Zen in the Art of Writing

This book is a collection of essays by Ray Bradbury on the art of writing. He was an exceptionally prolific and deeply skilled writer so it goes without saying that this is a very readable text. Moreover the nature of the thoughts and insights he has on the writing process, from the quandaries of inspiration to the mechanics of typing, are incredibly useful - I read this as I am suffering from somewhat of a creative slump in my own writing activities, but I have to say I found Ray's words here to be immensely liberating, empowering, and so forth. If you're already a fan of Bradbury's work you might find this an interesting insight into his process, but really the main bulk of potential audience I would recommend this to is creative writers themselves. Take good advice from an expert.

2023 catch-up

So last year I read forty-seven books, which is not bad but not amazing for a year on this blog. Let's get right into a bit of a recap...

• I read The Chronicles of Narnia for the first time: it's alright, I suppose
• The Cloven, the final book in Brian Catling's Vorrh trilogy, was immensely satisfying
• One of my favourite Discworld novels so far
• I finally finished the re-read of the Gaunt's Ghosts series that I started last year
• Even more Warhammer 40,000 novels
• And even more - though rather than grimdark these ones were genuinely funny, one following the haphazardness of orks at war and the second following the petty feud of two ancient necron rivals
• And I must be insane because I've started reading the Horus Heresy series
• Inspirational and invocational Christian books
• The second [on creation] and third [on Christ] books in Jürgen Moltmann's series of contributions to systematic theology, which I'm really getting a lot out of
• A book that made me want to do better as a white person
• Classic anarchist theory from Kropotkin
• Pete Bearder's excellent work in the theory and practice of poetry - as well as poetry itself from both the London Underground and medieval Persia
• Ancient Jewish apocrypha
• A very depressing document detailing much of the problems in my old church
• Søren Kierkegaard's very difficult theory of anxiety and sin
• Reading Korsgaard's brilliant book on active selfhood for the third time
• This fun, magical little kid's book which I bought for my niece
• Bertrand Russell's very long very good History of Western Philosophy
• And finally, I'd be astounded to discover that this wasn't the worst thing J.D. Salinger ever managed to get published - as someone who loved all four of his books, this was a genuinely upsetting experience to read

   That's it for some of the highlights (and lowlights, although thankfully this year there seem to have been very few of these). Onwards into 2024 - and hopefully an increasingly more diverse reading journey! Thanks to all my many many readers [lol] for sticking with my ramblings here, hope you've been enjoying following along with all the random fictional and non-fictional things I put in my brain.

Peace & love

Isaac Stovell

Fulgrim

This book by Graham McNeill is the fifth Horus Heresy instalment. In this one, we again skip backwards a few years to follow the strands of story around Fulgrim and his legion, the Emperor's Children - who pride themselves on being the legion that most strives for, and in large part attains, perfection in all they do. Like the Luna Wolves had before, the legion has a cohort of civilian remembrancers attached to their crusade fleet to record the great deeds achieved in the war to reunite humanity. The aesthetic experience in a temple-like construct of a defeated alien race called the laer seems to have a profound and disturbing effect on many of the legion and the remembrancers alike; this influence builds slowly over the course of this novel into a horrifying excess of expression and enjoyment. But before that peak is reached, Fulgrim is brought into the confidence of Horus's new direction and sides with the Warmaster - then, given the task of persuading Ferrus Manus, primarch of the Iron Hands legion, to join the cause also, Fulgrim tries his best but ultimately fails. This uncloseable breach between the brothers opened, Fulgrim draws the Iron Hands to Isstvan V - where, just mere days after the terribly scenes of Isstvan III, the civil war among the legions rears its head once more in all-out slaughter - including the death of Ferrus Manus himself (the first primarch to die). Despite having been forewarned by an eldar farseer earlier in the book, Fulgrim is by this point so full of pride and surety that even Horus is looking at him askance by the end: and rightly, as those feelings are not the only things Fulgrim is full of - he has been completely consumed and possessed by a daemon of the warp. His life is no longer his own - he has become a passive instrument of the dark powers. So while the chief instigator of the titular heresy is of course Horus, arguably Fulgrim fell further faster.* Quite the trajectory for one book, but trust me, it's well-paced enough that not of it feels rushed nor anything less than inevitable.

* There are a handful of other traitor primarchs who were well underway with their downward spirals before Horus too (especially looking at you, Lorgar), but we'll get to them in turn. This is a long series, folks.

the Way of Jesus Christ

This book is the third of Jürgen Moltmann's series of contributions to systematic theology, and this instalment deals with Christology, as the title probably suggests. He very deliberately opts to consider the subject matter through a messianic lens, which makes sense as Jesus was the Messiah, although this makes the points elucidated in this book altogether more rooted in Jewish tradition than most Protestant Christology tends to consciously be, which is interesting. What Moltmann has to say is broken down into seven broad chapters:

1. The messianic perspective - the genesis of its hopes, the development of the hoped-for figure therein, and a consideration of what we learn about this from Jewish-Christian dialogue.
2. Trends and transmutations in Christology - its identity and relevance as a field of thought, how its theme and scheme can be interpreted through cosmological and anthropological lenses, and what all this looks like in the modern context of a scientific civilisation.
3. Christ's mission - his birth and baptism in the Spirit, the gospel's relation to the poor, the sick, the demon-possessed and the outcast, the broader ethic of the messianic way of life as expressed and taught and lived in Jesus, and the person of Jesus as embodied in his relationships to God and the rest of humanity.
4. Christ's suffering - starting with the notion that his passion event provides an apocalyptic horizon to world history, then going on to consider the nature of his death, the presence (or rather absence) of God throughout, the overall purpose of his death, and how this is echoed in martyrdoms throughout history in remembrance.
5. Christ's resurrection - viewed through an eschatological lens, we look at the unique character of Christian faith in this event, then dissect the theological and historical problems of the resurrection as a historical phenomenon and the theological and natural problems of the resurrection as a [super]natural phenomenon, before finally thinking about the spiritual unification process foreshadowed by the resurrection as an event.
6. Christ in cosmic terms - first outlining historical and ecumenical views of such, then a look at Christ as the ground of creation, his relationship to evolution (is he its driving force, its victim, or its redeemer? Moltmann makes a case for all three), and his establishment of a basis for the community of creation.
7. Christ's parousia (that is, second coming) - the nature of its expectation, the character of the promised one who is coming "again", the event of the Last Day itself, the category of Heaven, the righteousness of the foretold judgement, and finally affirmed embodiment.

   Obviously there is a lot going on in this book (as there has been with all of Moltmann's books that I've read so far and I expect nothing less of the fourth and fifth) and it would be ludicrous for me to attempt to summarise what is said herein. I will say though that as with the books on the Trinity and creation Moltmann here delves into corners of theology that comprise the home turf of questions I have always had but never quite known how to pose; he has an uncanny knack for uncovering something so intellectually obscure that it seems almost esoteric but once discussed and placed into proper context provides new and fruitful ammunition for starting to grasp the divine mysteries underlying the Christian faith. The same caveats apply here for the first two books - that is, that being translated (very well, but still) from German means the text's structure is often a wee bit confusing, and Moltmann has that incorrigible academic habit of dumping you with a phrase in Greek or Latin that even the footnotes refuse to clarify in English for the heathen reader - but overall this is a largely readable book for how dense its ideas are, and I think any Christian reader willing to be patient and thoughtful with a meatily rewarding series of trains of thought will find a great deal in this book to flesh out their understandings of Christ's being, mission, and meaning.

Stage Invasion

This book by Pete Bearder is a multi-disciplinary investigation in poetry and "the spoken word Renaissance" that has been taking place in the west in recent years. I've actually met the author* (stage name Pete the Temp) at a fracking site a few years ago, where he performed some radical poetry - but his scholarship shown here is just as fine as his capacity for crowd-rousing verse.

   The book itself drives a complex path across its many disciplines to explicate the nature and trajectory of spoken word. After an introduction setting up the intent of the book, we are first given a glimpse into the world of slam poetry, its origins, popularity, and benefits and drawbacks.** We then dive into a definitional chapter discussing exactly what spoken word is and isn't - from the ancient concept of oral tradition to "live literature"; reflections on style, and then finally a consideration of the social format itself in which this art form generally takes place and its uniquenesses. Then there's a history chapter, starting with the Romantics through the Beat generation up to contemporary hip-hop, and how all of these have left their mark on the art form as it's evolved. The next chapter digs into DIY renewal culture; how the grassroots nature of poetic space necessarily creates room for creators to create, interact and share in innovative ways. Following this are three chapters building on the same idea - first how a poem inhabits and leaves the body of the performer during performance; second how this inhabits and shapes the experience of bodies in the crowd listening to said performance,*** and thirdly how if done well this can all lead to spoken word performances bringing out transcendent states of shared consciousness between audience and performer. The final chapter is about how this can be, and often is, utilized to great effect in harmonising sympathies in crowds for transformative political ends - poetry can be remarkably effective propaganda if written and shared correctly, as long as recognition and empathy are at its heart.

   The blurb quote on the front of this book claims it is the book "we have all been waiting for", and as a member of the many spoken word communities in the UK today, I couldn't agree more; Bearder's scholarship is deep and wide and his love of the craft evident on every page. The poetry he samples for quotes to make his points is eclectic and wondrous, and his core argument that spoken word is a social force of uniting and driving emotional communal activity toward understanding and the forging of better worlds is tangible throughout. If you're a spoken word artist craving to know more about the artistic world you inhabit, this is absolutely the book for you - if you're skeptical about it as an art form, this would be a challenging but wholesome read that will make you think twice about what you do or don't seek out and listen to. A fantastic book.

* And again [edit December 2024] as he was performing at The Shakespeares, and I got my copy signed; he says "this book - in your hands - a powerful weapon". I hope I live to prove him right.

** As the host of a spoken word night myself which is very much in its culture antithetical to slam, I found much to disagree with in this chapter, but much worth bearing in mind too.

*** This chapter has a section which delves into the role of the MC of a spoken word event, a role which I myself have held for Guerrilla since 2019, and so this was of much encouraging inspiration to me.

Rumi: Selected Poems

This book is a collection of poetry by the 13th-century Persian Sufi mystic Jalal ad-din Rumi, or simply Rumi as he is more commonly known.

   I went into this book expecting majestic, mysterious uniqueness; and I found it. Rumi, it is claimed at least by the blurb inside the Penguin Classics edition,* is the most-read poet in the contemporary United States of America - which I honestly found quite a shock given the friendly terms Iran is currently on with that country. I guess people who read poetry are generally more forgivingly open-minded? Anyway - the Penguin Classics edition, which I read, edits the whole of Rumi's multi-volume masterwork the mathnawi into twenty-seven thematic chapters, with themes ranging from Bewilderment, Emptiness and Silence and Being a Lover to Art as Flirtation with Surrender, Recognizing Elegance and Jesus. As a Sufi, Rumi believed that union with God in His divine loving nature was achievable to the willing and dedicated soul, and that belief shines through on every page of his poetry - there is an affirmingness there, a love of all that is human and authentic, almost to a fault. Many of these poems are tongue-in-cheek; lots are genuinely funny; many deal with profane matters; several are genuinely pornographic (there is one very graphically memorable one involving a donkey and a makeshift sheath); many more deal in explicitly religious terms with the struggles of human life and consciousness, of love and hope and loss and fear, of union and separation, of discovering and keeping one's place in the world or even simply of wondering where that may be. All are beautiful and worth reading.

   I don't know enough about Sufism to confidently discuss my reflections on this collection of poetry in religious or spiritual terms, but as poetry, as pure voice that uplifts and echoes the human spirit, I can confidently say that this incredible man is worth reading.

* Translated and edited by Coleman Barks, and also, for some reason, including an appendix with half a dozen random recipes.

the Flight of the Eisenstein

This book by James Swallow is the fourth Horus Heresy novel. Rather than following straight on from the third book, this one skips backwards a few years to trace the journey of Mortarion's Death Guard legion, viewed through the personage of captain Nathaniel Garro. We follow this legion through a handful of military struggles and victories, before catching up with the broader narrative at Isstvan III - where, while everything is kicking off down on the planet's surface, Saul Tarvitz of the Emperor's Children manages to send a warning to Garro (who is waiting in space) that a betrayal of epic proportions is about to take place. Shortly thereafter a small gaggle of civilian refugees from Horus's own ship (where all the remembrancers who had been assigned to them had been slaughtered once the heretical new direction of the Luna Wolves - now renamed the Sons of Horus - had been decided upon) manage to reach Garro on the Eisenstein, and inform him of the developments that are taking place. Determined to inform the Emperor of the treacheries taking place, Garro commands the Eisenstein to flee into the warp and make headway as fast as possible for Terra (i.e. Earth). They have a close shave breaking away from the rest of the fleet orbiting Isstvan III, but they eventually make it - and at the novel's closing Garro has succeeded in passing his news on to Rogal Dorn, primarch of the Imperial Fists legion who are stationed at Terra, who is quite understandably shocked and outraged at the report.

Galaxy in Flames

This book by Ben Counter is the third of the Horus Heresy series. Loken and the other Luna Wolves, in large part unaware of the heretical direction taken by their Primarch and much of the legion, team up with Fulgrim's legion the Emperor's Children, Angron's legion the World Eaters, and Mortarion's legion the Death Guard to put down a reported rebellion on the world Isstvan III. Little can the loyalists of these Astartes legions know that this whole little trip is a dark ploy to ensure the ultimate compliance of these four legions to their Primarchs' new loyalties - that is, to the Warmaster above to the Emperor... the stage is set for tragedy and slaughter as civil war amongst the Imperium's finest breaks out in earnest.

False Gods

This book by Graham McNeill is the second in the Horus Heresy series. We're back with Loken and the Luna Wolves, and they're still absolutely bossing their way through the latter days of the Great Crusade - that is, until a mysterious weapon wielded by a possessed-seeming renegade manages to seriously wound Horus himself. On the brink of expiration, the Warmaster's closest confidants decide to take Erebus up on his offer of a means of salvation, even if that means striking a binding bargain with the unknown, unknowably powerful forces of the warp - and with that, the sown seeds of heresy are covered with dirt and given their first big watering...

Horus Rising

This book by Dan Abnett is the first* in The Horus Heresy series.** I got a Kindle for my birthday for the express purpose of being able to read my way through the entire series of these novels, there being well over fifty of them (not counting short stories, anthologies, and audio dramas) so I simply wouldn't have the bookshelf space to read them physically. I have read this and the following six books of the series before, but that was way back when they were coming out originally and thus long before this blog was even conceived of. Also - just a warning note, since there are so many books in this series and the story is so epic, in the interest of not spoiling the overarching plot's many twists and turns as well as keeping myself sane by not having to spend too long on each of what will be several dozen posts by the time I'm done, I will be keeping all posts about the books in this series as short as reasonably possible.

   So, what happens in this one? The Emperor of Mankind has withdrawn from the Great Crusade, the grand mission of reunifying the disparate interplanetary civilisations of a long-separated humanity across the galaxy under a single banner, and having done so has left his favourite son, Horus Lupercal, in charge as Warmaster of the continuing crusade. Horus is one of the twenty Primarchs (superhumans bio-engineered from the Emperor's own genes) and his legion of Astartes (aka Space Marines, superhumans [albeit not as superhuman as the Primarchs] bio-engineered from the genes of the Primarchs), the Luna Wolves, has been absolutely crushing it all Crusade so far, and in this novel, they continue to do so. We spend most of the narrative's time following a captain called Garviel Loken, who is a pretty stand-up dude. The narration also devotes a fair amount of attention to regular humans who have been sent to join the Crusade as remembrancers, that is, to use their artistic and such skills to create cultural records of the grand events of the latter days of the great war. But despite everything seemingly going so swimmingly, an undercurrent of resentment that the Astartes are likely to be discarded once the Crusade is won and their winnings turned over to civilian control is brewing among the legions, and secret gatherings are starting to take shape. Is this the seeds of outright insubordination against the Emperor planting themselves? We'll see as the series progresses...

   I know this is quite a long post despite my saying that I was going to keep all the posts about this series as short as possible, but there was a lot of pre-emptive exposition to throw at you to place the whole series into context. The next fifty-plus posts will be a lot shorter.

   Oh yeah - and fuck Erebus.

* Okay, I know I've read this one already and it's a prequel, so it technically comes before this one, but this one was released first and is formally the initial instalment of the series as a whole.

** A quick note on the post labelling - I've created a separate label for this series because there are so many books in it, and it would otherwise completely dominate the sci-fi label, but obviously given the Warhammer 40,000 (well, 30,000 technically) setting all the books under this label are sci-fi with hints of fantasy.

Valdor

This book is a novel by Chris Wraight that serves as a prequel to the Horus Heresy series (and if that means nothing to you, watch this space, as I fully intend over the coming years to read the entire series detailing the pre-history of the Warhammer 40,000 universe). It follows Constantin Valdor, the leader of the Adeptus Custodes, the Emperor's closest guards, across the dark days when the reconquest and unification of Earth is very nearly complete, and the Emperor thus almost ready to set out to reconquer and unify the galaxy under human dominion. I've read this first as, as I said above, I fully intend to read the whole Horus Heresy series,* despite it being like a hundred separate novels or so, and this seemed like a handy kickstart to that process. I won't give away spoilers, as there are many in this book, but I will say that we get a glimpse of the Emperor's grand plan and unstated intent that completely reshuffled my understanding of much of the basic lore of the universe; also the detached brutality shown by the nascent Imperium is telling of what it will become. If you're not already a fan of the Warhammer 40,000 universe you probably won't get a lot out of this novel; it's well written, sure, but all the characters are such grand figures lore-wise that there really isn't all that much artistic license that can be taken with them and so it boils down to a handful of dazzling secret easter-eggs that only lore nerds will appreciate.

* I'm getting a Kindle for my birthday. Which is why. Had I meant to read the whole series in physical form I simply wouldn't have enough bookshelf space.

History of Western Philosophy

This book by Bertrand Russell is pretty much what it says on the tin,* being in itself one of the most famous and influential academic works of the twentieth century. Russell being a thinker of incredible stature in his own right, this more broadly germane outline of the key figures and trends in the history of western philosophical thought never fails to be an insightful, illuminating, and surprisingly easy-to-read book.

    To give a coherently satisfactory summary of this weighty tome is far beyond the scope of a blogpost, so I will merely list out the figures and trends covered, and then give a few reflections of my own on the text as a whole. Russell divides the history of philosophy in the west into three broad chunks - ancient, Catholic, and modern.

    The "ancient" section starts with the pre-Socratics: after an initial chapter about the rise of Greek civilisation, we look into the Milesian school, and then more closely at Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, and Protagoras; we also have chapters on the relation of Athens to cultural developments and the influence of Sparta. Following this we get onto the Big Three Boys of classical thought - elusive as he is we only have the only chapter on Socrates, but then Plato has distinct chapters covering the source of his opinions, his notion of utopia, his theory of ideas, his ideas around immortality, his cosmogony, and his thoughts regarding knowledge and perception - Aristotle has almost as many chapters too, covering his metaphysics, politics, ethics, logic, and physics. A supplementary chapter details ancient Greek developments in mathematics and astronomy. The final section of this first third of the book ties up the ancient period with a brief consideration of Hellenism's impact more broadly, then covering the cynics and skeptics, the Epicureans, the stoics, the changes culturally wrought by the Roman Empire, and finally the only individual thinker in this part to get his own chapter, Plotinus.

    The "Catholic" section is divided between the older Fathers of the Church and the latter scholastics. We begin with a broad sketch of the history of Judaism and its evolution into Christianity, then tracing intellectual currents within the first four centuries of Church history. A particularly meaty chapter then lumps together three 'doctors' of the Church - saints Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine; the last of which gets an extra following chapter diving into his theology and philosophy more intensively. A vaguer but still fascinating chapter covers the dark days of the fifth and sixth centuries, and then the influences of St Benedict and Gregory the Great, before we consider the impact of the Papacy within the dark ages. John the Scot gets his own chapter, before we zoom back out for a wider take on ecclesiastical reforms in the eleventh century, as well as the multifarious impacts of Islam, and then the general trends of things in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. While no individual thinker is predominant in these looser historical chapters there were still many profoundly interesting people discussed who I'd never heard of. St Thomas Aquinas gets his own chapter, unsurprisingly, before the section is finished off with discussions of Franciscan schoolmen and the eclipse of the Papacy towards the end of the medieval era.

    The final third of the book, concerned with "modern" philosophy, opens with a double-barrel of general characteristics of the Renaissance and then how this manifested in Italy specifically. After smaller chapters on Machiavelli, and Erasmus and More, we plunge back into more broad historical analysis, as both the Reformation and its counter-Reformation were taking place against a backdrop of the rising tides of scientific inquiry and achievement. Most of the rest of the chapters in this part concern individual thinkers; Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, after a preamble-chapter discussing the wider tendencies toward a growing liberalism Locke gets three chapters detailing his theory of knowledge, his political theory, and his influence; then we have Berkeley, Hume, a slight tangent discussing the cultural challenges and changes wrought by the romantic movement and later a broader consideration of deeper trends in the nineteenth century particularly, then Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Byron, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the utilitarian school (John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and their ilk), Marx, Bergson, James, Dewey - and finally closing out on the most modern trend in western philosophy at the time of this book's writing** being logical analysis.

    I am obviously not going to dissect his presentation of all of this content in detail. What I will say is that he clearly knows what he is talking about to an immensely intimate degree, and even when presenting thinkers with whom he disagrees strongly (a fact he will always let the reader know, often in great detail and with sparklingly dry logically-witty remarks) he is careful to present the general details of what they thought and, most probably, why, insofar as one can surmise this from a historical perspective, with a generous degree of goodwill. Russell never shrinks from decrying what he thinks is wrong but he will never misrepresent it to make his doing so easier - in fact some of the densest writing in this book appears when he is well into the hedges of having to contend with particularly messy or convoluted ideas to unwrap just what a thinker originally thought in order to judge how much veracity it likely has. He is also always very good at situating systems of thought in their historical context, so that cultural and political influences as well as the personal circumstances of these ideas' originators can all be taken into account when we are brought to judge the evolving steps in the development of the western modes of thought.

    Russell is a superlative academic and I think anyone would get a huge amount of benefit from reading this book. It will be inordinately eye-opening for anyone who has ever wondered where our ideas have come from and how they have been shaped and reshaped over the millennia-long story of western civilisation. While I do not personally agree with Russell on everything, I cannot refute him as a keen and penetrating thinker with a sharp and soft and strong set of moral sentiments - and what is more, despite the potentially off-putting nature perhaps inherent in a book of such scale and ambition, he is remarkably easy to read, never needlessly academic for its own sake, and delightfully largely free from that habit all-too-common in professional philosophers and theologians to dump random Latin or Greek phrases at you with no translatory footnotes. Overall I think this book is well worth a visit from any reader with a general curiosity - if you're looking for a solid text on the history of western philosophy, this is almost certainly IT - and if you're just a casual reader who'd like to get their teeth stuck into something highly educational and world-broadening, this might take you a while to get all the way through but I guarantee you'll get a great deal out of the experience.

* I'm reading it as I'm in the process of planning an application for a PhD in philosophy and not only has it been a few years since I've been involved in direct academia but I am painfully aware of my own blind spots, and this seems like a good place to start broadly rectifying those. In close tandem with reading through this I've also been watching my way through Arthur Holmes's own history of philosophy course, which is all on YouTube - Holmes deals immediately with fewer key philosophers than Russell does, but goes into far greater detail on each, and in my opinion it's a much more helpful introduction to those thinkers he does cover, as his commentary is more concerned with explaining the intricacies of each rather than, as is Russell's wont, going into somewhat opinionated digressions about why so-and-so is wrong. The comparison of these two also highlights a couple of interesting lacunas - while Holmes gives almost zero air-time to the pre-Socratics, which Russell has an entire part of the book dedicated to, Russell mentions Kierkegaard (inarguably an immensely important figure for modern philosophy) exactly zero times, and while Holmes has a full two hour-long lectures on A. N. Whitehead (whom one would expect Russell to talk about at least a bit given that Whitehead was his professor when he was just starting out in philosophy, and they wrote the Principia Mathematica together) Russell barely mentions his mentor.

** The manuscript was originally composed over the course of World War Two, which makes the occasional passing remarks about Hitler and Stalin all the more striking.

Self-Constitution

This book, which I have already read since the beginning of this blog hence the link above and the shortness of this entry, is, as I stated before, easily in the top few philosophy books I've read to date. I stand by everything I said about it last time, and have nothing in particular of reflective note to add, but I will say, going through a period of my life at the moment where I have been struggling with being an effective agent in both doing and/or not doing the things that I know to be best for me, the calm, rational train of thought Korsgaard carries throughout here was a real blessing to help me reassert some semblance of control over my habits. As I said before I'd recommend this book to anyone looking to know themselves better and become a better person, regardless of how familiar you are with philosophy - though her arguments are intensely academic in nature the way she writes should be largely accessible to anyone with an above-American vocabulary.

the Politics of Newspeak

This book, or rather an appendix to the novel 1984 by George Orwell (not one in any edition I've ever seen - available as a free .pdf on the link above) is a pretty apt corollary to his essay Politics and the English Language, as it details his application of his political thinking as regards language to the fictionalized totalitarian mode of English, or IngSoc, that is used in aforementioned novel. He walks us through a rough overview of the vocabulary amputations that are made to English in order to achieve the mental effectiveness of Big Brother's totalitarian regime, explaining as he goes the thinking between the removal of certain words and the curtailing of others' meanings to the absolute minimum. The overall effect of which, by distorting language, is to reduce the capacity for abstract thought among a population to only modes which are conducive to the continuance of the regime. It's a powerful and insightful reflection on both the power of language to shape thought and the power of politics to shape language - and IngSoc is a perfect example, if admittedly fictional, of this taken to deliberate extremes. Following the discussions of vocabulary and grammars permitted or disallowed there is a fairly extensive dictionary of IngSoc terms used in 1984 with explanations as to their meanings under Big Brother - with their actual meanings to us living under liberal democracy arguable. Overall this is a really interesting take on how to fictionalise language, as Orwell here isn't making up a new interpretation of dialect or inventing a new language, but butchering an existing one for political purposes. Anyone interested in how politics and linguistics intersect would get a kick out of reading this, and it will certainly add a new layer of intrigue to the novel it derives from.

the Dragon in the Library

This book by Louie Stowell is the first in a series of three novels following a ten-year old tomboy called Kit Spencer who gets peer-pressured into going to the library with her friends Josh and Alita, only to stumble upon magical secrets (of the variety that you can probably guess from the title) and commence training with head librarian Faith, who is also a wizard. Beyond that I won't spoil the plot, other than that the Evil Businessman Bad Guy is a very entertainingly Dahlesque villain. The prose is sharp and accessible, the story is well-paced and exciting, the arcane lore is actually quite well-explained and internally consistent, and the illustrations by Davide Ortu are pretty delightful and add a lot of character.

   Overall this is a cracking little children's novel - I bought it as a fifth-birthday present for my niece and pre-read it to make sure it was appropriate, but I reckon this would go down a bomb with any imaginative kids between the ages of five and nine or so. Would recommend.

the Concept of Anxiety

This book is "a simple psychologically oriented deliberation in view of the dogmatic problem of hereditary sin" (according to its official subtitle) by Søren Kierkegaard, the grandfather of existential philosophy. I can only say that the inclusion of "simple" in aforementioned subtitle is wholly undeserved; this was a very difficult book to read. You know those kinds of books where you know every word the author is using but have no idea how they seem to be fitting together to make the points they seem to think they are? For me, this was one of those. I would love to have some insights to make about this book but I have to admit I simply didn't understand most of it. The language is simple enough, enjoyable in places, but the trains of thought at the core of this text's argument are horribly tough knots to unravel. Maybe I will revisit this in a few years when I have more hard philosophy and theology under my belt and it might unveil something to me; but for now, unless my recitation of this book's subtitle grabbed your attention like nothing else ever has, I don't think I can recommend this book to anyone. Profound? Probably. Important? Almost certainly. Difficult? Most certainly.

Brutal Kunnin

This book is a Warhammer 40,000 novel by Mike Brooks about one of my favourite factions from that universe, the ever-hilarious orks. Ufthak Blackhawk and his war clan descend upon the Adeptus Mechanicus world Hephaesto to raid and pillage whatever cool tech they can get their grubby green mitts on, only the race is well and truly on because ork pirate Kaptin Badrukk has had the same idea (also there seems to be a Chaos Space Marine farting about on his own kind of mission, which messes things up for the defending Mechanicus no end). This book is pretty light on thought-provocation and complicated themes - it's simply a strong, comedic, grisly action blockbuster of a story. If you like the general energy of 40k orks, you'll love this book. And if you have a general affinity for science fiction where it happily veers into the extreme and the ludicrous in terms of creative violence, this could be a gateway 40k book for you.

One disconnected comment I will make is that this novel pretty much establishes as official lore that most Mechanicus agents and ALL orks are canonically non-binary and use they/them pronouns. At least from the narration's point of view. Which I thought was joyously unexpectedly woke of the Black Library, but makes perfect sense within the canon (as most Mechanicus personages are so technologically adapted in their physicality that concepts like gender were left behind several dozen upgrades ago; and orks? well, orks are literally fungus).