Our Story Isn't Over

This book is a collection of poetry* by seven young people** at [past & present] the Amber Project in Cardiff, a Church Army project working with youth at risk of self-harm. The poems in the collection reflect this, and draw heavily on themes of one's own self in relation to mental and bodily wellbeing, exploring trauma, identity, renewal and growth; I bought a copy of this not out of artistic interest but genuine solidarity as the creativity unleashed by these brilliant young people at Amber is truly inspiring. I went to see their pantomime with colleagues from the Church Army head office over Christmas and it was SO FUCKING DOPE, LIKE - I've never actually enjoyed a pantomime until I saw theirs and even beyond enjoying it blew me away with how funny, confident, clever and subversive the whole thing was. Anyway I'm rambling about a pantomime but in all honesty several of the poems in this collection brought a tear to the eye & a lump to the throat also; and further some others are resonant with sheer determination to overcome their struggles and grow into the joy they've found through community, creativity, and hope. Definitely some rough stuff in here so major content warning for mental health and self-harm theme in poetry, but builds on these elements to make an overall booklet that is life-affirming to a grand degree, and I'd heartily recommend getting a copy if there's any left.***

* Didn't want to figure out where to mention this in that horrendous run-on sentence but it also has some lovely intricate illustrations by Aimee Taylor

** Ryan, Nicki, Channing, Louise, Adam, Hanna & Maryanne

*** All proceeds go toward the Amber Project's work with Cardiff's youth.

the Art of War

This ancient Chinese text by Sun Tzu has, purportedly, been high-ranking among the most influential books in the history of military, political, cultural, corporate, &etc kinds of strategically-navigated arenas of conflict for like, ever. However upon reading I found for my own taste a surprising amount of it is ridiculously practical pointers on logistics and supply lines, a furtherly surprising amount quasi-mystical poetic ruminations on various types of ground; on the whole though, there is depth & subtlety in every [stanza?] of it - and it's all online for free anyway, so in the spirit of a decisive tactician I am going to withhold sharing precise information from my own perspective so that others are forced to send spies out for themselves - only for your camp to find itself under my cunning ambush. You never expected that, did you?

Hit the Ground Kneeling

This book, by Bishop Stephen Cottrell, is an extremely helpful series of practical Bible-and-life-experience grounded reflections on the natures of and interplay between prayerfulness and leadership. Everyone in my office got given a free copy, and I've been going through it bit by bit over the last couple of weeks - would strongly recommend to any Christians in positions of leadership, be that in church life or the secular realms.

Quakers: Advices & queries

This booklet (available as text online) comprises the introductory guidelines to what it means to be a Quaker or participate in the community, worship or otherwise life/activity of the Religious Society of Friends - 42 short reflections laying out the roots, gists, and thrusts of Quakerism generally - if you can even call it an ism, which I'm growingly sure you can't, not accurately at any rate. I'm still very new to & relatively suspicious of this whole Quaker thing [wQt], and while this short book by no means answered any let alone all my questions it laid out a fruitful groundwork of understanding by which I can now approach the wQt. If you don't know much about the wQt - whether you are irreligious, or a Christian, or whatever - I'd be interested to hearing people's first (or current etc) broad impressions of it in the comments, as I'm still very much an explorer here myself. But as with all things I'd hasten to add a warning that you can't dismiss something out of hand if you don't know what it is from a nuanced, unbiased perspective; and I've not found it very easy so far to get these kinds of views from other Christians about the wQt.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How Faith Changes

This book* by Ruth Perrin is an absolute marvel of qualitative research in the complicated theological and cultural context that is millennials. She interviewed 47 young people from across 23 Protestant denominations, all living in Newcastle upon Tyne, the Tees Valley or Northumberland, and who had all been actively-affirming Christians in their early 20's - now aged 29-37, she explores a rich and deep and thoroughly challenging set of ways in which their faith has been knocked, changed, reformed, dropped, and so on. I've probably read this more like two or three times because it spoke so deftly into the particular kinds of things I've seen young Christians wrestle with (often, as she discusses, largely without helpful support from church families, for a number of reasons) and the fallouts of these issues; though not wishing to simply offload an attempt at a personal summary of her whole arguments and methodologies (fascinating though these are), particularly because she has a fuller book about the same thing coming out soon and I'd rather discuss it in detail then (as I will definitely be getting a copy when it comes out in January). Not much point making a recommendation to you, dear audience, when there is very little chance you would be able to acquire a copy of this particular book either - but it was a highly informative and illuminating exploration of the field and would probably surprise most readers as to the fluidity of religious faith and some of the dynamics underlying this.

* No link on this one, sorry! I know it's against my own rules but hey, it was a limited run exclusively shipped to church research folks and I can't find a page for or about it online anywhere. Check out her blog Discipleship Research though. And consider pre-ordering her next wider-audience book which will probably build on a lot of the research discussed in this.

the Tale of Pigling Bland

This book by Beatrix Potter (available free online from that link, albeit with only one illustration) is, pardon my French, really fucking odd. I'd read it to the same kid I read this to, only he didn't really enjoy this one as much, because it's a lot longer - and as much as we Brits all have deep-rooted cultural memories of how much we love Peter Rabbit I started to wonder reading this whether this is just a subconscious myth of denial, because either those books must be far better than this one or Beatrix Potter was just not a very good children's writer (especially compared to A. A. Milne or Jacqueline Wilson or Anthony Horowitz or Julia Donaldson), or maybe she properly hit her stride with Peter Rabbit and Pigling Bland was left to rot on the dump of Things That Didn't Make It - frankly, I spent the first ten minutes of the reading increasingly wondering whether it was in fact some kind of spoof akin to the Ladybird ones, and genuinely had to apologise to my three-year-old audience to check the publishing info page to realise it was a legit Beatrix Potter - but whatever the case, I found it quite entertaining as it was just so bizarre, with enormous gaping holes in every aspect of its narrative (which, if it could be said to be comprehensible at all, was of utterly no consequence) and new characters on every page and an overarching narrative that started nowhere, traversed through nowhere, and seemed then to conclude nowhere, with a giant bunch of nonsense spouted by anthropomorphic pigs in between.
Probably one to skip.

Hold Your Own

This book is a collection of poetry by Kae Tempest, of whose other stuff I've read I'm a big fan. Based on the ancient Greek story of Tiresias, the poems here are bound together in a sequence that follows through childhood, manhood, womanhood, and 'blind profit' - each layering continually circling, reflecting, with a deftness of social commentary and a relatableness that quite belies the ostensibly lofty or complex bundle which are hallmarks of why Tempest is one of the world's most famous working poetic artists. Feelings will fly in all directions and thought-provocation oozes from every page, as the fine [im]balances between subtlety and poignancy wrestle each other across the themes and narratives in recognizable conflicting archetypes that shout with a voice that is as fresh as grime yet resonates like myth. High among my favourite poetry books that I've read recently.

Five Escape Brexit Island

This book by Bruno Vincent is, weirdly enough, the only Famous Five book I've ever read, never having been much of a fan of Enid Blyton - in it, our plucky four whoevers and their dog are trapped in a mysterious detention facility off the coast of Dorset, from which they have to try to escape to get back to the mainland. I do appreciate the satirical point of all this but to be honest I just found it incredibly depressingly close to reality. Would perhaps recommend as a Christmas present for your gammoniest relatives.

Oi! Duck-billed Platypus!

This book, by Kes Gray, illustrated by Jim Field, is one I was prompted to read to the children of the family of whom my third-youngest brother is lodging with in London; it's a pretty serviceable kids' book with rather entertaining illustrations* but on the whole boils down to a series of interrogative puns about animals sitting on stuff which rhymes with their names. Cat on mat, dog on log, the platypus when it comes round has nowhere to sit... you get the gist.

* On that front alone it's probably worthwhile for a child who likes animals, especially weird ones.

the Odd Egg

This book by Emily Gravett is a pretty charming little kids' book about a series of birds who try to incubate a particularly peculiar egg. Spoiler alert - it turns out to be a shockingly reptilian infant once it hatches... Nice detailed entertaining pictures, prose thoroughly smooth yet still dumpy enough to introduce children readers to lots of cool new words in the field of animals, hatchering, etc. Worth a grab as a present for any 2 to 6 year-old bibliophiles in your life probably.

Transgender

This book by Vaughan Roberts is, I say, trying not to despair, probably the first (and probably often only) thing most Christians will ever read about the complex and sensitive field of gender fluidity. While in terms of overall theological orthodoxy, I don't yet feel I could articulate much of an alternative perspective to his general points (and in terms of my general views on gender I'm not sure I'd need to), but there are* psychological, social and ethical points in which he seems to think a blunt sense of evangelical conformism to traditional binary gender norms overrides any/all complexities in relating to people who sit outside of this - evidenced by his platitudinous use of simplistic bible interpretation to sidestep genuine scientific ambiguities or questions around authenticity and identity or even feminist conceptions of justice. Of course, it's unrealistic to think a writer could do a top-drawer job in a 75-page A6-size book, which is part of the problem. He has not only hugely oversimplified the issues, but done so from an ideological standpoint which draws more on the patriarchal whinges calling themselves the Christian front in the culture war than it does on prophetically challenging people to properly engage with the issues (or - not to mention - the people implicated). As a devout Christian who has been wrestling with the decision whether or not to come out as non-binary for a while now** and looking for helpful faith-oriented literature to help me navigate, this book was profoundly less than useful or encouraging. That said, I know what the gender-argument landscape is like in evangelical Christian circles all too well at the moment, and so I can still probably say that this book might be a good starting point for people new to the issue who want to find out more - though I would also rather insistently add, don't stop here.***

* Lots of these. To the point where they largely underpin many of his core arguments and so isolating particular things to say 'well this is wrong because X' would not be plausible without a comprehensive intellectual dissection of his book, which I fully can't be arsed to give it.

** As to do so would fundamentally disrupt my relationship with my home church, and may be perceived by many I know as less to do with myself than being a 'screw you' to the form of Christianity I've grown up in as well as those involved in that community. I feel kind of safe enough saying this on here because nobody reads this blog.

*** [edit - June] I've just read this. Kind of comes from the opposite end of orthodoxy. I feel a lot more affirmed and based on a number of other factors have made the decision to come out at some point. Don't know how this will go. But anyway, if you read this, read that too. And then keep looking into it because nobody but God has all the good answers.

Knowing God

This book by J. I. Packer is a contemporary classic of practical Christian living literature. One's relationship with God is at the heart of anyone's religious life - and here Packer unpacks what this means, looks like, feels like, or doesn't (and how can we try to discern well where/whether these things are/n't the case) in Scripturally-grounded, doctrinally sound - but generous and challenging to the rigid orthodoxies we fall into when driven by fear of the world over love of God's supreme goodness - there is far more in this book than I could hope to summarize with a post such as this, but can wholeheartedly recommend this as a text that will help in anyone's faith journey if digested slowly, thoughtfully, and with self-reflection and prayer. It's been one of many recent landmarks in my personal spiritual growth but perhaps one of the most concretely helpful for its theological rigour.

2018 overview

Wow! I finally bloody got there - it's July 2020, but because I'm a time traveller, insofar as the majority of posts from the past two years have been written much later than the date which they're formally listed on [a long story, I had a backlog which got out of my hands], but can now say I'm pretty much caught up with this blog enough to give you my muchly overdue recap for last year's reading. So, while last year's containment of the reading for my Master's dissertation means 2017 very much remains my Personal Best in terms of sheer quantity of books read, this past year I read forty-nine, which is still pretty good - oh, and I wrote a book too, which might count for something? I know nobody reads this blog out of interest for me and my actual life, but it's a routine feature of these annual recaps so if you don't give a shit skip to the bullet points below. Still very much blessed to be working with the Research Team of Church Army - and I feel like I'm learning so much here, just by osmosis. The office's Anglican atmosphere has been an immensely different gear-shift to the evangelical atmosphere I've grown up in - I'm being challenged by God in a hundred tiny ways every week just unlearning and relearning what normal, or actual, Christianity is or can be. I've gone from part-time to full-time here, and this has been a significant change to try to adapt to as it's by far the most intensive routine I've ever had - but I'm loving it here, having joined the Mission Community back in November even; and as the rest of this post will evidence God has been drawing me deeper into knowledge of & love for Jesus in ways that have taken me by surprise for how new, yet natural, they are.

   Anyway, enough waffle. Now for some reflections on the books that hit home hardest this past year - in a range of ways, as per the usual format for these recap posts:

• Obviously I haven't read nearly as many books about Kurdistan as I did last year, but I will mention this excellent comic - Kobane Calling.
• Best children's book - The Snail and the Whale, by a mile. Though I did also enjoy I Can Fly.
• Best graphic biographical work - the Persepolis sequel [as I read the first part last year]
• A much-needed book for Millennials - OFF: after reading this I began experimenting with digital detoxing and honestly feel a lot better for it. Similarly Matt Haig's Notes on a Nervous Planet is an excellent little book about mental health which I think will benefit anyone, but many of its core concerns are big issues for my generation.
• Best popular science book - The Physics of Star Trek.
• Funniest book punch-per-page - We Go to the Gallery.
• Bleakest novel - Camus's The Outsider.
• The series of books for which I seem to have inexplicably written a 4299-word essay in the post for the final one of and as such you should be thoroughly warned before reading it - the post that is, not the book, which is Mostly Harmless.
• A book I was quite scathing of in my post but as the year has progressed I have found its insights actually rather meaningful: A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind.
• Most interesting contextualized poetry: Poetry, Conspiracy & Radicalism in Sheffield.
• Best overall poetry collection: &.
• Funniest poetry collection: Donald Trump's own beautiful wordcrafts.
• Not really sure what to categorize this one as but I really liked it and want to lump it in with this list - Confabulations.
• Best philosophy book - Self-Constitution.
• Best biography - Paul Johnson's Socrates.
• Most unexpectedly thought-provoking - A Philosophy of Walking.
• Most [actually, expectedly] life-affirming - Vagabonding.
• Least personally-theologically-adventurous - You Can Change & Total Church - the former being one I've read before, and though somehow I'd never read the latter in its entirety, it pretty much forms an unspoken [okay, and actually rather often spoken] doctrinal foundation to the pragmatic operations of my church, and so even when reading it for the first time it felt Very Familiar.
• Most personally-theologically-adventurous [at the time, anyway - I got further out as the year progressed]: Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son.
• As alluded to in the above section though - my working in the research team of an Anglican charity has broadened my theological horizons in ways that have been quite difficult to neatly quantify. It started with Seven Sacred Spaces, which got me really thinking about stuff in fresh ways: I was already reading Pollution and the Death of Man alongside The Prophetic Imagination at the time, and several things in my subconscious collided somewhat. Desperate to slow down my own journey to find reflective space for everything I was discovering about my own Christianity - The Rest of God was a great help, as was revisiting Screwtape with a totally fresh cognizance of my own participation in spiritual warfare [difficult to work somewhere called Church Army and not get a feel for that, or at least some rough inklings]; as was the ongoing work around Messy Churches, for which I did a fair bit of wider self-directed reading outside of office hours because I was finding the whole theological angles therein so life-giving where I was. By spring I found myself taking hugely wholesome lessons in my own faith from places I never would have thought to look - such as Jacques Ellul; or from places I'd long been thinking of looking but had never got round to - like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By summer I was well underway with a completely unexpected series of prolonged wrestles with questions about what the church is or should do next - contemplative devotional classics like Markings and The Imitation of Christ were great stepping stones here - then I went to New Wine, and met someone who claimed to have a prophetic ministry; I tell the story in this post. Something clicked, or was unleashed within me, and I found myself now empowered to seriously questioningly begin to unlearningly and receptively listen to the spiritual contexts I was in; Holy Listening and How to be a Bad Christian were of key aides in this period - and then October came round, and Extinction Rebellion were a new thing, and Rowan Williams, who is the Chair of Church Army, put out a statement in support of it - and everything else that had happened having happened I basically took this as a direct order and so got arrested on Lambeth Bridge. Whatever else is going on in my head and heart and bookshelf - God has handed me, wholesale, the pragmatic toolkits for thinking and being in ways faithful to this - I don't even know, journey? strange sojourn? - you know. Needless to say, by the end of this crazy single year I'd travelled far enough from where I'd been at the start of 2018 to read A Closer Look at New Age Spirituality - and only partly out of itching curious desires to be able to debunk it for being 'bad christianity.'

Yeah, maybe that was a bit more freeform than last year's recap. But the content of and context for my reading journey is ever-changing, and so this blog must change with it - or become a dull relic of routine, without meaningfulness in its intrinsic tracing of my own mad sub/conscious travels across the written word. I'm still finding it very much a useful personal exercise, so regardless for its total lack of readership it will continue - and as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the backlog is now pretty much handled, so I'm really hoping all the posts from summer 2020 onwards are going to be written at least within a day or two of the actual book's being read - as you wouldn't believe how much of a faff it's been to dig back through my own memory across a very strange couple of years anyway to gather enough reflections on the list of several dozen books I'd not yet properly transcribed my thoughts on... maybe you would.

   My intentions of reading substantively more works by non-white non-male authors fell a bit by the wayside, I'm ashamed to say - I'd like to lay the chief blame for this failure on the fact that I've mostly been reading stuff I already had, or that was in the Wilson Carlile Centre library, but that's a poor excuse and I know it. It remains an intention onwards into 2019.

   Anyway - happy new year.

   Peace & love

   Isaac Stovell

A Closer Look at New Age Spirituality

This book by Rob Frost was one of those I read with a classic almost-ex-evangelical mixture of cynical apprehension of heresy and roiling curiosity. I've borrowed it from the communal research & training library at work, and if the subtitle is anything to go by, it will live up to this mixture of expectations - as holism and psychotherapy I have no doubt Christianity is fully compatible with the ultimate findings of, but - ley lines? astrology?

   It's interesting from the offset to note that this book's author was in the same position as me when he began researching it. He wanted to debunk all the 'New Age nonsense', as is so much the trend in contemporary christian circles, but as he dug he found more and more commonality, potential insight into things like our relationship with nature and our own minds and bodies (which Christendom-form christianity often wasn't very good at talking about in healthily educational ways), and challenges of basic phenomenology that New Age mysticism is, in many ways, better-equipped to deal with than 'correct-theology' obsessed forms of modern church thinking, and therefore better able to connect with any persons or ideas outside of these modes and communities.

   There's a lot in this book and I won't pretend to bother summarizing it. I'm still on the whole retaining a broad sense of caution in approaching new ideas, but I've never been a shirker from them, and this has been no different - in many ways from reading this book I feel much more affirmed in the core sturdy reality of Christianity to respond to things we may perceive to be alien, but - do we really need to then perceive them as hostile? Or - is this going too far? - incompatible? At root, New Age thinking believes in the possibility of a set of practices and attitudes which can unite humanity and bring about a superior form of human civilisation. This potted summary, were it to contain a mention of Jesus, would also pretty perfectly describe Christianity's God-intended secular impacts. So whatever you may think about it all (assuming here that most of the readers of my blogposts about Christian books are Christian, sorry if you're not, God loves you btw), I'd recommend this book to any persons of faith who suspect grains of truth may exist anywhere else, to be discovered and brought into the larger whole which the gospel forms the core to. Because I certainly believe they do.

I Can Fly

This book by Fifi Kuo is just beautiful. I've bought it as a Christmas present for my very new niece Lily and, because it's very short, managed to read it before wrapping it. Replete with washy pastel illustrations that shiver with life & cold, the story follows a baby emperor penguin as they discover (much to their chagrin) that unlike most other birds they can see - they can't fly. But then... they learn to swim. A life-affirming, broad-strokes tilt at that elusive monster - the perfect children's book. If only Julia Donaldson and Lynley Dodd were out of the game, this one would be in with a shout.

Journal of the Unknown Prophet

This book, despite its title, is by someone known to be called Wendy Alec - and it claims to be a series of revelations pertaining to various End-Times matters during a visitation of Jesus Christ to her over a ten-day period in November 1999.

   If that sounds to you like mumbo-jumbo, let me assure you that my initial reaction was also of the same grotesque cynicism that characterises, quite hegemonically, our twenty-first century's general sociocultural attitudes toward "the prophetic" - which is deeply & systematically misunderstood; people know it has some general mystical or supernatural component but since the typical individuals' apprehensions of covenant relations with God are so corroded the true nature of prophetic ministry is completely unheeded and people seem to just presume it's a weird magical means of predicting future events. Or summat. 

   Indeed - for want of a better place to tell this story, I'm going to recount here something that happened to me over summer. I had the privilege of being part of my work's team sent to the New Wine festival, and on the penultimate night of my week or so there, I met a man in the bar area (whose name, to my fault, I can't remember) whose claim, during our introduction, was that he held and exercised a prophetic ministry. And despite having grown up in Christian environs - this was not a claim I'd ever heard anyone make. Ever. I was skeptical, and to be completely honest somewhat tipsy, and given the range of other things going on in my heart at the time in a very strange place spiritually - and so I met this claim with something akin to derision; but we talked at some length of what he meant by it, what this looked like for him on a day-to-day basis with his relations with and ministering to people inside and outside of Christian communities, and after the bar had closed and my colleagues gone to bed I found I was still talking to this man - felt in myself deeply convicted by God of my own ignorant arrogances of which I'm still trying to repent and decolonize: we prayed together around midnight as he tried to wrap things up to head back to his tent and he, during that prayer - said things about me that even I didn't know I knew to be true, asked God for things that I didn't realise I needed; ending on a simple request that through the providence of the Holy Spirit that I would be given "some connection" that would help me make sense of my walk with Christ at that stage. And nothing immediately happened, of course. But looking back - thinking through - this "connection" I think was something God had already been abundantly showering me in: to come to know, fully, humbly and joyously, the realities of Jesus's work made real through his accomplishment on the cross and re-enacted by his stumbling followers ever since - I've been blessed enough to grow up in a Christian household, and a very good church, and to now have a job I love literally studying the ongoing work of the Church in the UK to see how it can better see God at work and follow his will better - but have always felt in my heart somewhat spiritually bereft, homeless, driftwood-like: even having in the September of the autumn before the winter during which I started this blog I'd had, at a UCCF weekend retreat, feeling particularly keenly this alienation from the "felt" realities of my faith which seemed to flow so freely among my peers and worrying what was going wrong - I walked off alone into a field and threw my complaints tearfully toward Heaven; "why does this all seem so right to my mind yet feel so empty in my heart? why aren't you letting me feel whatever it is my brothers and sisters seem to be feeling when they thrust hands in the air during moments of ecstatic worship, or their voices break during prayers, or why do you even let me think these things and feel the nagging doubts that I am maybe surrounded by fakers, by superficial christian spirituality, or if it is real WHY are you letting me not feel it?" and during an earlier worship service on that same weekend we'd been prompted by someone at the front to think of our gifts, our callings, and I'd had no idea - the only thing I knew I was really good at was book-learning, and short of becoming a theologian there didn't seem to be any tangible means of using this to bless or serve the body of Christ nor aid in their missions: but following this prayer from this prophet, whose name remains unknown to me, at New Wine, it was gradually & overwhelmingly revealed to me how blind I'd been of God's own work in & through & for me - answering this prayer of lonely desperation, helping reform my mental, emotional and behavioural attitudes to bring myself fullerly, truerly, toward the Throne of Jesus with everything I could be & do: and thinking backwards reflectively over the nature of the workings of the spirit I began to see evidence of God's interventions everywhere in my life, ranging from the enormous upheavals like saving my life as a child through the NHS to the bizarre minutiae of things like the encounter that prompted me to read this book that would go on to radically shape the way I thought about God, humanity, creation, rationality and so much else at a time appropriate for these thoughts to impact my spiritual growth and intellectual development - and so much else, big, small, normal-everyday, weird: it became impossible for me to now not be able to look at life without some degree of a mystical lens to it, and if coming to the budding emergence of this element in my perspective doesn't qualify as an answer to the prayer of this man for some meaningful connection to manifest in my life I don't know what does.

   Anyway, other than all that - I've realised I've barely talked about this actual book. It's not an easy read, and this might be not an easy thing to believe but on reflection I think I believe it's genuine. Though now for having said that, I'd like to remind you that that means I believe this book to be a faithful account of Wendy's revelations from Jesus Christ himself - and given the magnitude of that it would be very difficult for me to talk about the contents of the book much without feeling obliged to go into loads of analytical depth cross-reffing it with Scripture and history and current contextual factors and whatnot and this post is, I'm feeling, already long enough, but if you've made it this far through without thinking I'm an absolutely insane person then perhaps this is the kind of book you'll grow somewhat or take something from.

Notes on a Nervous Planet

This book by Matt Haig is a punchily honest & disarmingly thoughtful series of reflections on how we can try to maintain our mental health in a world increasingly beholden by all of our modern era's weirdnesses, stresses, etc: drawing on everyday biographical snippets and pretty robust common sense this book skips around a lot but weaves together a bright cogent narrative of our Real Living Selves, navigating political chaos, new technologies, & all the myriad fuckeries these bring to bear on our poor battered brains. Personally I got a lot of encouraging ammunition from this book to apply to my own struggles with the stuff Haig* talks about here; I'd highly recommend this to anyone similarly looking for some kind of individual stability and reasonableness throughout the bluster that is becoming of this fucking decade.

* Btw it is indeed same author as this fantastic novel, which in itself was inspired by Haig's own disassociative experiences with extreme depression & anxiety, as further unpacked in this other more testimonial work.