The Secret Boat

This book is one of the many, many, many works of Patricia St John that blend Quality Kids' Writing with depth-charged rocket-fuelled evangelically Christian propaganda. I say this not to be derisive - its doctrine is sound, and its storytelling far slicker than other similar efforts - but to a non-Christian reader whose experience of the faith has been less than 100% A-Okay I'm pretty sure it would just come off as disingenuous and twee.
   What St John does do very well is literary diveable portraiture of life as a "third culture kid" and it being an unpredictable impact on these youths; and while much of the decolonization of the Western Christendom mindset that I think is essential to the ongoing successes of a western missionality, the characters draw up workable examples from the story itself - of the Gnosis of Christ, of the beauty of salvation through faith and the humanized power of raw, friendly forgiveness: on these fronts, St John's book makes fantastic uses of living metaphorical touchstones that root the story heavily in Christian ethics and thought, and while it in places does certainly come off as "twee" - it never bonks the reader over the head with strict dogma, and its subtext is as generous as I could have hoped to expect from Christian literature.
   One for the bookshelves if you're a Christian family with children who Read Stuff - especially the secret stuff. Whose boat are you in? Do you own it or is it a rental, borrowing, theft kind of boat? And most importantly do you know how to handle the rudder and mainsails when the waves get choppy?

Dewsbury as it was

This book is a very straightforward exploration of my hometown* through the ages, with text and pictures dug up and expertly compiled by Christopher Scargill and Richard Lee; the selected photos do a grand service to the surprisingly eminent and regionally impactful town, which is far from deserving of its current if-heard-of-at-all it'll be because of either inter-racial tensions or other chavvy plots.
   But nay, Dewsbury was once the beating heart of gluey gooey sociocultural virality in the centre of Yorkshire - playing important central roles in both medieval church-planting efforts and the post-Reformation Wesleyan renewal movement, as well as various secular reforms to democratic and women's/workers rights - especially around the cotton-spinning industry,** and it had a crest of coalmines surrounding it to boot. Then the industrial revolution entrenched an unequal power balance*** in the textile industries surround it, then the mines started becoming less and less profitable, then Thatcher happened - so, there you have Dewsbury today. But if you are curious about its past, which reveals a lot about how stuff changed - and so damn quickly! - in the Victorian era - then this would be a decent little primer. Its photos aren't the most interesting in the world but then it is basically just socioeconomic history rather than theatrically artistesh - so who cares. Very decent book for its given purpose.****



* Plus all surrounding mini-towns, Batley, Soothill, Thornhill Lees, Mirfield, Ravensthorpe, etc. We're an old town; listed in the Domesday book itself as "Ettone" [which evolved by the by into several distinct Eatons, these all being mini-towns well absorbed within Dewsbury's range as it became the centre of local socioeconomic gravity at its late-18th early-19th century peak];  translates as "wasteland".

** Pretty much all the blankets used by all the soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War were made in Dewsbury, which I think is a pretty cool factoid. Although my fave new factoid from this book is that a stone-carved dog, that sits atop the 13th century-old Moot Hall, would purportedly leap down into the church square at 11AM every Shrove Tuesday when the Pancake Bell was rung. I need to do more research into this, I know. An extra cool factual add-on to this is that Dewsbury-spun garments could be made considerably cheaper than importing foreign cotton while their makers still got relatively fair pay - cos they properly and attentively recycled fabric/material for 'scrap'-wear.

*** Oh yeah - while being a completely apolitical book, this book has some pretty hefty and recurrent themes of unrest, revolt, state and civilian violence; radical shit happened in our mad little country's backstory, don't you know.

**** The prime purpose of course being taking the York out of any sense of Capitality in its own micro-climate, Yorkshire - as York City lost 72-0 against Dewsbury in November 1915 playoffs in - boxing? Football? Rugby? I can't tell from the picture but we thrashed ya. Also in terms of generic town planning - standard terraced-housing with decent living space & a garden per house were drawn up in 1914 for Dewsbury, however the war took over as the fund priority - but these plans were pretty much coped en masse when construction of new housing for the urban masses began in the 1920's-30's. Obviously I'm only mostly joking with all this talk of motive for the post - I am genuinely interested in the character and colour and textures of the places that have shaped me through my time on this Earth.

Rhyme Stew

This book is a masterful, short but jam-packed collection of poems by Roald Dahl, that most pre-eminent of Englishly encouraging kids' writers. Children and adults alike will find much of delightingly subcultural echo herein; it builds on a foundation that is folkloric and immaterial to look at - but which undergirds a heroic span of shared subconscious poetic or notherwise elements in the British-European consciousness.
   A marvellous key of a book to my own head's journey, the perfect soundtrack to my heartsong as I read it - Quentin Blake's illustrations are just the icing on the cake. Hilarious at times, heartbreakingly real or rawkily rude in others - this would probably be in my top seven or eight poetry books of all time that I've read, Full-Authorship Compendiums notwithstanding.

KEEP THE FLAG FLYING

This book is a very patriotic collection of what makes the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island so damn special. Which is nothing, really, we're just used to our own weirdness - if deeply, blithely ignorant of ways in which our own prideful hubris has spread to infect World Kultur.

   In any case, I found this book particularly rousing to my sense of English (and Yorkshire) pride; and found myself making a number of annotations in this book in the hope that it may be craftable into an apologetic present for the Conservative friends in my life whom I fear I have alienated somewhat with my own failures to live graciously since 2016 - I can only hope they find it, plus my scribblings, inspiring as I did - and we may come to see a new reimaginable Britain emerge with vim & vigour into the 2020's.
   Small prayers.

Hamlet

Okay it's cheating I know but I read all the subtitles so it kind of counts, even though it's in screen video/sound format - but it's worth it for one of the greatest plays in Western Literary history. My revisitation of the Great Danish play was undertaken for personal reasons, but it has helped me navigate the wider world in doing so since; also, for Yorick, Horatio and the others who, having dispensed such Excellent Catholic wisdoms - were thus also themselves confounded to the dust of memory, in time, in blood, and sometimes ink? A story so timelessly human that nearly five centuries later lions reenacting its basic gist remains one of the strongest unchallenged franchise boons in Disney's cupboards.

Five Minute's Peace

This book, another by Jill Murphy of the Large family series (see also); its focus is more on the desperate multitasking goddesslike Organisational Efforts of Mrs Large to keep all her children satisfied and safe while keeping the House in Order - all before Mr Large gets back from work! I was fairly critical of the series as a whole last post but on reflection I think it's a great way of drip-feeding small children the ideas of respecting their parents' authoritative needs and commands as Elder Beings; that is what parenthood is for is it not and children learn the ropes from the bottom up!
   And this series about elephants is likely a good one for building strong early-childhood reading foundations if you want them to not be whiny needy little trunk-nosed shits when they hit puberty.

"My Book about Me"

This book - if you haven't heard of Roger Hargreaves's maddeningly-long & samey series of children's books by this point then Google help you; is, quite simply put, an absolute masterwork of metacommentary-breaking genre-bending Fourth Wall Throat Grabbage, as Roger - wearing Mr Silly's hat* - writes a very circularly silly book about Mr Silly trying to get his friends to be included in his book, as without them he is nothing.
   A quite delicate and juicy bud-nipper for childhood solipsisms as readers; without which adolescent trains of readership can turn nihilistic corners - or so has been my experience, at least.



* It is formally subtitled, "by Mr Silly".

Husbands: Don't you just love 'em?

This book, that to my shame, I have been unable to find a link for purchasing or viewing anywhere on the whole internet - but it's from an Oxfordian Past Times Trading Corp, so it'll probably be reprinted or whatever when the Time Traveller's Wife shows up. Publishing joke, sorry.

   Anyway - it's a veritable treasure trove of old wives' wisdoms regarding their partners, warty, gentle or not and all; and rather than react to the book in any Christological depth as I have done this essentially here and here already - I'm just going to drop a few choice para-edited quotes from it. Pretty even split on gender for source quotation'd figures.

• Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst cloths; but is popular by its very combination with the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
• All women become like their mothers; that is their tragedy. No man does; that is his.
• Before marriage, a man will lie awake thinking all night about something you said; after marriage he will fall asleep before you have finished saying it.
• The road to success is paved with women pushing their husbands along. (although if we're taking the backseat driver metaphor - they give the co-passengers a bad name if it ever gets above first gear.)
• It's a funny thing that when a person hasn't got anything on Earth to worry about, they tend to go off and get married. It's the woman's job to do this ASAP - the man as late as possible.
• "Beware men wearing flowers" - as a bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever.
• Being a spouse is a full-time job. That is why so many husbands fail; they cannot, or do not give their full attention to it.
• "Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very human need." On these grounds, every woman should marry an archaeologist - since she'll grow increasingly attractive to him as she grows increasingly to resemble a ruin.
• "Married life's charm is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties" - and while open marriages are rare, Zsa Zsa Gabor knew a few that were "quite ajar".
• "Bigamy and monogamy are the same - having one husband too many." Oscar Wilde; going on to claim that "divorces are made in heaven."
• Marlene Dietrich says, "once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast." Helen Rowland cites this meal and its microcosmic fallout as the Patriarchal Savagery Litmus Test.
• A Mexican proverb: "it is the only war where one sleeps with the enemy." *
• "Even quarrels with one's husband are preferable to ennuis of solitary existence."
• "FATHERS SHOULD BE NEITHER SEEN NOR HEARD. That is the only proper basis for family life." - also O. Wilde. Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men. The purported success of a successful marriage compared to a mediocre one is that three or four things each day are left unsaid.
• Did you know that DIY stands for Do Yourself In?
• Victoria Wood: "He thinks I can't do anything. When he was in ceiling tiles, he used to look up to me, but now he's in contract carpeting he looks at me like I'm underlay."
• Stirling Moss: two things no man will admit to be bad at - driving & fucking.
• After a short discourse on technological interference in marital domestic economy, the next eye-catching quote was the great secret of all successful marriages; "treat all disasters as incidents, and none of the incidents as disasters."
• "Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits, the complain he's not the man she married?"
• Men are working to be as mediocre as possible, which is what women want. Dickens makes a reference here to uniforms, but I think algorithms have taken that place in the centuries since that quote flew out straight and true.
• "Suffer the little children to come to me" - Jesus of Nazareth.
• Mrs Patrick Campbell claims that God withheld the sense of humour from women, so that men may love them rather than laugh at them.
• Sydney Smith's quote I will not replicate as it smells too much like Tim Burton.
• Ruth Stafford Peale: "a man's job, basically, is to tame this world; a wife's job is to control herself - and thus indirectly her husband." As it was said by Ian Dury, "the natural thing [we blokes]'ve been born to do is grab someone and go wallop!"
• "Any hope of applying logic or common sense can be blown away with the Cupid arrows of a pretty face and a flattered male ego."
• Mary Lamb: "I have known many single men I should have liked in my life (if it had suited them)... but very few husbands have I ever wished were mine."
• "NO MAN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS FATHER.
• THAT IS ENTIRELY HIS MOTHER'S AFFAIR." - Margaret Turnbull
• "Kissing dun't last - cookery do!" and "when a man discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste, he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery."
• 3 kinds of kisses;
• fire extinguisher
• mummy
• vacuum cleaner
• Emma Bombeck, on noting the male post-marital appetite; stated "I am not a glutton; I am an explorer of food."
• If you hear BAD music, it's your job to drown it in conversation. And it's probably no mere chance that in legal textbooks the problems relating to married women are usually considered immediately after the pages devoted to idiots and lunatics.
• All unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains.
• "Always suspect any job men willingly vacate for women." - Jill Tweedie
• Liz Taylor - "a diamond in the only kind of ice that keeps a girl warm."
• Bachelors being those who enjoy the chase but don't eat the game; a man & woman may eventually marry because they do not know what else to do with themselves.
• "Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder." - T. Wilder - also, Herbert Spenser calling it "a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman."
• Leo J. Burke; "he who dun't tell his wife everything, probly reckons what she doesn't know won't hurt him."

I really enjoyed this - a great gift-book as a coffee table or bathroom shelf go-to LOLzer.

* Although, given the massive prevalence of civilian locals' being raped en masse by any invading armed forces - this one needs tweaking, Kurdishly - get on it, Spanish speakers.

Tadpole's Promise

This book, by Jeanne Willis and illustrated by Tony Ross, is a pretty run of the mill kids' book about tadpoles, their life cycle, and whatnot. It has a sad but funny dark ending - of which I shall not spoil here; but great visual storytelling and should be a fab entertaining read to anyone under 5 or 6.

Dogs Don't Climb Trees

This book is another from the fantastic Lynley Dodd series - though I do prefer her cat characters; in it, Schnitzel von Krum, the sausage dog, gets stuck trying to climb a tree. That's it. Excellent ring-rhyming text and full-bodied illustrations too, as ever.

the Smelly Sprout

This book by Allan Plenderleith, I must say, since it's American Independence Day and I've been wanting to go full-on old-Scots-dialect Burnsian roast on Donald J. Trump since his inception; but it's not about him, it's about the leftover traditional Christmas vegetable that nobody wants to eat. But I secretly love sprouts; roasted, with garlic, onion & chives; you've got the basis for a vegan meatballesque curry stew that'll leave you feeling just how much you missed out for passing on chargrilled sprout.

The Path

This book by Christine Gross-Loh and Michaell Puett is an unacademic, but unflinching in its acerbic accuracy of phrasal gutpunching to the Western mind; short introduction to the range and content of (an initially-seeming-somewhat-disingenuous but explored with real nuance) ancient Chinese philosophies.

   As readers of this blog will know, while my life is still in Christ Jesus the Tao has helped me walk with God through His crazy-at-times world - and there is a notable lack of talk of God, especially in the kind of personal terms monotheists often attribute to They Who Transcend All Thought - which is to say, this can be safely read by any agnostic on any fence and it will probably help you out in some form or other. We're walked through the as-if ritualization practices of Confucian living; the staunch disciplines and Chuang Zhi and the raw spontaneous whimsy of Lao Tzu clashing in midair as arguments around the Tao fail eternally to Pin it Down; Mencius helps us simplify anxiety-causing choices we have to make in the modern world; while Xunzi keeps the pattern of ethical humanity very much at the core of everyday living. There is a lot in here that a lot of people would find extremely salubrious to their mental health if they drank it in and tried to get it, not by striving to fully understand; but by submitting in ignorance to the mysterious nature of Nature and Humanity itself as we shamble about beneath the Heavens - and obeying. It is not idolatry to comply with ancient wisdoms about how our own bodies and minds work. And if it is, then that might be a jealously too far for whatever that god is - because the God I believe in made Everything for a Reason, and the Tao wouldn't be floating about in the real-spacetime arcane umbra without some kind of purpose.

   The book's subtitle; a new way to think about everything - one could, being generously cynical, argue is the case for pretty much any book assuming it has contents that would seriously affect the contents of the heads of its readers. For me it has not fundamentally altered my worldview - only helped flesh out the carpet a bit better, and vaguely try to grab snatched memories of whatever the wallpaper in Purgatory looked like.

A Wizard of Earthsea

This book is a fantasy novel by the inimitable Ursula K. Le Guin; about a goatherd called Ged who discovers he has the gift of interacting with reality magically, and goes off to train to be a wizard. He then spends the rest of the book on a range of island-hopping adventures, eventually chasing his own shadow to the very edge of the known world, and I won't tell you what happens there or why this post is so lacking in its usual ruminant quality because I loved this book and am going to read its sequels very soon. Worth mentioning also that Harry Potter can shove his wand up Ollivander's cavities because this is, by far - the best realized quasi-soft actually-hard Magic System I think I've ever encountered in fiction.

the Corpus Hermeticum

This book, for which I'm not going to provide a link because the whole point of alchemy is to send unexpecting overcurious readers down their own rabbit-holes and where would the fun of that be if I just gave you it that easily?* is probably the foundational text, or at least one of the key foundational texts, for the Western Hermetic tradition by which a true alchemical practice is derived. It takes the shape of a conversation between Hermes and Thoth, on a range of matters - but dealing in considerable depth the natures of Cosmos, Mind, Being, God and Goodness; the language is potently symbolic but not such that it, I don't think anyway, obscures the underlying metaphysical things it is trying to talk about - though the very nature of alchemy means that what I have derived from the text might not necessarily be what any other reader might clearly be able to infer from the words alone; as such, I would not recommend this text with much gusto - despite feeling personally that it has an abundance of Truth contained therein - because for that truth to shine through in a proper way to the Imaginations of its readers they must have been prepared through the cosmic trip of their own life-inner-journeys - but if you have, as I was, been led to the discovery of this text through your own questings, then read it with generous discernment - as I sense this far down the rabbit-hole things do start getting strange, and those who read out of an intellectual voracity and a desire to Fully Comprehend risk dragging their minds and souls into the truly abstract and/or occult which are less than life-giving; but if you have been led here out of a humble expectancy, spiritual curiousity and openness - it may very likely have much of merit to say, but let me say here - nothing which has not been said elsewhere, in many forms and occasions, as the true & proper ground of any alchemical "fact" can only be known exactly as and where it is - which may well be just about everywhere, and if you do not already see that then reading a text like this might not necessarily help you do so, instead just furnishing the strangeness of your mind-soul's quest-loot with an additional bunglage to its burden, which will only be shed when you properly grasp what it's about. God is not gnosis. Nor is gnosis necessary for salvation: only Christ - but the Gnosis spoken about in this text, that is the gnosis of, and in, for and through such things as the mind-soul's Life in Jesus-God; is a real thing impossible to lose when it is found, for it is the truest surest ground of a mind-soul that can be known, felt or said to exist - all of which is to say, be honest in your self-examinations, and quest carefully.

* That said, you do have my assurance that PDFs of it are available online, or it in book form. I read the translation by G.R.S. Mead, if you're interested.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

This book by Dave Eggers truly lives up to its title: that's all that needs saying of it in a post like this.

witness

This book is the second poetry collection by Jonathan Kinsman [this being the first], who's a personal inspiration to me and an all-round fantastic bean. The fourteen* poems herein exploratively reimagine the personalities of Jesus of Nazareth[who!?]'s disciples, with all of their quirks, flaws and background-complications - as 21st-century persons.
   I'd read or at least heard many of them before but upon receiving my copy of the book in the post I took the opportunity to read it all out again, aloud, in the park, as it was a nice day, though on reflection I'll think twice about doing something like that again as I had to interact with a gaggle of strangers who were looking for a lost football in a bush while I was fully teared-up from the sheer emotive power of some of the poems in this volume. This is a righteous angry book, of radical love and hope, of seeing depths of injustice and hypocrisy latent in the world and knowing that if Christ came again today we would crucify him again; and his followers, for all their pain and self-tormented inner conflict, would probably let the authorities do so. I think most "orthodox" Christian readers would find elements of these poems grating, because they are challenging - they ask the hard questions, remind us of the fundamentals of Jesus's mission, redraw familiar boundaries into stories that feel so strangely familiar and eerily echoant of contemporary reality - I'm rambling.
   This book is excellent and I'd recommend it to all discerning poetry-lovers with the knowing caveats that if you're a Christian it will make you think some uncomfortable things but lead you deeper into Christ - and if you're not - well, it could be an even more dangerous book.

* The twelve originals, plus Mary Magdelene, and Matthias - who in Acts is chosen by lot to replace Judas.

the Improbable Interplanetary Revolutions of Naomi Moss

This book is one I have written myself - though it has not yet found publication. As such, I hope you don't mind there not being a link to where you can get a copy of it yet - nor will I talk much about what I think about it, as it's kind of the point of a piece of art to speak of itself for itself. Watch this space.