Living Dangerously

This book, edited by Alan Jacobs, is a collection of extracts from the speeches & teaches of Osho, also known as Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh - a man who were it not for this excellent netflix documentary series I wouldn't have heard of probably. As you'll know if you've seen the doc - things got strange; but as you'll know if you're read this blog much - I love it when things get strange, and I'm always happy to suspend disbelief a bit when the lines between genuine wisdom & odd cultic dogma seem to be blurry. So, without making any judgments whatsoever - I decided it wasn't worth only having an impression of the man's life and/or philosophy without actually exploring some of it directly rather than just via a probably-somewhat-dramatized retelling of all the juiciest highlights. And my verdict is - I mean, my personal jury's still out on the nature of the cultic community his ashram turned into, but in terms of his actual outlook and ideas? The man makes some excellent points, which are highly uncomfortable to hear for anyone from settled ideological perspectives: his reflections on the nature of meditation, modernity & the mishap-overlap in-betweens therein are some of the most striking new poignancies I've heard from any thinker on the subjects of mindfulness and modernism, and much of the rest of his philosophy in my view does bear striking similarity to the clarity of insight and quasi-prophetic character of properly, dangerously enlightened thinking. That's not to say I necessarily agree with him about all the things he said - far less endorse all the things that happened under his watch - but you know, shit happens when you start trying to fundamentally question & uplift the human consciousness beyond the boundaries of convention, so I'm not gonna throw stones. Think for yourself if you want to dare to try to.

[edit - June: I've lent this book to a colleague of mine who's into spiritual mysticism and all that after we had a conversation about the documentary. He's still very skeptical which is totally fair enough - they did have those pink police people...]

Little Turtle Turns the Tide

This book, from author Lauren Davies and illustrator Nico Williams, is an absolute gem of a children's book. It's got every vital ingredient: fun slick non-clichéd rhyming prose and inventive, beautiful pictures, which both work together to tell the story instead of just one following t'other as is so often the case; it squares up to some sea creatures that most kids' books wouldn't touch with a bargepole and succeeds in making them characterful. 
   And it has a strong, praxis-based, optimistic ecological moral, which engages the reader in the turtle's quest to clean up his corner of the reef without its ever having to preach or infodump - it respectfully assumes some general environmental consciousness on the part of children reading,* and then dives headlong into "well no point moping, let's Do Stuff Together & Try & Make Things Better!" in a fully coherent and exciting way. If part of my inclination toward an activism of pessimism could be laid at the feet of certain children's books in the absence of an activist education, this one no doubt could spur many a child onto hopeful practical paradigm-shifting ladders. Or maybe they'll just like it as a book and that's fine too cos it's a damn good** children's book.

* Children like nature, don't they? And the ones who don't are little shits who probably don't read anyway. JOKING

** Weird story, I found out about this book by meeting the illustrator in person. She lived downstairs from some friends I was visiting and came back a bit pissed from a night out at the same kind of time that we got back, and we all got chatting (at first about the fact that my friends' toilet had been leaking through her ceiling, y'know, normal London small-talks) and I ended up reading a copy of this book to my friends in their flat, which actually went down surprisingly well considering reading a childrens' book aloud at an aftersesh-type-gathering usually just doesn't happen. I then proceeded to very enthusiastically tell her that I'd been reading lots of kids' books recently*** & could confirm as a connoisseur that this was indeed a really damn good one.

*** That's another story, and is predominantly Big Isaac's fault.

Grace Beats Karma

This book is a collection of letters written from prison* by Neal Cassady, primarily to his estranged wife, with excerpt ripoffs at the footers of each letter to be read to their kids; but also to his godfather who was in the Catholic clergy. We're only getting Neal's letters here, not the responses - if you need a reminder who he was, N.C. was a close friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, being immortalized by both as Dean Moriarty in On the Road and in various poetic referentialisms; little of Cassady's poetic writings survive in the world of Actual Publishing, but his impact as a personality is pivotally central to the whole generation of avant garde wordsmithery that followed in his wake.

   We forget too easily how deeply religious the Beat core founders were: Cassady and Kerouac devout catholics, Ginsberg a reformist Jew - as such, a considerable bulk of these letters is Neal talking on and around the history and understandings of his faith, trying to memorize the whole list of all the Popes** there's ever been while doing daily exercises in his cell and committing longer and longer passages of Scripture to memory.

   Ultimately it boils down to his inner wrestling with the transcendental realisations of dharma that he and his fellow poet-beats had 'discovered'*** the dharmic truths of Eastern religions, and were trying, through their business of poetry, to syncretize or harmonize these insights with Western Christendom; ultimately a task they were halfway successful in, but Neal paid for it with his life, being imprisoned by dint of his own trust in American libertarian amenities and losing his family soon after. These letters are not tragic - nor are they entirely pleasant reading; you can see the boredoms and hypocrisies and mental gymnastics he puts himself through each time his wife writes back - and the tidbits he feeds as half-truths to the kids make this an actually interesting case study book for psychologists looking into the neuroses of the archetypal charismatic leader of folks. Well worth a read if you're interested in modern American cultural history, or the roots of all Cool Poetic stuff since WW2.

Since grace, in real Christian life - really does beat karma, I'm going to take the timely opportunity here in this post to talk briefly about my exit from my home church, which I'd already given some intimations towards here and here.
   So, my home church, The Crowded House, has been hemorrhaging members for some years - often under legitimate pretences of planting new churches elsewhere, but also because something was rotten in the local Danish crown, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the dams holding back the leak or leaks of refugee testimonies burst - it made big news - and I don't entirely know where to look to for spiritual leadership now, as it kind of feels like waking up to the fact that Acts 29, the meta-church body of which I was a part, is no different from the personality cult megachurches where book sales and speaking tours take precedence over pastoral care for all in the flock.
   Others have said far more than I would like to say here on the whole messed up scenario, so rather than testify myself (which I have done, to the formal enquiry) I'm just going to linkdump a few things. Some have seen it as fishy since Driscoll days; signs of unchristian leadership were noted and undealt with a full decade ago; from 2016 red lights began popping up more and more - this was the same year both of my parents left TCH, forcing me to stay and decide whether I trusted them or my Elders more for my longterm spiritual welfare; and now, with all that has come to light having come to light - we need to be having serious conversations about what ministry looks like in the 21st century, dealing in Hard and Certain terms with celebrity status and bullying.

* Some policemen gave him a lift home once and he, well-spiritedly and not knowing they were cops, paid them for fuel in form of two or three jazzy cigarettes.

** He lists them, including their dates of popehood, in an appendix. Another appendix is a letter from Neal's long-suffering wife to Allan Ginsberg - or is it the other way around? In any case, it adds a good bookend.

*** "Disco inferno" I was, somewhere on the internet, told translated from Latin as "to learn through the fires of suffering" - but Google Translate didn't let me get away with this, and only by playing around with its phrasing to "discos infer no" which renders "bring no dishes" - which is arguably a Zenlightened kind of roundabout means of saying what I meant anyway.

Punk Monk

This book by Pete Grieg and Andy Freeman is perhaps the best book I have thus far read about prayer as a communal, lived out practice. Drawing on the ideas of old and new monasticism, the authors passionately and persuasively sketch out exciting fresh means and models of doing church that resonate with these ancient arts - breathing, meditation, lectio divina, fasting, prayer benders [my term], involving creativity with group worship - all things that lend so much spark and life to Christian richness and witness.

   This book would be a great boon in the shelf of a well-discerning leader in any kind of Christian community, much more an encouragement and drive to the imagination of many involved in such communities as 'mere' members little engaged with the "running models" of church activity to indeed get more stuck in, using their individuality and initiative to find new paths to service and outreach. A truly inspiring read, with some really handy appendices which tie in really nicely with some of the models of ministry and smart discipleship that cropped up in 5Q and other books.

the Cloud of Unknowing

This book is the product of an unknown 14th-century Carthusian monk, probably from the Midlands or thereabouts. It deals in an incredibly holistic worldview developed from the mystical  theology of Saint Denis, and contains as well as the introductory essay on Denis's thinking, an epistle on the subject of prayer, and a longer note discussing privy counselling, which I'm just going to haphazardly compare to being medieval term for spiritual direction: the main chunk of the text though is the central work as given the main title.

   The "cloud" refers to the impenetrable fog of ineffability that human minds brush up against during the holy act of contemplating the supreme virtues of God above; only by God's grace over time and effort can we begin to even somewhat penetrate deeper into the fog, and doing so can be psychologically and spiritually ardous even for the most liturgy-hardened monk. The author strongly recommends not reading this work at all if you have no desire to embark upon the road to deeper and greater contemplation of God's nature and works; but I took this warning with a pinch of salt and took the plunge. I regret nothing, but I easily could have lost my mind had God not stepped in to save me from where my contemplative journey started taking me - that's what happens when you, as a well-intentioned Christian, track daemonic energies into your own "holy" mind palace on the bootheels of your ego. So beware, and be mindful, and read this book if you want the inner adventure of a lifetime - for reading this whole thing may irrevocably open your eyes to spiritual dynamics of life that it is very difficult, in my observation, to unsee.

Holy Habits

This book by Andrew Roberts is a wholesome, practical* unpacking of how the community of followers of the Way (as Christianity was originally known before its adherents got called Christians) went about daily life following the Way to Christ's glory, as we're given a remarkably attractive, counter-cultural and transformative picture of in the last verses of Acts chapter 2. Roberts begins by breaking down the nature of what Christian life is, in terms of individual and communal rhythms of discpleship, which entails a commitment to God and one another, through sacrifice and suffering, experiencing signs and wonders of God's love for all - deepened intentionally as all share in things, through the habits. There's a lot to unpack from these and even more that could be said about how we might think of ways to contextualize them for different situations, but broadly we get listed ten habits that signify healthy spiritual and social patterns of discipleship as we follow the Way: biblical teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread, eating together, giving, service, gladness and generosity, prayer, worship, and making more disciples. It may seem immediately like these cross over each other quite a lot and they do - they're meant to in real practice too! I'm not sure this book in itself is particularly groundbreaking or insightful but taking the time to walk through these patterns as practiced in the earliest model of Christian church and thinking about ways to apply and inhabit them today is certainly a worthwhile task in any Christian setting and if your church feels like it's missing something in terms of the day-to-day rhythms of normal life, that these aren't naturally helping people draw closer to each other and God, then this book may be a good leaping-off point for further thought on that question. Roberts writes accessibly and concisely, with a strong grounding in both real examples and scripture - and ends on a prophetic note, challenging us not only to see the routine habits of church-as-we-know-it as unchangeable but to push imaginatively onwards in emulation of Christ and his disciples as pictured.

* So much so that in the several years following its publication, it has helped spawn a new range of missional church resources from BRF.

All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome

This book by Kathy Hoopman is an entertaining, if thoroughly dishonest at surface level, exploration of the similarities between cat behaviours and common personality traits of persons with the higher-functioning autistic spectrum disorder often called Asperger's - not super educational on either front for most practical purposes but an interesting and somewhat amusing conceptual mishmash.

playing

This book by James Evans is a really interesting series of Christian reflections on culture, society, God, "the margins" and how playfulness encapsulates & shapes the creative and prophetic dimensions latent in all things; I found this book far more academic than I was expecting but it was a refreshing deep dive having been working on something similar for much of last year. Evans covers a lot of ground in a concise book - the Spirit's guiding acts in subverting things of worldly wisdom and convention, Jesus's examples of how "playing" with rules/norms can refocus sociocultural imaginations out of self-maintained prisons & on toward things of Heaven: underlying his conceptual frameworks and plentiful in examples is the lived experiences of African-American Christianity, and I think for that alone this book should be high up the reading lists of all white christian leaders; the graceful depth and theological poignancy here make this a must-read for this oh-so-typically-unplayful demographic in my opinion. 

2019 overview

Another year - another few dozen thousands words poured into posts that nobody but me is ever likely to read; and since my last year's recap - there's been a lot of change. I'm going to link here to the posts in which I've further explicated the stories related in this whistlestop summary, but those posts will also be linked for actual book-related recap purposes later on down this post. So, the super-quick summary - I was told by a colleague that I was, apparently, a prophet, which seemed to map onto things God was also trying to tell me; I went through an absolute horrorshow in relation to mental health and my home church which resulted in me leaving my church - and also getting fired; so though still part of the Mission Community I'm no longer involved with Church Army's research work, and after a brief & messy recovery stint at my family home, as of the end of 2019 going onwards to a hopefully brighter new decade, I'm working as a chef, which is actually great for my mental health, weirdly, as I don't think many in the profession find that to be the case, but I've always been a bit odd. It gives me plenty of spare time & headspace for writing and reading, so there's that.

   Anyway - in 2019 overall I read sixty-three books, which is still quite a way below my 2017 personal best, especially when you also consider the fact that a good dozen at least were children's books, which I had to read, for reasons. Whatever. Here's some bullet points, as per the usual for these recaps:

• Essays that I found myself disagreeing broadly with from the outset but actually then upon completion conceding "fairenough" - Why I am not going to buy a computer.
• Best existential comic - Garfield Minus Garfield.
• Best toilet book - The Etymologicon.
• Least practical [obvs jokes] - The Art of War.
• Superlatively pragmatic & conceptually relatively concise Christian intellectual works - Truth and Authority in Modernity and A Generous Orthodoxy.
• A superb, if less concise Christian devotional-intellectual work - Knowing God.
• Excellent Christian books with strong mental health relevance - The Inner Voice of Love for the devotional side, and Jesus PhD Psychologist for the more rigorous bits.
• Best book on the Church - 5Q.
• Best book on Jesus - The Universal Christ.
• Best Christian kids' book - Wonderful Earth!
• Probably most countercultural Christian book - Single-Minded.
• Worthwhile research into youth Christianity - How Faith Changes.
• While we're on the subject of Christianity, if you are one [a Christian] and you want to be better at understanding and loving trans folks - don't read this, read this. I mean, read both if that's your jam. But transforming is both a far more scripturally rigorous and Christ-ethic centred treatment of the subject.
• Close but no cigar - almost interesting interfaith dialogue; the Lotus and the Cross.
• Most theologically adventurous Part One - Quakers: advice & queries.
• Most theologically adventurous Part Two - the Tao Te Ching, although I did need the help of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet in explaining its contents to me initially.
• Several poets have taught me a great deal this year about vulnerability, being okay with not being okay and giving yourself permission to be honest about that as you grow and change - including here: Kate Garrett, Rainer M. Rilke, Hannah Chutzpah, Sabrina Benaim, Kate Tempest, Raluca de Soleil, Hollie McNish, Otis Mensah, Rupi Kaur and the young people of the Amber Project.
• In terms of my favourite poetry books of the year though - it's really difficult as I've read some absolute corkers, and though I think Rilke would have to just win on the blunt technicality that it was a longer book; in terms of punch-per-page I'd lump this collection joint top spot with "Safe Metamorphosis!!", Hold Your Own and The Saint of Milk and Flames.
• Best non-poetry discussion of mental health - Reasons to Stay Alive.
• Most embarrassing book to still own in 2020 - the 2019 Jeremy Corbyn annual.
• Best manifesto/polemic - Feminism for the 99% - if any coherent political ideological system can bring together the calls of Greta Thunberg and the Dalai Lama, I'm reckoning it's this.
• Finally read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and it's a pretty stupid book.
• A handful of quality fun children's books - The Odd Egg, Gary Larson's morbid tale of a worm family There's a Hair in Mr Dirt!, Michael Rosen's classic We're Going on a Bear Hunt, Slinky Malinki's adventures in Catflaps and opening doors, and finally Oi! Duck-billed Platypus! I did read a lot more half-decent kids' books than are listed here, but you've probably heard of The Gruffalo and honestly I'm not even convinced it's that good.
• What the hell was Beatrix Potter smoking when she wrote this? - Pigling Bland.
• Least funny "humour" book - The Famous Five Escape Brexit Island.
• Most surprisingly profound - The Little Book of Colour.
• Overall most mind-expanding - A Secret History of Christianity.
• Discworld novels I'm not going to choose between - Thief of Time & The Truth.
• Also I just love the Gaunt's Ghosts series; see The Warmaster and Anarch.
• Best non-sci-fi or fantasy novel - Of Mice and Men. Although Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine gets a solid honourable second-place.

In terms of the reading more stuff written by people who aren't just white males, I think I'm doing a lot better this year - though still need to keep pushing, as I've done a survey of my personal library and it's not even remotely representative of even Anglophone writers, let alone the whole world repository of human wisdom. We can all dream. But can we really dream?

   That's it from me for now - I'll be keeping up the blog efforts on into the foreseeable future, so expect the first book dump of 2020 to land here immanently.

   Happy new year folks

   Peace & love

   Isaac Stovell

   

Of Mice and Men

This book by John Steinbeck* I honestly don't know how I ever let slip past my readership during school, as it's an undisputed classic of American humanism; the lead pair painted as raw, believable and deft such that the overall emotional power in these characters is astounding, despite their relatively simple sketches. The turbulent desperation faced by the little man during the Great Depression is palpable on every page, and for enormous-yet-childlike Lennie & his streetsmart guardian George this is, harrowingly, no different: their quest for some semblance of security is everything. It's fairly short for a novel - and I found it unputdownable, finishing it in a single horrified heartrending sitting. A singularly powerful work meditating on men, our mortal smallnesses, bignesses, hungers and thirsts and fears.

* Its title I always assumed was a Shakespeare borrowing, but it's actually from Rabbie. 

Thief of Time

This book is the twenty-sixth Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, and stands as one of my favourites from the whole series that I've thus far eaten. [sorry, read.] It follows a tight ensemble of characters magical, mystical, temporally-abnormal, immortal, disco-ordinated by the shocking revelations of how tasty chocolate is, and/or even relatively normal and just disgruntled by all the weird goings on - even though 'normal' goings-on in the Monastery of Time* is a bit of a stretch. Anyway, no time to give purported summaries of a story that

1. I don't wanna spoil

2. is so fkin weird I don't think I could

3. will make you laugh so much you won't care

* Basically it's a timeless haven in/atop a mountain where Monks live whose duty it is to pump time from places/times where it's less needed to places/times where it's more. Yeh - fair warning, if you're not a fan of Steven Moffat's legacy, this isn't the Discworld novel to get you started. Lots of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey & blink-or-you'll-miss-it infodots

a Generous Orthodoxy

This book by Brian D. McLaren is another truly pivotal vägmärk on my walk with the growing strangeness of my relationship with Christ's body, the Church - as I feel it probably has with a great many of my brothers, sisters and non-binary siblings in the community of us worldwide.
   In it, he dedicates a chapter each to exploring why he can, in the fullness of gospel truth, consider himself to be each of the adjectives in the subtitle of the book: missional, evangelical, postprotestant/protestant, liberal, conservative, poetic/mystical, Biblical, charismatic, contemplative, fundamentalist, Calvinist, anabaptist, Anglican, incarnational, Methodist, catholic, green, emergent, depressed-yet-hopeful & unfinished: - many of these, which are used here as adjectival labels, are more commonly seen and adhered to as "in-group" border-maintenance tools by denominations, and though before reading this book and probably the main thing that led me to reading this book was a sneaking suspicion that if Jesus is truly God's son and the Church his body then humanly-constructed/maintained denominations are kind of a bullshit idea, having now read & digested it I think perhaps there is something else there, something deeper, weirder - so strange, beautiful, sad and perfect that only God could have planned it - that our endless splitting of hairs and ideologies in the bizarre evolutionary tree of Christian history has not led to an inevitably entropic end - but that each strand, each twig, let off freely to pursue its own inklings may do so within the full assurance of Jesus's goodness & promise, to someday, and I pray this might be soon but only God can say - to return home, to a Church unified, where the insights and perspectives of all may be reconciled in Truth and good faith to one another - all having something to share, much to learn, and a great deal more that actually unites them all that they can remind each other of in all joy.
   It's with this book that I can in my brain-heart now rest easier in no longer feeling like I was properly "part" of the ideological-theological community I'd been inhabiting since my home-church joined it nor really a participatingly-up-to-speed part of the one that has since adopted me - I am in Christ, and the labels ultimately, while they don't entirely not matter, don't define me in my being in Christ - and as such I am free to see, and benefit from the insights of, any group that falls under any adjective one might think fit to append to their own particular cell in the great historical body of God's son. How liberating is that?

A Secret History of Christianity

This book by Mark Vernon is a fascinatingly erudite, mindblowingly holistically-applicable and thoroughly thought-provoking exploration of the work of Owen Barfield - probably the least well-known of the main Oxford literary threesome of the inklings, though the other two better known members of this club both cited him as of key inspiration early on in their artistic and intellectual careers.* In it, we're taken on an invigorating mystical romp across the history of an element absolutely central to the metaphysical efficacy of this predominant world religion: that all good, true and proper parts of one's life have their root and essence in the shared life of God - something as bafflingly simple as endlessly complex, a perennial truism that lies at the heart-core of all religions, if not in doctrine then I believe in pragmatic reality; yet it's a notion the sincere realisation of doesn't seem to have been very far up the pastoral or otherwise priority lists of most Christian leaders across the history of the Church and its faith.

   Barfield's work is incredibly potent, drawing on language, psychology, social and historical and cultural considerations, philosophy and poetry in its purest sense - Vernon re-examines the person and teachings of Christ through the lens of Barfield's analysis of said mystical truth; and the theological and practical out-worked upshots herein are massive. World-shaking. The raw powers of inner reflectivity and the human imagination, when enthralled to True Goodness & Beauty, as given in the gospels, is incredible - but to see the scope of such raging paradoxes in their fullness one must accept the mystical element for what it is: once discovered and thusly inhabited, it is not something, I don't think, one can easily then just step back from, if at all, as it is of a profundity, breadth, joy, seriousness, playfulness, creativity and noisy silence that to enter the psychospiritual headspace, the lived consciousness talked about by Christ and Barfield and Vernon, utterly transforms everything about who you think you are and how you think you can be in the world. Which shouldn't sound like much of a surprise, as this is the core promise of Christianity as a faith: but I hope it doesn't sound like a callous barb to say that my gradual apprehension of my lived experience of this fact, the secret hiding in plain sight in Christ's apostolic succession, has been far more like the 'second birth' of a transformative, actual conversion than the course of personally walking with God that led to my being baptised as a pre-teen. Can you become a Christian twice? I'm not even sure the answer to that matters. I've been very lucky to have grown up with such exposure to the faith, but in all the honesty of my heart and mind - I feel luckier to have meandered to the extents I have on that walk so that Jesus found me all the more truly and powerfully somewhere on the border-lands.

   I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in consciousness and the human experience, regardless of what credence you may or may not lend to the Christian faith. Vernon's writing is accessible, entertaining and illuminating, and while readers who come at this book from within a church may find it opens up some strange wondrous new doors, it may also be for you very hard going because the perspective of gospel reality in here is so wild: and for that reason I think readers who remain skeptical of most organized forms of Christian community and faith will find this a refreshingly original, and starkly eye-opening take on the whole matter. I'm going to add some of Owen Barfield's stuff onto my reading pile, then probably read this again relatively soon...

* These being of course J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis - and it shows.

100% unofficial Jeremy Corbyn annual 2019

This book was a Christmas present last year from my youngest brother. I don't think he's read it. As its title suggests, this is a kids-style hardback annual book chock-full of puzzles and trivia and exactly the kind of funny, weird graphics you wouldn't expect your eight-year-olds to be getting Marxist-propaganda'd by the Ultimate Boy from. Of course, I am also writing this after the December of the year which the annual was for and so it comes with an added, six-foot-deep skin of painful nostalgic irony. Maybe next time...

Feminism for the 99%

This book is a manifesto by Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser and Tithi Bhattacharya - and I'm going to be honest, I think if the ideas contained herein got popular traction it could have the kind of impact in the twenty-first century that Marx & Engels' Communist one had on the nineteenth/twentieth - albeit, given the nature of the internal cohesive integrity and built-in safeguards that such a well-developed feminism comes with, I'd hazard it may do so with massively lower risk of spilling out into less-than-ideal post-revolutionary autocratic orders.

   Alongside the postscript chapter which explores the co-current crises of capitalism, ecological sustainability, and heteropatriarchal normativity - and lays out some really helpful pointers for how our ongoing efforts for global lasting justice & peace must involve reimaginings of these things as well as the socioeconomic means of reproduction; the book is comprised of eleven straightforward theses:

1. A new feminist wave is reinventing the strike
2. Liberal feminism is over - it's time to get over it
3. we need an anticapitalist feminism - for the 99%
4. What we are living through is a crisis of society as a whole - with capitalism at its root
5. Gender oppression in capitalist societies is rooted in the subordination of social reproduction to production for profit - this needs turning back the right way up
6. Gendered violence takes many forms - all of them entangled with capitalist social relations. We vow to fight them all
7. Capitalism tries to regulate sexuality - we want to liberate it
8. Capitalism was born from racist & colonial violence - feminism for the 99% is anti-racist and anti-imperialist
9. Fighting to reverse capitalism's destruction of the Earth - feminism for the 99% is eco-socialist
10. Capitalism is incompatible with real freedom & peace - our answer is feminist internationalism
11. Feminism for the 99% calls on all radical movements to join together in a common anticapitalist insurgency

   Pretty radical no?

   I found the arguments and evidence laid out as they were herein mapped extremely congruently onto my current thinking, so it's likely that if you're a sympathetic/regular reader here you will too - certainly a book to be digested and thrown [with generous accuracy and a context-apt gentleness] at Marxists, liberal feminists, those rare but pesky anarchists who aren't also anti-racists & radical feminists, etc.

Garfield Minus Garfield

This is a book* collecting several strips from this webcomic by Dan Walsh, which is in turn an extremely simple ripoff of Jim Davis's gargantuanly-popular** strip - each strip having been subjected to one single edit: Garfield is removed. The comedic effect of this, leaving Jon Arbuckle's horrendously sad life to speak for itself, is consistently far funnier than the original comics they're edited from, coming close to sublime in many of the strips.

* This is an almost totally superfluous aside but this post is short enough that I may as well add, it's my brother's book as I got him it for Christmas or something years ago, and I was delighted to notice he's not only kept it but promoted it to that greatest rank a book can aspire to - small shelf near toilet. I flipped through the whole thing in a single shitting.

** And Really Not That Funny, if you ask me.

Depression & Other Magic Tricks

This book, a collection of poetry by Sabrina Benaim, is broadly themed and toned as you'd expect from the title: a hard-hitting series of world-weary sarcastic-yet-sympathetic reflections on what we do when the Black Dog comes to visit, how we put up with it, explain its housekeeping to others, feed it, take it for walks, etcetera. I felt myself quite deeply reflected in some of these - the minutiae, the tiny borderline-inexplicable agonies, the moments of unadulterated bliss when the fog lifts for a minute or a day - Benaim has written a highly-relatable collection here that never skews or preaches its perspective but paints instead a dynamic series of complex murals, yet laid out in clear strokes. Powerful comfort reading for anyone who has also found themselves adrift in conversations with a doctor or parent or in half-imagined hypothetical reworkings of memories and encounters; sometimes there's just too much noise underwater to make sense of it all, and we fail and feel worse for doing so, but when writers like Sabrina manage to articulate these sinks or cliff-edges in recognisably intuitive chunks of sheer language - it basically is magic, and it will let its reader feel far less alone in the world for hearing so done well.