojava: compiled from interviews, articles, frontline accounts and documents, letters, emails, and such, it's imbued with a strength of hope and revolutionary spirit that makes reading the mixture of horrific trial and slow bit-by-bit victory that have characterised the birth of Rojava (crushed between Syrian civil war, Daesh, and a still-relatively-hostile-to-the-Kurds international community) a thoroughly encouraging one; one gets the sense that Uncle Apo would be proud indeed. It includes the formal constitution of the three Rojava cantons, and a short timeline of the history of the Kurdish struggle, for context. Anyone interested in revolutionary struggles around the world should already be well-up-to-speed with the Kurdish problem, and this is their latest chapter - and this book gives a good picture of what it's about.

   Bijî Kurdistan! Bijî Rojava!

* If you want filling in somewhat, this article by David Graeber is a great place to start.

** Unless my dissertation idea gets rejected - in which case, any disappointment from curiousity I may have piqued in you is, let me assure you, less than my disappointment at having to think of something as fascinating as this to spend all summer reading and writing about.

Semiotics: A Graphic Introduction

This book, by Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz, is another in the series of graphic introductory guides to enormous complex topics like logic or critical theory. If you don't know what semiotics is, you should probably get out of this post before it's too late.* If you do, then this book, I can guarantee, will provide a helpful overview of international academic trends and disciplines influential within and upon the field of semiotics - i.e. the study of signs. It's a relatively new field for me to be reading much into, and it's like discovering metaphysics all over again - somehow, everything leads back to it, and however much sense it makes there's nothing in the middle and nothing holding it together. Language and communication and concepts and objective reality and subjective perception all spiral away together in an inexplicable tautological circle-shaped puzzle.

   This book, indeed this whole intellectual field, has added a dense and complex extra layer onto my own mentally-experienced-and-rationalised self, which is always exciting, but means I can't really write anything substantive about it right now.

   A decent introduction, then, I suppose.

* Google it. I know, right?

the complete Calvin & Hobbes: volume three

This is the third and final volume of a box-set (this) comprising the whole roughly-a-decade span of newspaper comic Calvin & Hobbes, of which I've already done posts for the first and second volumes. In the post about the first volume, I try to give a general overview of what, superficially the comic is about - in this post, I'm going to go into more depth about some of the recurring themes Bill Watterson explores through the world he's created in this comic, and try to give some shape to why I think it's so timelessly special as well as timefully poignant as an enduring body of artistic work.
   Okay...
   I'm returning to this post having left that first paragraph sat as a neglected unclosed tab on my browser for a full week. I simply don't know where to start. There's too much that could be said about this comic and it's too dear to my heart to devise a deconstruction, so I'm just going to do what happens to a small (lol) proportion of my posts and gonzo it. Or whatever the term is.
   Reading the comic in its entirety, a ten-year span, had somewhat of a Groundhog-Day-esque feel, in that Calvin is, of course, perpetually a six-year-old, but Watterson, as part of his construction of a real-feeling world to a daily-newspaper-reading audience, allows the change of the seasons to permeate Calvin's environment, activities, and moods. You watch him spend ten years in first-grade, struggling to restrain his over-active imagination for long enough to learn simple addition, struggling against alienated boredom within an education system that genuinely fails to engage lots of children, his brief respites at recess and lunchtime hampered often by the bully or by his own weirdness driving away his only real friend (Susie Derkins - well, both would deny being the friend of the other, but they live on the same street, and she's the only kid in the comic who Calvin regularly talks to who doesn't tend to end their encounters by thumping him and stealing his lunch money; arguably as a know-it-all she is on a similar popularity level to the out-and-out weirdo with a stuffed tiger that he fights with (and loses to sometimes), Calvin). Much of the comic explores the regularities and routines of a child's life as part of an incomprehensible structure of disappointment - evident in everything from waiting for the bus to performing household chores to bathing to keeping oneself entertained around the house - and Calvin's imagination provides gateways to 'play his way out' of these all-too-commonplace scenarios. But the comic strikes a careful balance between his reality and his dreams, such that the adult sensibilities of the boring traps laid out for Calvin's everyday experience and the childlike excitements of escaping these are both avenues for the comic: his parents, I think, provide an extremely important presence of normality. The burden and joy of parenthood, the thankless domestic life of the stay-at-home mom and the paper-weight drudge of an office-working dad, are shown through the admittedly extreme prism of raising a kid who is just as likely to be found sitting quietly reading a comic by the fire as he is hammering nails into the coffee table, assembling some sort of catapult to fire rocks at Susie, or trying to sell glasses of pondwater to passers-by - he's a handful, to say the least, for all the good his father's attempts to get him to do 'normal' (i.e. unpleasant) activities to 'build character'. Calvin's imaginativeness lets the comic take some brilliantly broad-ranging directions in terms of illustration (the dinosaur ones are often among my favourites), but it is his real-world high-demand six-year-old-style selfishness that forms the core of the comic's capacity for social commentary, of which there is a lot, neatly diffused into it bit-by-bit over the decade of its run. Bill Watterson, if it be his own worldview that he allows to flourish in the words of Calvin and Hobbes, has a considerable uneasiness around the political, economic and cultural trends that were becoming all-but-unstoppable in the years the comic ran (late '80s to early '90s; basically the Soviet Union fell, and suddenly everyone in the world was an American style democratic liberal capitalist, a universal consensus masking neoliberal hegemony, which had been developing an extremely strong base of consumer culture in the West for centuries, and the '80s was when it centralised itself as the Western way of life); work was unproductive and unfulfilling, advertisements for stuff people didn't need was everywhere, supplemented by sociocultural pressures to feel needs for the stuff being advertised; people were losing their connection with nature, their capacity to trust each other and the media, and their capacity to actively care about anything substantive or meaningful in a world where suburbia could become everything, where TV replaces thought, and kids are primed to expect to find a place in this world where they can follow their dreams - even when their actual dreams (of day-to-day imagination) are constantly shattered and grounded by representatives of the same grown-up community perpetuating their being kept in the dark about the vacuousness of the whole endeavour. That was a horrific sentence, I know. But some of the hardest-hitting strips are simply Calvin watching television, or his dad's thoughts on the drive to work, or his mom's thoughts upon receiving junk mail ads; surprisingly subversive for a comic that was printed in thousands of American popular newspapers. The anti-consumerism critique* ramps up toward Christmas each year in the comic, alongside, interestingly, vaguely theological and moral ponderings about the nature and possibility of being good in the hope of a reward (from Santa). The winter periods also see Calvin making many bizarre, grotesque, or as he calls them 'avant-garde' snowmen - these ones are as visually amusing as they are littered with topsy-turvy commentary on the world of art that any aesthete would appreciate. Likewise Calvin's summers are crammed with school-free romps around the wilderness, riding carts down perilous hills while making casual existential chitchat, throwing water-balloons at Susie, finding frogs, meetings aliens, holding club meetings in a treehouse - all of these elements are completely dependent on the comradeship of Hobbes, who, ostensibly self-evident to everyone except Calvin, is an inanimate stuff tiger, and also the voice of Calvin's self-doubt in the comics - which means the things Hobbes says (Calvin's self being one of TV-raised fantasy-embroiled narcissistic noise) tend to be on the wiser side. As well as enabling exploration of a child's developing understanding of his place in the world through Hobbes taking up one side of the inner dialogue, Hobbes is Calvin's constant playmate - they scheme together, invent games, explore, argue, snack, fight, find new uses for cardboard boxes, rest, and muse. It is through conversation with Hobbes that the depth and nuance of Watterson's voice in the comic shines through best - this is not a strip that shies away from big questions, and though it doesn't claim to have answers, reminding people to ask them is often good enough.
   This comic achieves more, artistically, in terms of both writing and drawing, than any other newspaper-daily comic I have ever encountered. It is well worth discovering, even if you don't plough through it in its entirety like me - this post has been a structureless shambles, but I hope it gives some insights into the sheer breadth and depth of what makes Calvin and Hobbes such endearing characters at the heart of this lovely comic.



* Something that Bill Watterson stuck to his guns about IRL - he spent years fighting his publishing syndicate for the rights to the characters so they couldn't be used for corporate merchandising.

the complete Calvin & Hobbes: volume two

This is the second volume of a three-book boxset (this) of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson - introductory comments are given in my post about the first volume (here) and all (well, at least some) my actual reflective thoughts about the series will be given once I've finished reading it in its entirety after the third volume (this). I'm using it as 'comfort reading' while I read loads of dense and depressing stuff for an essay about environmental political economy, and lemme tell you, it's doing the job.

Have a nice day

Living High & Letting Die

This book, by Peter Unger, I've just finished in a several-day spurt after it being unexpectedly recalled by the university library (I've had it out since late 2014) - is one of the hardest-hitting tracts on practical ethics I've ever read. Utilitarianism on steroids.
   It opens with a simple factual statement: that a relatively small amount of money, sent by the reader (who is, in all likelihood, a relatively affluent American academic philosopher)* to a humanitarian charity, will be able to substantively extend the expected lifespans of tens or hundreds or thousands of children in developing countries. However, when readers encounter donation-requesting-leaflets from such charities, it is not widely considered morally reprehensible to ignore what, upon reflection, seems to present itself as an unshakable moral obligation. Unger goes on to develop an ethical position he calls Liberationism, whereby such obligations are laid bare through a thorough scouring of our responsive processes and painstakingly weedling out all the common psychological, social, and behavioural hurdles of irrationality (i.e. half-thunk excuses) that we have to learn to leap before we can join him in assenting to the Liberationist's ethical position.
   This development of an admittedly extraordinarily challenging view of ethics is demonstrated at regular intervals by thought experiments, which Unger devised and threw out at a sample group of Moral Agents (i.e. people) to see how they responded, then comparing general responses about right and wrong behaviours to the Liberationist position. These thought experiments are varied and colourful - there are bombs rolling down hills, fat men in remote-controlled rollerskates, the spare and easily-hijacked yachts of selfish billionaires, and more innocent children tied to train tracks soon to be crushed under a runaway trolley than you could shake an envelope from UNICEF at - and ultimately do serve to demonstrate, develop and gradually expose the Liberationist ethic extremely well, also serving tangible detailed examples where the irrationalities of non-Liberationist ethics become murky or troubling. That's all I'll say about the content of the book: it's one the core message of which I am enthusiastically-but-shrewdly for, yet I would not recommend this book** - unless you're an academic philosopher (of course including students of this) who shares my fascination with altruism.
   Nor do I have many particularly original reflective responses to the book. (However, it does fit nicely into my personal map of ideas, so prepare for a final paragraph chock-full of hyperlinks to old posts.) Liberationism is a strong ethical position, sure, but not too dissimilar from that advocated by someone whose moral teachings I take quite seriously - Jesus Christ (google him if you must).***
   As a Christian, I believe the nature of God as purely good means that the entire of reality is structured around and toward goodness, including ethics, including socioeconomic justice as a necessary pursuit. But the nature of God's holy loving goodness so far surpasses our capacities to imitate (as explored beautifully by Kierkegaard here) that we are prone to blind spots; the ultimate blind spot is other people in need when our needs are our priorities - the fundamental tendency toward selfishness is innate to our brokenness, and corrupts our worldly understandings of good and right. Economics is a great starting point - despite having originated as a field with just as much moral concern as material, it is now largely unreliable, and at worst, the academic arm of neoliberal hegemony's ongoing reign. Neoliberalism is a philosophy that fundamentally feeds off the selfishness of the already-successfully-selfish, and then basically just kicks everyone else in the self-esteem their whole lives unless they strike lucky (and then probably even moreso). This means the person-level blind spots of the real needs of others (generally on a socioeconomic scale this whole element can just be referred to as 'the poor') are elevated to social-level blind spots, rampant poverty and inequality goes unaddressed, despite the obviousness of a solution - give them money. This book seeks to make the non-theistic philosopher's ethical case for the worrisome undeniability of such an obligation (which is also tried-and-tested one of the best ways to actually help). Our world's richest economies are living well beyond their means, using resources unsustainably to prop up grotesquely wonderfully convenient lifestyles while billions live precariously on the brink, and that brink is only growing nearer and less predictable given the economic-ecological crisis we face - I believe that richer nations have a duty to both massively reduce their own impacts and support less-developed neighbours in mitigating the worst of climate change and transitioning their economies through huge transfers of money to the poor (this idea comes from not-too-far down the degrowth rabbit-hole, see this and this). While making a lot of sense to me in a political-economic sense, it also neatly brings to bear the demand of Christian ethics on the way our economies operate - a demand that is radical, costly, and difficult, like Unger's, but there doesn't seem to be a way out of it but for irrationality or selfishness.



* Unger states this 'target audience' himself. This book is not written for the layman.

** He states himself that the purpose of the book is not to convince a general reader, as it would far more likely alienate them - he's trying to further the debate within academic philosophy, in the hope that straightforward hard-talking solutions such as his may bloom longer-term and lay the socio-cultural groundwork for radical economic altruism.

*** As I'm aware, readers may well just give up on a paragraph offering only my own opinions which have been hewn into the imperfect chambers of my worldview by many a book, conversation, or short period of time staring at walls; if you can't be arsed to read it, fair enough, and so as an alternative (or, if you did read it any only just got to this bit, consider it a reward), here's another Vulfpeck.

2016 overview

Every year on this thing I do a recap of the project, and while it's very early in the late night and I'm knackered having been travelling back from London most of today before going to a pub quiz (priorities), 2016 has been an absolute shitter* of a year, I'm sure many will agree, and I wanted to get its review over and done with, because in terms of books I've read it's actually been a pretty good year. My blog has endured its third year of my spewage of thoughts about stuff I've read cover-to-cover, and while this year has seen the fewest completed books since the project started, I feel this year I've read a lot of really good books - certainly ones that were right for me to read, being where I currently am, in terms of life and worldviews and everything.

   Excuse #1 for this relative lack (actually there are no 'excuses' as I don't owe this blog anything, it's a personal project, but whatever) is that lots of the time I'd usually spend reading I've spent writing (more info here - link also, incidentally, leads to the book that page-by-page brought me the most immediate joy all year). Excuse #2 is that through a variety of complex causes that I've given up trying to decipher, for a lot of last year I was (mildly? moderately? dunno, wasn't diagnosed but wasn't well - but these things come in waves) a bit off-key, and I ended up reading quite a few books about happiness. These included:

• Happiness by Design, by Paul Dolan - blandly good for the well-structured mind.
• Status Anxiety, by Alain de Botton - slightly-less-blandly slightly-less-good for the slightly-less-well structured mind, or anyone with general angst.
• The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck, by Sarah Knight - samey and not as blunt as you'd probably like it to be if you like the title.

   However, the two books** that genuinely deeply helped me in this time were:

• Kierkegaard's Works of Love - a must-read for Christian intellectuals.
• Emily Dickinson's selected poems - just pure transcendent beauty.

   Anyway, time to start handing out singular end-of-year recommendations from out of the twenty-nine (a contestable figure given some of the 'books') I read last year.

• Best word-to-picture ratio - the Snowman, by Raymond Briggs.
• Best novel*** - How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid.
• Another must-read for Christian intellectuals - Paradoxology, by Krish Kandiah.
• Highly-recommended for Christians who feel they are on the verge of becoming more mature in their faith - Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands, by Paul Tripp.
• A commonly-praised extremely boring 'classic' that I recommend you avoid - Moby Dick, by Herman Melville.
• Must-read for anyone with, or wanting, a leadership role in groups of any kind, especially activism - the Consensus Handbook by Seeds for Change.
• Disarmingly universal religious-smelling poetry - the Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran.
• Strongly recommended for anyone interested in psychoactive substances - Drugs Without the Hot Air, by David Nutt.
• Strongly recommended for literally everyone - Teaching Critical Thinking, by bell hooks.

   I've read books about Jeremy Corbyn and Kanye West (both of which I'd recommend if their names stir anything within you), but core to much of my non-fiction book choice is an attempt to build up a coherent holistic understanding of how the world works and how it needs to change. And this year, through my studies**** as well as my independent reading I feel I have, for the time being, settled on a system of ideas which more or less make sense of the world and give me tangible goals and ideals in a political-economic-social sense: degrowth.

• Prosperity without Growth, by Tim Jackson, is an excellent case for this radical and unpopular but ecologically-urgent and sociopolitically-appealing idea.
• Kathryn Tanner's the Economy of Grace lays out a Christian view of economics which seems to me highly congruent - but further reading is probably required on that, as it is on most topics one is trying to learn the truth about.  

   Accessible, digestible, applicable truth, now more than ever, is oh-so-important, and if you are a regular reader (you're probably someone I know anyway) then please at the end of 2016 may I implore you, having witnessed the horrors capable of being brought about by mass ignorance, to think for yourself, to read for yourself, to run away with ideas and fight them until you know where you stand, because the truth is always out there but it is rarely simple, and never irrelevant.

   Peace & love,

   Isaac J. Stovell

[edit - I've just realised that my last post of 2016 promised that this post would include a longer explanation of my writing project, but honestly I can't be bothered at the moment and will provide one of these once my plans are more properly in place.]

* I know I don't usually swear on this blog, but if you're more offended by the term 'shitter' than you are by the current state of the world given how it's changed in 2016, go read an online overview of everything that's happened this year and have a good long think. And then, because it has been a stressful year, here's a brilliant thing to offset the upset.

** Except the Bible, obviously, but as I said in this blog's founding post, that doesn't count. Also, this book was a good help in bringing together calming behavioural practices that help reinforce one's rest in the truth of the gospel.

*** Hands-down. I usually really struggle to pick one. Helps that I didn't read many novels last year but honestly that one is just brilliant.

**** I'm shortly entering my final semester (before a dissertation) of a part-time Masters in Global Political Economy, and honestly, I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this course but also how much I'm looking forward to not being a student any more.

the complete Calvin & Hobbes: volume one

This book, the first volume of a three-volume hardback collection (this) of a newspaper comic called Calvin & Hobbes,* by Bill Watterson - I have been nibbling on it over the last month, as something familiar and beautiful for my comfort reading while I commence work on another inevitably-bleak essay on the political economy of the environment.

   Since there are another two volumes to go before I've properly "finished" reading the full collection, I'll save up all my proper thoughts and reflections (of which there will be a lot: this is an utterly fantastic comic strip, possibly the greatest of all time, certainly to my mind, for the quality of writership and pen/brushwork, conceptual depth yet childlike accessibility, sheer adventurous joy - and it's also one that I've known and loved since I first encountered it as a nine-year old, but have never read through the full collection, so I'd like to let my words stew awhile as I ingest the other two volumes) for my post about the third volume. Nevertheless, they are separate books, so warrant separate posts.

   Cool? Cool.

   One thing I will add about this one though is that the first volume comes with a longish introduction from Bill Watterson about the comic as a project - an unexpected success that blossomed with artistic possibility that he took full advantage of in ways no other newspaper comic artist I can name off the top of my head (except Charles Schulz? - no, Bill trumps here) had ever done before and which few have probably tried to do since; his work developed a readership that both deeply touched and connected with the comic, again, not what you'd usually expect from the daily funnies. His telling of how he, having surprised himself at landing such a successful project, tried to make it the best comic he could make, was of immense encouragement and inspiration to me reading it as I am now; the craftsman of one of my oldest cultural loves offering up a straightforward and honest story of struggle and joy and finding fulfilling work in art - which is what, at the end of 2016, I've come to realise I want to do. I've mentioned in previous posts that my excuse** for barely having read anything since a family holiday in early August has been that most of the leisure time I usually direct into reading has gone into writing - and this is still the case, to such an extent that completing this project is now my primary goal for the next few years. I'll be finishing my Masters of Arts (which ironically prepares me very little for an actual career as an artist, those tending to be fairly stereotypically shambolic) over summer 2017, find a non-committal job to pay the bills, and then spend my mid-twenties writing a series of novels**** that I've been planning extensively since around May. Frankly the organicness with which this project has replaced my previous ambitions is deliciously welcome - and so inspiration from masters of the arts, like my much-esteemed Bill Watterson, has been great soul food for me this last fortnight. And I'm sure the next two volumes can only deepen that.

   So, thanks for reading this year, it's been an odd year all round - happy end of 2016.

* If you've never heard of it - it's about a six-year old boy called Calvin with an extremely active imagination and a real-only-to-him best friend in the form of a stuffed tiger called Hobbes; the pair's playfulness drops them into regular trouble, as the immensity and constancy of a child's imagination rubs up against the disappointing mundanity of a child's actual life (leading to many a clash of worlds - with long-suffering mom and dad, the teacher, the sensible girl next-door, the school bully, and the only babysitter in town who has the patience for Calvin's antics). The strips are infused through-and-through with altered realities - earthquakes, dinosaurs, monsters, detectives, fearless space-faring heroes, you name it - as Calvin's imagination runs away with him, Hobbes close behind.

   It was first syndicated in 1985, and by the time Watterson felt his brilliant characters had told all they could and he had achieved his artistic vision as a comic writer/drawer, this uniquely-charming childhood-nostalgia-heavy perfect lovely little strip was going out daily in over 2400 newspapers - until its final strip on January 1st 1996. Lots of them are online for free (see), and while the complete collection is a heavy investment, these books are ones that will stay somewhere on my shelves for the rest of my life. I cannot recommend this comic highly enough. Keep your eyes peeled in charity shops - you can often pick up smaller books collecting C&H strips for a few quid/bucks (in the UK and presumably USA too - dunno how internationally-loved it is). They work extremely well in book form, as unlike most newspaper comic-writers, Watterson frequently embarks on narratives that span several 'weeks' - each individual strip amusing and often surprisingly poignant, the longer stories truly delightful.

** Well, one of them. I also made the mistake of taking on a full-time seven-week research assistance*** position in which I was wayyy out of my depth and that was stressful and huge and certainly not conducive to my quasi-normal quasi-healthy habits of time management. It may have been this that led to my decisiveness in aiming for a break in academia and flying after creative pursuits.

*** Don't ask what it was in.

**** Yup. There's eight of them. They're sort of a series, but each readable as a standalone story, with books varying in tone, topic, and genre, following the same three characters (Amina Nadir, John Ezekiel Smith, and Naomi Moss) over about sixteen years. Lots of things happen to these three. I won't ever put any of my draft material or even outlines of plans up on this blog, but I will give a slightly more in-depth description of the general broad thrust of the project (basically just to fish for volunteers to offer constructive criticism) in my 2016 recap post,***** which you can expect in about a week probably - I'm off to London for NYE and staying for a few days. Without laptop. As true holiday time should be.

***** You know, the thing where I go back and think about some of the best things I've read in a year, or have other thoughts, or make cheesily over-enthusiastic statements about the joy of books. See last year's.

Paradoxology

This book by Krish Kandiah is one of the best books in Christian apologetics I've ever read. Through scrutinising biblical figures and stories in context, with immense theological and philosophical rigour, Krish tackles head-on some of the biggest and most problematic question-problems posed to Christian faith - those that are seemingly irreconcilable, as scripture seems to imply, or allow the possibility of, opposite truths existing in paradox (hence the title). He covers the following aspects of God:*

• needs nothing but asks for everything (through Abraham)
• is far away, but so close (Moses)
• terribly compassionate (Joshua)
• actively inactive (Job)
• faithful to the unfaithful (Hosea)
• consistently unpredictable (Habakkuk)
• indiscriminately selective (Jonah)
• speaks silently (Esther)
• is divinely human (Jesus)
• determines our free will (Judas)
• wins as he 'loses' (the cross)
• effectively ineffective (the Romans)
• fails to disappoint (the Corinthians)

   Alongside these brilliant chapters, Krish includes in the book a short introduction, mid-way reflection, and epilogue, about the nature of paradoxical understanding and how we can live with it. His pragmatic and intellectually humble approach to the complexities and enormities of transcendentally infinite divine realities, and how human understanding can, if not at least grasp them, then grasp what is meant by the apparent contradictions, leads to some profound insights into the depth and mystery of God's truth and character. I would strongly recommend this book to any Christian who has been waging the ever-present inner wrestle with doubt in perplexity; this book strikes right to the core of the biggest and most common of these niggling doubts and uncertainties, and though they cannot be perfectly resolved in neat explanation (as is the nature of paradox), thorough examination of them certainly helps us understand how contradictory doctrines may both hold true, and strengthen the reader's heart and mind in faith along the way.

* The nature of the subject matter makes these chapters hard to summarise, so I'm literally just using the subtitles from the contents page... sorry. Hey, if it piques your interest, read the book!

How to Be a Mindful Christian

This book, by Sally Welch, is very much what it says on the tin - a practical and helpful guide to incorporating aspects of 'mindfulness'* to one's walk as a Christian. The bulk of it consists of forty bitesize chapters, sectioned by how we engage with silence, sound, smell, sight, touch and taste; each of these is a passage of scripture reflecting an aspect of the glory of the gospel, or life with God, and then a short reflection on how we can have such feelings of restfulness or gratefulness or gracefulness as perhaps are inspired by these passages present in our minds more and more, the aim being constant enjoying and rejoicing in God in the moment. Exercises are provided (meditative breathing etc) to help orient minds thus. A further seven chapters along these lines are given for each day of Holy Week, and a final section about pilgrimages. This book has, I feel, really helped me develop a stronger, deeper, more persistently self-aware relationship with God - though I suspect most Christian readers will be wary of a book claiming that a practice more commonly associated with Buddhism can help in any way.** To these people, I simply say this: don't be daft. You are called to love God with all your mind - and oriental practices of mindfulness, even if unattached from Christian traditions, are demonstrably effective in clearing out the kind of mental clutter that prevails so much in our 21st-century culture of distraction, anxiety, and entertainment. Why not use these tools to help properly orient your mindset and thoughts in such a way as to consciously inhabit Christian truth more fully? If you keep a firm grasp of your Christian identity and Christian theology, you have nothing to possibly lose from trying a meditative breathing exercise or two - and from me at least, using the kinds of exercises outlined in this book have truly helped me become more pervasively cognizant of the gospel's centrality in my life and thoughts, bringing me joy and peace and motivation to serve others and glorify God; and while the murk of the world still clouds my mind with tremendously normal regularity and intensity, the gospel is the ultimate anchor, and practicing mindfulness with it in sight a tried-and-tested means of bringing your own knowledge of the gospel to spread itself out in your mental and emotional life. Give it a go!

* A buzzword that gets bandied around all too much these days, but still an important and culturally-timely concept.

** Interesting articles on this topic (linking is easier than paraphrasing): one, two.

Just Give Money to the Poor

This book by Joseph Hanlon, David Hulme and Armando Barrientos is an extremely well-balanced between scholarly and readable overview of a 'new' means of tackling poverty, the nature of which you may be able to guess from the title.

   Conventional aid and development strategies,* especially those led by Western academia propping up entire industries of Western people whose jobs it is to find ways to help the poor, are pretty wasteful and inefficient - in the context of a single simple misapprehension being pointed out: however effective an organisation seeking to alleviate poverty is, would the money it takes to pay their (probably Western) staff or fund their (probably paternalistic) projects be more effective at actually alleviating poverty if, instead of paying those staff or funding those projects, it was simply given to the poor? The authors of this book answer: probably, yes, with a few large caveats. Central to their argument is a very reasonable faith in the non-idiocy of poor people - i.e. if you give money to a family in poverty, they are likely to use to it for productive and worthwhile ends, so any expensive NGO scheme seeking to tell them what might help them be less poor is redundant; moreover, such schemes assume that poor people remain poor because of ignorance or particular personal failures to act in certain ways, rather than that poor people remain poor because they do not have enough money. It almost seems too obvious. Giving poor people money helps break the poverty trap - pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is impossible if you're too hungry to bend down and you can't afford any boots anyway - thus improving basic living standards and empowering people to engage with healthcare, education, small-scale investment, and so on, stimulating their local economies and nurturing upward spirals of development. These schemes, called cash transfers, come in a wide array of forms, and are emerging across increasing numbers of developing countries in the global south in response to the abject failure of Western development strategies to alleviate poverty, and (subject to the caveats, which I'll come to) are proving incredibly successful almost everywhere, such that they attracted the attention of skeptical Western academic economists** who promptly conducted a flurry of skeptical studies into these cash transfer schemes and were even more surprised to find their own studies supporting what the governments, academics, and straight-up socioeconomic evidence from the global south was suggesting was true - giving money to poor people helps them be less poor! Wow!

   Anyway, the caveats. Basically there are just loads of problems with deciding who gets the cash transfers - everyone, or only old people, or families with children, or the poorest 10% or 20% or 50% of the population (and how do you means test for this?), or people living within particularly poor areas? There are also extensive problems with ensuring that the people receiving cash transfers get lifted out of poverty; some schemes require work or participation in programmes to qualify; a larger issue is that for poor people to be able to engage with education or healthcare or entrepreneurship or markets or whatever those facilities need to be in place and adequate - yes, paying Pedro's family $7 a month might enable them to afford enough food that he can quit shining shoes and go to school, but if there are sixty kids in his class and no effort is put in to bring him up to speed, the future benefits for Pedro are dampened.

   So this book provides an excellent overview of 'just giving money to the poor' as a poverty alleviation strategy, key debates and problems with the idea, outlines of schemes currently in action and how they're faring, and summative pointers about what makes such a scheme effective and how practicalities can be approached. Worthwhile reading for anyone interested in understanding the global political economic struggle to end poverty, especially for those supportive of bottom-up common sense solutions.****

* Microfinance, while not in quite the same league of paternalistic resource-intensive aid strategies broadly described above, has been super popular among liberal progressives and is often heard touted as a key means of alleviating poverty. However, it has problems which I can't be arsed to write so google it if you're interested, and the core concept of this book was the nail in the coffin of my thinking it was worthwhile. What's the point loaning money to someone who's in a poverty trap? Just give them money instead. On that note, I've withdrawn all my outstanding Kiva funds after five years of recycling loans of questionable helpfulness. Ah well.

** I mean, trust an economist to be confused at the notion that giving money to poor people helps them be less poor. The mind boggles.

[this book was the first of an enormous*** pile of university library books, mostly about global political and economic issues, that I'm using as practice for speed reading. partly because the nature of these books' content means I'm unlikely to have particularly interesting thoughts or reflections on them (instead just drinking in large quantities of information to flesh out or refine my views on pretty niche topics) and partly because I've had some of them out for over two years and there are quite a few of them and I've only got ten months left with a valid student card. also partly because it'll mean I'll get to do lots of blog posts, as compensation for how relatively few books I read this summer and (so far) this autumn. one final also - because speed reading is a skill someone who blogs about books they've read should probably have, but it takes lots of practice to get high-speed high-comprehension. anyway. hope that's cool.]

*** Just counted - there were fourteen including this one, so now thirteen.

**** It also slots nicely into my ever-growing personal-opinion-critique of global capitalism and conceptualisation of systemic change: somewhere in the overlaps between grace-led economic structures and radical redistribution from the global north to the global south.

Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands

This book, one of many by Paul Tripp* written to help Christians be more Christ-like, is actually one of the most uplifting, challenging, encouraging, and practical books of this type that I can remember ever reading. (Don't worry, Tim Chester, if you're reading this, which is highly unlikely - you're still way up there.) My dad lent it to me months ago and I've been reading it very slowly but progressively** so as to carefully and meditatively digest its wise, helpful, gospel-centred insights.

   There is so much excellent stuff in here that I can't and won't discuss or overview it all; I simply exhort Christian readers to slowly and progressively digest this book. Tripp knows the nature of the human heart as well as he knows the glory of the gospel, and he is excellent at helping us focus on Jesus so we can navigate our own and others' brokenness so as to allow the Holy Spirit's work of sanctification to be seen and delighted in. This book is, technically, written as a guide for Christian leaders to help them model personal holiness and to counsel and disciple others in their communities, but as Tripp points out, all Christians are called to strive for holiness and to speak the gospel in encouragement and rebuke to one another to keep us all in the body of the church; so both elements of the practical advice given in the book should I think be applicable to any maturing Christian. Tripp writes clearly and powerfully, reminding us of our own need of God's work in us to make us holy, reminding us of the beautiful redemptive truth that we know in Christ, helping us diagnose blind spots in our attitude to personal sin, helping us develop meaningful relationships with other Christians so that we have a more-than-superficial understanding of their lives that enables us to see not just surface sin but the deeper struggles warring in their hearts, helping us develop effective conversational methods to work through our and others' understandings of these heart struggles and where we can turn the gospel light onto it to show them up as redundant and sinful, helping us establish personal and relational and church-community accountability for processes of change as we and others are reminded of our identity in Christ and soften our hearts to allow the Holy Spirit to work in us for Christlike change.****

   This is a book that I feel has substantively sharpened my attitude to my own sin and that of others around me, has substantively re-oriented my proper and clear thinking about my identity as a Christian and its implications, has substantively empowered me with a practical toolkit for loving and knowing and speaking truth to and seeing real heart change in other Christians (and likewise helped me in responding to all the same) as we, together, as a church, seek to put old ways behind us, seek Christlikeness; a collective process involving lots of broken pieces, but we are in the hands of a God who can - and does - do great things using weak unreliable sinners. Including fixing them, bit by bit.*****

* A lovely and godly man with, if I remember, a delightfully Ned Flanders-esque moustache - I met him when I was about 11, as he was in the UK visiting various churchfolk, including my dad.

** Like, seriously, reading half a chapter or a chapter and then having to sit and think and pray about it and then do something else so I don't let any of the wisdom leak out. This book has been with me to Manchester, London, Catalonia, Amsterdam, Derby; to a beach and a campsite and a countryside villa, to the houses of four different friends, to two pubs and three parks and six or seven cafés; finally finishing it this morning in Marmaduke's - one of my favourite little places in Sheffield - also incidentally the last place I met up with Rowan, who's probably up there with my dad and Tim Chester as men who have helped me mature as a Christian; it seems fitting that I finished this there as we used to talk a lot about what we were reading. Needless to say, the book, while it wasn't in mint condition when my dad lent it to me, is now fairly battered and stained. The worst damage was done on the ferry from Calais to Dover during my return from the Netherlands - the book was in my secondary rucksack with a bottle of water which leaked all over it, and while it dried out fine and none of the pages have run, the top third of the book's pages throughout are forever bent together in a rigid wavy deformity. There's also a considerable coffee ring on the front cover, from when I couldn't find a coaster for my bedside table and didn't realise how drippy the mug was. Blemishes like these add character though.***

*** Needless personal digressions like this are what make these posts sometimes go on for so long, and yet also what make them so easy/fun to write. Structured writing takes intensive thought. When the stakes are low enough to allow it, I much prefer aiming generally at a cluster of ideas and reflections and allowing my brain to burp out as much as it can be bothered - needless digressions and all.

**** There are also several quite extensive and really practically helpful appendices about 'data gathering' and 'homework' (basically strategies for working out and working through and working to change what's going on in sinful hearts).

***** Note: I'm on about progressive sanctification here, not salvation generally. #theology!

the Snowman

This book, a wordless (yes) children's Christmas classic from Raymond Briggs, is another that I feel a bit iffy about writing a blog post about, not because it's so short (I've read a few short things on here) but because it has literally no words in the actual content of the book. But alas, I find myself a month on from the last post on here, without having finished any more actual substantive books - this is largely because of the ongoing writing project I mentioned in my previous post, as well as having started back at uni (two jobs, a part-time postgraduate degree, several churchy or extracurricular or activism-ish endeavours, a social life, eating and sleeping and also enjoying TV - this combination does not allow a huge amount of time for recreational reading, sadly), and also because the one substantive book I was recently getting more of a groove into (Spinoza's Ethics, if you must know, which makes the following anecdotal excuse for postlessness quite roundly ironic) was in a bag of mine which was stolen by a drug dealer who crashed a party I was at in Manchester a couple of weeks ago.*

   So as an excuse for a post, and also because despite the immense cultural impact of this particular snowman I had somehow never seen or read it, I seized the opportunity (it's a birthday present for my sister, and being a book made of child-style cardboard, was able to be pre-read without a trace) - and you know what, it's pretty good. The whole story is told through the medium of pencil crayon drawings evocative of 1970s childhood nostalgia - all toast and wellies and fireplaces, when winters were genuinely snowy and snow was genuinely magical, when you had easy access to actual lumps of coal with which to demark facial features and buttons upon any snowmen built, when, let's face it, kids actually built snowmen.** Simpler times. The Good Old Days. Whatever.

   The actual story is as follows [SPOILERS]: boy builds snowman, boy goes to bed, boy wakes up in the night to see snowman moving about, boy invites magically-living snowman inside, shows it a variety of hot (oh no!) and cold (oh yes!) and funny (haha!) items therein, boy is then led outside by snowman - who seizes the boys hand and flies off dangerously into the night, in what can either be taken as a bizarre exploratory abduction or a glorious flight of youthful imagination (probably the latter), snowman returns boy home, boy goes back to bed, can't sleep due to excitement about the occurrence, goes outside at sunrise to discover a melted snowman.

   For what it is, a wordless book of pure nostalgic imagination, it is actually brilliant - its status as a classic should probably attest to that. There's a purity in its simplicity, it's the kind of story that a small child who can't quite confidently read yet could fully engage with and be absolutely spellbound by, and for that, big thumbs up. Despite how flippant and digressive this post has been (aren't they all though), don't think I don't know this book would be a perfect wintertime delight for kids - indeed, one to stoke and spark their love of both alternative methods of storytelling and old-school play, two of the finest imagination-pumps in existence.

On that note, if you're a six-year-old or younger reading this, go outside!***

* Upon realising this, I was annoyed about losing the book but also amused that such an item had been, if only as part of a bag-to-chuck-other-stolen-stuff-in type deal, stolen, and wondered if its new owner would get round to seeing what Baruch de Spinoza had to say about God and metaphysics and inner peace and whatnot. Whatever the case, it turned up stashed in a cupboard the day after, and is still in Manchester. The whole debacle has made me slightly wary of getting stuck into any other of the several interesting books I currently have on the go, lest they meet a similar fate. Key lessons here are probably not to leave your bag in the kitchen of a party where there are people you don't know, as some of them may turn out to be party-crashing super-shifty dealers (we weren't to know), but also probably don't take philosophy books to those kinds of parties. Even if it's only for reading on the lonely train ride home.

** I mean, they still do, but have you seen them? Calvin and Hobbes would despair. Kids these days get cold hands after constructing a cylindrical lump any taller than a foot or two, whinge out and finish quickly by sticking a carrot, a twig, two small stones and a flatcap on said lump, and whisk back inside to warm their fingers up on a games console. I blame global warming - there's just not enough snow to make it worthwhile anymore.

*** Or read a book!

The Angry Spider

This, admittedly, is not really a book. It's a single-page-worth of internet fanfic ('fan fiction' for those among you with better things to read, which is hopefully all of you, and is usually also me), based on a single line from episode 8 of season 3 of BBC political-satirical comedy The Thick of It.* It is, however, quite funny, and if you're a fan of the show, I'd strongly recommend giving it a read,** especially since it'll take you five minutes tops. Anyway, even though this isn't really a book, I felt compelled to do a post about it, lest the whole month of September 2016 lie empty upon my blog's archives - an increasingly likely prospect, as I just haven't been doing much reading over summer. Well, other than that huge week-long splurge while I was on holiday. This is because I've been working on a big personal writing project, and my summers, while generally happily filled with recreational reading, have this year become much more word-output than word-input heavy. So, apologies to any post-starved readers - but fret not, I've not stopped reading entirely, nor have I given up on this blog. It might just be a bit sparse, especially since uni starts again soon.

* MILD EXPLANATORY SPOILER ALERT: Malcolm Tucker, the sweary Scottish hyper-connected hyper-angry spin doctor extraordinaire at the heart of the British government as portrayed in the show and at the heart of the show itself, temporarily finds himself jobless. Someone reads a list of increasingly absurd-sounding little jobs he could take on to fill his time post-political-career, one of which is "write a children's book called The Angry Spider". Malcolm mutters "for fuck's sake" and stands to leave. I found the line quite funny upon rewatching, and from somewhere the notion popped into my head that TTOI does have quite a cult following, and like anything with a cult following, probably inspires occasional online fan-fiction, and this was almost asking for it. So I gave it a quick google, and was not displeased. Hence this post.

** If you've not seen the show, there's probably no point, but you should also watch the show, because it's one of the finest satire series ever committed to television.