You Can Pray

This book from Tim Chester (one of the founders and elders of The Crowded House church community in Sheffield which I've been part of for about half my life), was the first I've finished in ages - for which I apologise if anyone avidly follows this blog (whoever you are find something else to do). I went hitchhiking round Europe for charity and didn't get as much reading done during the adventure as I thought I would. Anyway, as far as books on christian life go, this does what it says on the tin - makes a clear and compelling exhortation for us to use prayer as a more habitual part of our lives.

   It does this in three sections - firstly, explaining the theology behind prayer to show us how significant and appealing it is, because God the Father loves to hear his children call upon him, Jesus the Son presents our prayers before him as he intercedes for us in grace, and the Holy Spirit works in us to reform our hearts (and thus our prayers) to please and glorify God by reflecting his will. This gives a brilliant picture of prayer as our current earthly means of making use of our relationship with the Trinity by talking to God, and given how good God is that makes it something truly special - we can literally present our daily thanks, requests, fears, concerns and repentances to the creator of the universe! What a privilege!

   The third part of the book builds on this by showing us how we should approach and use prayer given what it is: with a mixture of awed reverence and a familiar closeness; God is our God and our Father. In prayer our first thoughts should be of him, and our prayers should reflect this - by knowing why we're praying for what we're praying for. A child treating God as a genie praying for a bike evidently doesn't have the rightness of approach, but a diligent churchgoer may pray something wholesome-sounding simply because they feel it's a "holier" thing to pray, and that's not quite right either. Making prayer God-centred means examining our motivations for each prayer and ensuring that we can argue those requests through to something that exults God, by faith in his promises and his Word, by glorifying him and hoping for the spread of his glory, by rejoicing in his mercy and thankfully imploring him to extend it. Any good prayer should be able to be worked into one of these moulds - Tim helpfully walks through modern applications of the Lord's Prayer (the guideline to ideal prayer given by none other than Mr Messiah Jesus) to demonstrate how we can bring forth petitions for the advance of God's kingdom and for our needs while still trustingly prioritising the glorious sovereignty of our Father.

   The second part of the book tackles a much more reluctant issue: times when we don't pray. Maybe other things are more enjoyable, or seem more urgent, or we've prayed unanswered prayer too many times. Here we're shown from the arguments of the rest of the book how ludicrous such complaints are, but above just theological nudges to get our prayer life going again Tim offers a few strong practical pushes too. Chiefly among these is praying is groups (note how it's rare to look forward to a prayer meeting but even rarer to regret going to one, such is the encouragement of corporate worship in prayer) and praying over the Bible. Prayer is only one side of our relationship with God - us doing the talking, and we're much more unreliable than him, so it makes sense to not only talk but to listen, to spend time in his Word meditating over the gospel truth and how it speaks into every aspect of our lives. If we feel far from God, it's not because he's holding us at arms' length - it's because we've broken off the conversation with our heavenly Father. Bible reading and prayer as regular intertwined activities are essential to a healthy relationship with God.

   So as always with Tim's books, this is extremely easy to read, rigorously grounded in biblical truth, with theology made accessible by examples applying it to normal life. Definitely worth a read if you're keen to know the glory of God more in your prayers. However if you're considering reading this as a kick-up-the-backside to spurt you into praying more (I was), don't bother - read the Bible instead and just pray; have the confidence that God is good and glorious and true and just pray. For rejuvenating our appreciation of our heavenly citizenship, no book can possible be a substitute for God's word itself, hearing it, thinking on it, and responding to it in worshipful prayer.

The Worldly Philosphers

This book, Robert Heilbroner's classic overview of major thinkers in the history of economics, is truly excellent. I've been using it to base a series of informal discussions on, for a student society I help run that aims to push for critical analysis and pluralism in the university economics curriculum - we were doing a three-part talk on how economics has grown and evolved as a subject, and this book was a good place to start in terms of giving a general outline.

   I've already spent a good twenty hours or so over the past month condensing this book into three thirty-minute-long chunks of digestible information, and there's so much depth of explanation I could now go to in terms of the book's content that it'd end up being far too long of a post for me to be able to be bothered to write, so I'll only give a very brief (well, as brief as it'll go without being dull or vacuous) overview.
   Heilbroner gives us the story of what economics is, told from those who thrust it forwards into intellectual frontiers as-then unexplored: from the recesses of pre-modern history where, despite millennia of scarcity, trade and debt, it had yet to develop as a field of study; through its gradual coalescence into a vision of society as capitalism took hold of 18th century Europe, until Adam Smith first undertook to draw from the ideas of many thinkers of his day a complete theory of how nations' wealth worked, grew, fell, failed, expanded. Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo and their not-so-cheerful theories of inevitable poverty-based automatic population controls and viciously competitive profit-erosion followed, and the classical school of economic thought began to take shape. This entire system of thinking was recorded in a comprehensive survey by J.S. Mill, around the time where mid-to-late-19th century Europe was growing restless from the continual misery inflicted upon the working masses by processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and generally just capitalism[isation]. In moral response to the broadening inequalities and exploitations, utopians sprang up, most as eccentric in character as bizarre in theory (Saint-Simon and Fourier sound like great fun); but on the serious side a pair of bitingly-logical analytic socialists named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels here developed ideas that would expose the fundamental internal inconsistencies of capitalism; ideas that would start revolutions and shape the next 130 years. However great the social impact of the radical leftist thinkers however, academic economics had taken a very different turn - economists like Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall, Francis Edgeworth and Stanley Jevons had begun reforming the subject into mathematical-based abstractions and models, and inevitable detachment from the more basic questions of underlying assumptions and political implications. This was the beginning of the birth of the neoclassical school of thought (which now dominates all economics studies, hence the recent national push for pluralism). Other than Thorstein Veblen (whose bottomless cynicism exposed the brutally-selfish heart of all society, primarily economics, which he also emphasised the post-industrial-revolution dependence of on technological development) and Joseph Schumpeter (who showed the limits of economics against an object of study that is, frankly, unpredictable), the book nears its end on John Maynard Keynes; the giant of 20th century thinking who, with impeccable clarity and rationality, showed governments the best way of breaking out of a slump - by compensating for depressed investment and stimulating consumption with a kick-starting burst of public-sector spending. His ideas declined in fashionability throughout the 20th century though, and while a few of the less-debatable aspects have been incorporated into post-Keynesian neoclassical economics, his grand vision of society is no longer prevalent within the academic ring of those professing to be economists. The book ends on a provocative note about the conflict between where the subject has gone now (well into thinking of itself, thoroughly problematically, as a science) and where these key figures in its evolution saw it as going; if economics continues to be dominated by maths and models instead of insightful observation of actual economies, then "worldly philosophy" is dead. Again, hence that whole campaign thing.
   I'd recommend anyone read this book; especially if you're interested in economics or politics or history or philosophy or sociology or whatever, and compulsory if you're a student of economics. Heilbroner's done an amazing job of conveying the core theories of the big thinkers simply without diluting them, and the grand narrative of how the "dismal science" has grown up is interspersed with delightfully colourful mini-biographies of those who helped push it forwards (these are extremely enjoyable; Robert Owen and J.M. Keynes in particular just had awesome lives), and a topic that has the potential of considerable stultification becomes lively, fascinating, and a joy to read about.

The Human Animal

This book, from zoologist Desmond Morris, was recommended to me in August of last year in some frankly bizarre circumstances. Long story short, I was talked to by an insanely sane stranger on a bus, he told me I should read this book, and in stumbling across it in a bookshop's bargain bin last week and reading the whole of it in three days I have kept my promise; and I am thoroughly glad that I did.

   It's an immensely eye-opening book, trying as it does to compose a rough examination of humanity from the perspective of zoology - and by dissecting human behaviour and lifestyle into animal explanations, some extraordinary insights into the nature, history, character, behaviour and needs of man are revealed.

   The book was written alongside Desmond Morris's 6-part BBC documentary series on the same topic (yeh, they had TV in 1994) and so the book's 6 chapters focus on the central themes of each episode of that. There are far too many fascinating observations and "oh wow so that's why X is X"-provocations in each section for me to be able to give any sort of overview that does justice to the sheer interestingness of the vast panorama of humanity that is exposed, but here's a vague guide as to the chapters' themes:

1. Body language - how basic gestures and movements are rooted in tribal-social origins of humans, and despite enormous various in ethnic culture and spoken language, these communicative foundations are generally much the same across the world.
2. Evolutionary origins - how humans grew distinct from other apes, and through the winning combination of bipedal stance, dexterous hands, and advanced intelligence, we were able to dominate the hunting-grounds and flourish.
3. Urbanisation - how as thriving human communities grew, we became more distanced from the wilderness that had birthed our species, and as societies coalesced into larger organisations such as towns and cities, while allowing for progress to accelerate this also forced territorial aspects of our animal nature into conflict.
4. Reproduction - how (left free from constraints of social convention) human sexual pairings all follow a remarkably similar pattern, and how physical and psychological developments in intimate relationships have given human sex a higher and less brutish place in our species' way of life (a certain degree of detachment advised if reading this chapter - the biological descriptions are as fundamental to understanding the topic as they are graphic).
5. Childcare - how human births and babies differ developmentally to other animals, being far more vulnerable and thus dependent on parental affection, which are ensured by strong emotional bonding; essential for proper mental and physical wellbeing in our life cycle.
6. Recreation - how the cognitive surplus of humans leaves us with a glut of spare time; being able to satisfy our basic survival needs easily, we can divert our vast intellect into other pursuits that benefit or entertain the community - from this springs science, art, literature, music, technology, philosophy and basically all culture: the root of which is our ability to think in abstraction, to see something as something else and create meaning from it, fueled by our insatiable curiosity to understand life.

   This book is a veritable treasure-trove of glimpses into why humans are as they are, with many uncoverings of evolutionary psychology and biology that throw up radical prompts to rethink much of the philosophical-as-religious way we perceive humanity today. One of my main itches reading it was how we should respond to the news that we are animals, or how we should act knowing that our evolution has already determined particularities into our bodies and minds. Part of me wants to carefully draw out all the links between what Morris's explanations of human development implies is good alongside similar implications from liberal christian ethics and anthropology and sociology and in doing so weave a consistent impenetrable scientific-philosophical picture of how humanity should be. But part of me knows that this would have feeble legs to stand on - what has evolved is simply what survives best. Having ascended by evolutionary means to a plateau from which we can rationally assess the world we're in, the arguments we rely upon to justify aspects of our lives are seldom grounded only in our animal natures, and I'm not sure whether they should be either. It's a headscratcher, to be sure.

   Nonetheless, this is a fascinating read, and for anyone interested in the origins of human biology, psychology, sociology and anthropology, plus all the philosophical quandaries unearthed by this exposition, I would (as that eccentric guy on the 52 did to me) wholeheartedly recommend you read this book.

The Damned Utd

This book, a fictionally-embellished-sort-of-biographical thing that is probably best to call a novel by David Peace, was surprisingly compelling. I encountered it in Oxfam at the end of November and took three months to read the first third or so, and upon resuming got so gripped that I finished it during a long bus journey. Anyway: the novel is based on the infamous 1970's football manager Brian Clough's forty-four day stint as manager of Leeds United.* As someone with an interest in football that only marginally counts as existent and generally not liking biographical works much, I wasn't expecting to enjoy it. How wrong I was.

   The novel follows two narrative threads, flickering between Clough's present managing Leeds to a snippetted walkthrough of his past (from his premature retirement as a player due to injury, into his managing career alongside Peter Taylor through Hartlepools, Derby County, Brighton and up to Leeds). Arranged in 44 chapters for each of his days at Leeds, these backstory parts are recurrent throughout and quite hard to get used to. Also hard to get used to is the writing style itself - David Peace has cultivated an extremely distinctive voice for Brian's interior narration (the present is 1st person, the past is 2nd, all Clough-centric) that is both down-to-earth and entrenchedly arrogant. Particular phrases and memories and images recur and repeat; people and places are almost always referred to by exact full name; past and present dialogues and experiences echo and intermingle in the head of the narrating Clough. The style perfectly fits the mindset of someone paranoid about their competitors, obsessed by their successes, haunted by their failures, and entirely sure of their own way of achieving their ends.

   And this is the kind of character Clough is painted as, impeccably and engrossingly so. The 2006 novel was published two years after its central character's real-life death and was not met kindly by his surviving friends and family, who protested the portrayal of him, and probably rightly so. But if it had been toned down it would have been just another biography [see *], and yet David Peace takes the facts of Clough's management career (which actually do seem well-researched) and chooses to give them the artistic slant that turns them into literature. Brian is certainly exaggerated as an anti-hero, his words and deeds and relationships certainly tinged with a particular sourness and viciousness that they probably lacked in reality, but as far as it takes the novel this is well worth it. The character study central to the novel is not so much Brian Clough himself but a black-and-white caricature of him, which clashes so spectacularly with visions of victory and defeat that it itself carries the novel, and only a character with as much tormented depth as the Clough painted herein ever could.

   That's why the novel is so compelling, even for those with little or no interest in football. In fact disregard football altogether - if you come to this book loving the sport you might be annoyed at how subservient of a place it takes to the central threads of the narrative. Be aware that football is obsession that has driven the compulsions, the hopes and despairs, of this novel's protagonist - and he is what it's about. If you don't mind a lot of swearing and a repetitive style of prose which is quite hard to settle into, then this book is definitely one to read. An excellent exploration of a darkened character.

* yes, based. Many of the complaints I've seen in reviews and general reactions to the novel have been that it's full of added details and speculations and characterful flourishes that distort the facts, but David Peace makes it very clear that his work is a novel, "another fiction, based on another fact" - not to be taken as pure history. The additions are what weld it into a powerful epic rather than being a dry overview of an egoistic Northumbrian's management career, which it otherwise would be.

William Shakespeare's Star Wars

This book, it should probably be said immediately, isn't an actual work of the Bard, but a product of fantastic enthusiasm for both Shakespearean theatre and George Lucas' classic trilogy on part of Ian Doescher, who deserves an enormous amount of credit despite the entire thing being a mishmash of plagiarised content and style. Before I start talking about it though I want to thank my dear housemate Chris Hedges for leaving this book on the coffee table, and apologise to him for my temporary theft of it. You can have it back now.

   The book - what is there to say? For any fan of Shakespeare (I am) or fan of Star Wars (I also am), it's truly marvellous, a playful amalgamation of the sublime scripted style of the one and the powerful punchy plot of the other. Doescher has done an amazing job of converting the entire of Episode IV: A New Hope into iambic pentameter, complete with archaic wordage* and all the classic to-be-expected tropes of someone spoofing Shakespeare (straightforward phrases turned amusingly into poetic spurts of "verily", "forsooth" and so on).

   Moreover he goes the extra mile to inject theatrical colour and character into this already excellent story: while the plot remains exactly the same, with Luke and Han and C3PO and R2D2 and Leia and Obi-Wan and Chewbacca and Vader et al, he foresaw that the book's primary (or probably only) readers would be people familiar with both Shakespeare and Star Wars anyway. Taking advantage of this, the play (it's written as a playscript so yes I can call it that) is littered with half-quotes from Shakespeare's plays, and full of references both forwards and backwards within the Star Wars saga; perhaps the best added element though are the occasional [aside] monologues, that allow by dint of stage direction the characters to voice their thoughts and feelings in things that are implied but never said in the films (because monologues aren't dialogues so weren't in the film). These often give surprisingly poignant insights into the mindsets and intentions of the characters, especially those of Darth Vader, R2D2 and Han Solo. Well, R2D2's are just funny, but the others definitely show a lot of depth through these parts.

   The illustrations are definitely worth a mention too. The characters are easily recognisable but styled in as close to 16th century dress as their costumes can go - rendering Stormtroopers in suits of armour, Grand Moff Tarkin in a full lace ruff, and Jabba the Hutt with a feathered Jacobean cap. I can't say a great deal about them because by convention of clichéd wisdom it takes 1000 words to describe a single picture sufficiently, and I can't be bothered to write that much. They're hilarious though.

   I think probably the most enjoyable part of it was how easily it worked. Yes, Star Wars has a great story, and yes, Shakespearean English is an immediately recognisable form of writing, but to bring the two together and mesh them well enough that even the overlaps can be filled in believably and the whole read with casual bursts of mirth is an achievement indeed. If you like Shakespeare and Star Wars even a bit, you'll share my appreciation for this brilliantly quirky combination of the two.

* speaking of wordage, it must be remembered that many of the characters in the films don't even speak English at all - and where they do not, Doescher has transcribed their vocal output. Every consonant-dense garbled utterance in the Tattooine language of Jabba and Greedo, every harsh vowel-burp of the Jawas, every beep, meep, whistle, squeak, whee and whoo of R2D2; these are all written down and nonsensically fun to read.

Ulysses

This book, James Joyce's seminal masterwork of obscurely innovative writing, has a literary reputation preceding it like almost no other book. It's notorious for being just downright difficult to read, and so having been informed as such by my A-Level English Language teacher (who as this blog goes on it will become obvious had a huge influence on my reading habits) I found it in a second-hand bookshop and started reading it out of sheer determination. That was two years ago (I read many books simultaneously and the longer harder ones get finished very slowly as a consequence), but having barely read anything in January due to exams I decided to tackle the remaining-unread 300ish pages in another burst of effort and so finished it just in time for the next term to recommence tomorrow. The book's general gist[s] is[are]:

• Leopold Bloom, a jewish advertisement editor, goes about the events of his day on 16th June 1904, encountering and interacting with many friends and acquaintances, primarily his wife, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, the son of an old friend. Within the book's twenty-four hour span these three characters go about their varyingly mundane days in Dublin, doing things from attending funerals to regretting affairs to surprisedly discovering a forgotten potato in one's pocket. BUT IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE BECAUSE
• It's also a parody/homage of Homer's Odyssey* (hence the title), with each succession of events vaguely mirroring a chapter of the Greek epic, albeit in necessarily less dramatic scope; for example, where Odysseus and his crew are captured and attacked by the Cyclops, Bloom and his friends are accosted by a drunk nationalist who throws a biscuit-tin at our not-eponymous-hero. BUT IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE EITHER BECAUSE
• Joyce was a pioneer of prose, experimenting with writing techniques throughout the book which I will not embarrass my lack of literature-jargon by failing to explain; and so the language with which the story unfolds is almost endlessly diversely immersively unpredictably obtusely brilliantly creative. The prose dips and flickers almost without warning between dialogues, descriptions, perceptions, memories, thoughts, current occurrences and odd half-metaphorical fantasies. The three main characters' heads are entered to a remarkably personal extent, with their streams of consciousness often played out in grand strings of idiosyncratic wordage. Chapters even vary between the genre and form of their written style - one interspersed with sensationalist newspaper headlines describing updating situations, one composed entirely from questions and answers of varying length, one written as a script replete with amusing stage directions, one written as a single fifty-page-long sentence without any punctuation at all. This is what people are talking about when complaining of how hard to read it is BECAUSE IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE.

   So the book, despite a fairly simple story and a fairly comprehensible set of mythic parallels, becomes nigh on impenetrable because of how it is written. Of course it helps not at all that on top of this the text is also littered with references to contemporary Irish culture, often in minute detail of politics or communities, plus spattered untranslated phrases in Latin, Italian, Irish and a handful of other languages, plus many a word that is simply either misspelt or made up. Much of these latter difficulties could be avoided with an annotated version (which I didn't have) but that adds on a good 240 pages of reading and probably doesn't add 240-pages-worth of enjoyment, so allow yourself to not understand certain things. I think in short it's fair to say that there was a pretty large proportion of the book that was lost on me, and could probably be lost on anyone except those highly-skilled in literary deconstruction and with a lot of spare time for analysis.

   Don't let that put you off in the slightest. This is renowned as one of the most difficult books but it is also absolutely superb: the rewards are so much greater for the increased mental strain of reading it. If they weren't, the first person to have read it would have considered it meaningless gibberish and tossed it aside and it wouldn't be the monstrously famous 20th-century novel that it is. Reading it is often like wading through glue, yes, but only because you're collecting pots of gold scattered about the surface of the glue-pond (please pardon that ridiculous sentence). The sheer liquid delight of the writing style's inventiveness as the words seem to play with themselves, the life-affirming splendour of some of the descriptions of feelings and people, the irrepressible grin or chortle as some benign or opaque phrase turns its own meaning into something entirely different - once you get the knack of not being put off by the text, you can stumble through it and see its fleeting beauty. This post is naturally meandering somewhat because there is so much to potentially say about this book and yet I wouldn't know where to start, so apologies. I'm just trying to outline how great it was to read.

   On the back of my edition, there's a quote by Samuel Beckett about the novel: "His words are not the polite contortions of twentieth century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way onto the page, and glow and blaze and flame and disappear". I cannot put it better; reading the book makes you feel as though you are reading minds, and of course this is hard to comprehend, to retain, to dissect; but it is full of insights and snippets of pure originality and excellence. Molly and Stephen and especially Leopold Bloom do not feel like characters in a novel - they feel like real existing humans with minds and bodies and communities; like we're allowed to peer into their innermost lives through James Joyce's meticulously** crafted prose-tinted glasses.

   It is a cliché to say so but this is a work of genius (it wouldn't be a cliché if people hadn't thought it were true frequently enough to make it one). There aren't many books I would wholeheartedly recommend that anyone who enjoys reading should attempt before they die, but this is certainly among them.

* I did start off trying to read Ulysses and the Odyssey in parallel, chapter to chapter, but of course the one was an epic journey with monsters and adventures in plain prose and the other was a day in Dublin with acquaintances and errands in the unplainest prose I've ever encountered - and for some reason I got bored of the first one and finished the second one first.

** the book had a thoroughly arduous journey from inception to proper publication, due to various factors including: Joyce's povety-stricken conditions; his developing eye-disease; inept copytypists; disinterested publishers; government censorship; and World War One. The pains of a genius' labours are great to birth such a great work as this. Fortunately the original text survives to today in a variety of affordable readable mass-market paperbacks.

The Good God

This book, by Michael Reeves, was another from the UCCF bookstall but which had sat neglected for some months. I took to reading it over the past week because of revision - it's exam season so I've not had much time to read and this book is quite short - but the genuine timeliness of its content to my week deepened its considerable impact, for reasons I'll explain further shortly.

   It's about God, basically; who he is in his unified tri-personal character of Father, Son and Spirit, and why this is a good thing for a great many reasons. The book points us to look at our own conceptions of "God", which generally fall far short of what we would consider perfect. We think all too often of a lonely omnipotent puppeteer who created a populated universe to serve him, imposing laws and judgments upon it when its denizens fail to meet his arbitrary standards - one God in one person, a sort of Omnibeing. If you have been put off faith because your conception of God was sort of like this I would encourage you to read this book and reconsider who you think he is, and then reread the Bible to meet the God described here in context and see how much more sense it makes. I'd also recommend this book enormously to Christians - it's a delightful reminder of who our God is and how good he is in the Father, Son and Spirit, and how we can approach him in those persons and delight in them. The book is quite short and in quite simple prose but very theologically dense - it's remarkable how so much complexity and meaning is packed into accessible sentences, and because of this it's very easy to read and a deeply encouraging and warming little book.

   The God described in The Good God is so much more agreeable, beautiful, and frankly plausible than the Omnibeing; the God of biblical theology as one Lord in three persons. It is the Trinity that forms the centre of his essential character, defining who he is and how he can relate to things; because he is in eternal loving community (of Father, Spirit and Son) it is intrinsic to his nature to be overflowing with self-giving love. This speaks immense volumes into almost every avenue of doctrine (of which I will have to skip several and the rest glaze over somewhat, the book is so tightly written that it's really hard to summarise chapters effectively), such as:

• Creation - an Omnibeing would have spent eternity alone and so have no need for a created world other than pure self-indulgence. God in Trinity however has spent eternity loving one another in such abundance that it seems natural that such a god would seek to create a world populated by beings made "in our own image", that the creatures (i.e. humans) could enjoy similar states of self-giving love in community in a world that had been created by the Father to be good in every conceivable way.
• Free Will - even if an Omnibeing had created people, their purpose would be more to the fulfilment of any whims of their maker, leaving them little more than automata. Creatures of the Trinitarian God are granted their own part of real existence with which to think and act independently, otherwise the "love" they are being shown in meaningless and they cannot respond meaningfully to it. To join their loving creator in genuine fellowship they need to be able to choose, though why one would choose to direct life by one's own terms rather than the perfect terms of the perfect Father who created them is another question.
• Sin, Judgment, Grace & Salvation - even if an Omnibeing had created people with genuine freedom of choice and they had rejected its rulership and moral decrees (which frankly is reasonable, such a God would be effectively just a grumpy dictator with substantive metaphysical DIY know-how) then it would have little reason to show mercy or forgiveness to its subjects and may as well start again from scratch. God in Trinity though takes the exact opposite tack; sin is the type of actions that occur when not God but ourselves are the object of our primary love, and this is not the way we were made to be. We were made in God's image of outpouring selfless love, and this is shown in Jesus' summary of the law as loving God and loving others wholeheartedly. Even if we fail to retain this character of perfect altruism however, it is intrinsic to God's nature, and so he will go to any lengths to keep his loved created ones near to him even when they have turned away - even if his willingness to forgive them requires someone else to take the blame and the only person spotless enough to do so being his Son himself in human form as Jesus. Only a God with eternal experience of loving relationships could have the potential for mercy and grace, and by this through the substitution of the Son we are saved and welcomed back into the eternal perfect community with the Trinity for which we were made.

So yeh, the fact that God is the Father, Son and Spirit in one is a fundamental and gloriously good truth. It was refreshing to me especially this week, as I said earlier, because I've been fairly snowed under by revision for philosophy exams. The latter (and harder) of the two exams concerns the Rationalist school (particularly Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant - they're all extremely clever and their ideas sound both scarily possibleish and utterly mental) and their ideas regarding epistemology and metaphysics, of which the philosophical concept "God" plays a huge role in determining truth, necessary existence and such. I don't want to go into details; this is my recreational book-blog, not excess revision - anyway, it's thoroughly interesting but quite dry, especially when one is used to considering God as the character expressed in this book rather than the abstract concept wangled about by various odd systems of armchair-reasoning. To leave behind ontological arguments and possible worlds and trademarks for a spell and reengage with a God whom I know not as concept but as loving personal Trinity was like a hot bath for the soul. He is more than just a necessary being or an infinite substance, he is a good Father who made me and knows me, has saved and adopted me through his Son and continually blesses me through his Spirit: he is my Lord and my God.

   Quite aside from how much I needed and enjoyed this book though, I would suggest anyone read it; even if you've never fondled a religious belief in your life it will provoke some interesting ideas about the kind of God you do or don't believe in, and if you are a Christian then it's a pretty sweet (uplifting? nice? any broad positive adjective) read.

Three Men in a Boat

This book, a shortish comedic novel of 1889 by Jerome K. Jerome, is just funny. I picked it up just after Freshers' Week as bag-book to read in libraries when bored of reading course material. Anyway - in the book, narrator J. and his friends George and Harris are all comfortably-middle-class young men (of strangely almost indistinguishable personality) who find themselves with little excitement with which to fill their days, and so they do what comfortably-middle-class young men of Victorian England did for diversion - and go boating. The three of them and J.'s incorrigible fox-terrier Montmorency (what a fantastic name for a dog) thus pack, with much slapstick difficulty, arrange a boat, with much slapstick difficulty, and proceed to row up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford, with slapstick difficulties ensuing all over the place. Beleaguered by rain, steamboats, struggles with locks and tents and towropes, George's appalling banjo-habits, Harris's propensity for mangling comic songs, mendacious fishermen, Montmorency's urges to generally destroy things, and above all their own amusingly-sketched ineptitude, their brief travel proves infuriating but refreshing, and a hilarious delight to read.

   Generously interspersed through their haphazardly-described boat trip are dozens of rambling anecdotes, tied to the main plot with very little effort or need as they are in themselves so buoyant with potential mirth. Irrelevant as they are it is these that give the book its flavour - a levity, a wit, that doesn't read like planned comedy scenes but more like you are in the boat with the three men, bored of watching the river and so talking endlessly, and running on into odd little "that reminds me of that time when" stories and "always seems to happen that" reflections. And needless to say, they are extremely funny (do not make my mistake of reading this book on the bus, or in a silent study area, or anywhere else where unexpected snorts of laughter might earn a disapproving glance). The 19th century language deepens the humour; verbose and civilised, the dry wit of the passages is very conversational indeed, and so the text reads as easily as it provokes a chuckle (i.e. very).

   Perhaps my favourite thing about the book though was the fact that it wasn't originally meant to be a funny novel. In the introduction I learned that Jerome set out to write more of a historical guidebook up the Thames - something that does clearly show through in the longish passages describing a local area's geographical features or what the Romans or some monks or Oliver Cromwell might have done in a particular passing town. To lighten the prose of this readable tour, the author added in several anecdotes about his past boating ventures through the places described, and eventually found that the supplementary funny material elbowed aside the non-fiction musings. So the book turned into a story about J. and Harris and George and Montmorency travelling this historically-and-geographically-interesting landscape, but having inconsequential squabbles and failures and remembrances along their way.
   The very fact that this happened to his story along the way surely speaks something vaguely grand about the purpose of fiction, non-fiction, and books - I'm not sure what. It it good though that however interesting a real topic, it will be enjoyed better if elucidated firsthand by someone who seems to only do so as an afterthought to describing the hilarious muddle they have otherwise made of their efforts to access the topic, not to say reflect endlessly on a host of other disconnected and uninformative but worth-hearing things. If the 125ish-year-old linguistic styles don't put you off (they make it better honestly, it's like discussing Oscar Wilde's disastrous holiday with him) then this is definitely one to read; who doesn't enjoy a funny book after all?

Understanding Scripture

This book was another from the budget bookstall at UCCF Forum. It's a collection of short essays, edited by Wayne Grudem, C. John Collins and Thomas R. Schreiner, about approaches to considering and studying the Bible. The topics broadly cover:

• How the range of texts included in the Bible originated and were collected together to form the book's canon.
• How the languages these texts were written in work translated into contemporary English.
• Archaeological evidence supporting for the historical claims of these texts.
• The coherence and variation of the thousands of pre-printing copies made of these texts.
• How older (Old Testament) texts share huge amounts of depth and meaning with newer (New Testament) ones. 
• How these texts collectively (i.e. the Bible) have been interpreted throughout history.
• How we as modern individuals can return to the Bible and read it to glean literary, theological and personally applicable insights, and how this can enable us to better proclaim textual messages to others and grow in prayerful communion with its main character (God).

If this doesn't sound rivetingly exciting it's because it isn't (this probably won't be a long post because most of the book is dry fact that fills mental gaps for dry facts instead of provoking further thought). Read something else if you want something juicy or stimulating. I'm not being irreverent in saying this - the book fulfils its purpose excellently, and that purpose is to inform one about the Bible's origin and reliability, and give a few vague pointers as to how one might adopt an appropriate mindset to go about reading it. It's sort of like the Bible's unwritten instruction-manual-cum-background-info compendium. I didn't read it for amusement or even interest, but to help shed some light on some questions that had been prickling my beliefs, and for that it did somewhat alleviate my doubts* and so while barely enjoying it I'm very glad indeed that I read it.

   If you are keen to know about how ancient Greek pronouns can be tricky, or be surprised at the inerrant transcribing skills of 1st century C.E. Mediterranean Christians (the statistics for meaningful variations in the texts are almost negligible, and there are literally thousands of surviving transcripts, which in ancient-document terms is a goldmine of historical surety), or how various councils decided against including the apocrypha in the final canon, or many other facets of the Bible's journey from being written to being read, then there are probably far better books out there covering the topic of your interest in more detail. This is still a fairly decent place to get a broad introduction though.

   The best section is the second one, with five approaches to reading the Bible; as theology, as literature, for personal application, for prayer and communion with God, and for public preaching and worship. As with the more factual sections, this is worth skipping if you'd rather read a whole book about the particular section of interest, but I still found this section an encouragement as it is the section of the book most imbued with a sense of the Bible's purpose, which is overwhelmingly positive; and when read properly engenders love, thoughtfulness, generosity, wisdom, gentleness, faithfulness, humility and such.

   This book then does what it says on the tin; it won't change your life, but scripture ostensibly does and this book helps you understand and approach it to bring you toward better facilitating that.

*asterisks are a great way of avoiding too-long parenthetical statements. Anyway; I mentioned in the last post about the challenge of being a christian and a philosophy student, you have to think very hard and run to a great many helpful books to retain a firmish belief in your beliefs. This most recent surge of doubt was brought about by the Philip Pullman novel discussed last post - not a great story but an interesting provocative point about how stories become stories, including histories, including Jesus' life as the centre of christian theological truth. I realised I didn't have enough of an understanding of the Bible's origins to ensure my confidence about its legitimacy, and this was the book I turned to to alleviate those doubts. Somewhat effectively. This footnote has way too many hyperlinks in it, I'm sorry.

five books that nearly made it

There were several books that I finished in late December of 2013 which were interesting reads, but the rules clearly state I should only write posts for ones finished from this year. To compensate I'll briefly cover my thoughts and reactions to the several that I unfortunately finished reading too early to warrant an individual post. Hopefully one day henceforth (i.e. after January 1st 2014) I'll reread some of these, or any of the other postworthy books that I read before commencing this project, and will be able to give them a deservedly standalone chunk of reflection.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce

One of last year's bestselling novels, I was fairly sceptical about this from the blurb (but it was cheap in Oxfam and I wanted an easy read for the post-deadline weekend), because it just sounded twee and nice. I was wrong, it's a fantastic emotional seesaw of a novel. Harold Fry is a retired brewery inspector, and if his quiet suburban life wasn't dull and lonely enough already, his relationships with his wife and son have fallen apart almost irreparably, and he's not heard from his only friend, Queenie Hennessy, for years. However, when Queenie writes to him to tell of her terminal illness and a fond farewell, he sort of breaks - as he walks to the postbox to send off a reply, he decides to embark on a mad journey, and so walks from his home in south Devon to her hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed. He is both wholeheartedly devoted to this quest, and completely unprepared for it. Along the way he meets dozens of colourful little characters who express admiration and support and confide in him their own losses, regrets and pains - he is able to talk freely as a pilgrim, just passing through on his way North. What he gains throughout the novel is the same as what I felt I gained through reading it; a sense of perspective and wonder at the sheer number of people on the relatively small island he's walking across, and at the dawning realisation that each of them has their own complex histories with fears and sadnesses in their past, and that given the same mad urge, everyone probably has a situation in which they could feel compelled to his same pilgrimage, desperate to atone for past things done or neglected and that if one can just keep walking determinedly then things will be okay, and upon arrival we will be forgiven the guilty deed that kept us walking. It's a very bittersweet story, with some deeply sad events contained and remembered, but with some beautifully positive images that give weight to Harold's poignant hope of redemption. All the characters seem a tad caricatured, but I think they well deserve to, because the story they're part of is more contemporary legend than novel. Quaint, encouraging, and mythic.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman

I bought this in a second-hand bookshop years ago and read it in two sittings on Boxing Day because of the lack of other unread material at home (most of my unread stuff got brought to uni). The basic premise is the life of Jesus, apart from (dun dun dah) he has an identical twin brother nicknamed Christ. Jesus grows up to be a morally-upstanding devout man, beloved of all but the establishment; Christ grows up to be a deceitful imitator with grand amibition for the Jewish religious authorities. Aided by a mysterious stranger, Christ realises the possible trajectory of his brother's recklessly godly mission, and records every miracle, parable and sermon of Jesus, and once a particularly well-known chapter involving a cross takes place, Christ is coerced into using his identical looks to fake Jesus' resurrection. The hope is that following Jesus' life and teachings (which the stranger and Christ manipulate to place it all in a more coherent context) this "being raised from the dead" business would help establish a durable body of committed transcendent moralist Jewish believers. It was a very strange and dissatisfying read, full of inconsistencies (if the whole thing is fake why can they do miracles? if Christ is also a devout Jew, why is he so willing to accept the stranger's heretical suggestion of doctoring scripture and framing his brother?) and questionable intent (still not sure whether it's meant to be a playful re-imagining or a genuine suggestion as to Christianity's falsehood, but one can almost hear Pullman's fellow militant-atheist friends high-fiving him for getting such drivel published). Yes, I shall stand by the word drivel, but it still counts as thought-provoking because it forces one to reassess the origins of historical texts - especially scripture. What criteria do we have for properly assessing whether something is the word of a deity, the legend of a cult, the ravings of a lunatic, or the carefully assembled craft of an ambitious writer? In light of this question, after Jesus has been crucified to death and Christ has finished editing together a broad range of records of his life and teaching, doctored to imply theological truths, Christ takes up a quiet job as a netmaker. The whole book's worth reading for that brilliant underhand metaphor.

Watching the English, by Kate Fox

Came across this book years ago on the shelf of some American friends who told me it had been recommended to them as a guide to Englishness; a cultural, social and anthropological guidebook to understanding the bizarre quirks of those cursed with English heritage. This sounded fascinating so I got myself a copy and read it (very slowly, alongside a dozen other books, as is the wont of my reading habits). If you're interested in understanding why people act in certain ways, especially English people, do absolutely read this. It's uncanny. You find yourself reading an explanation of a particular set of behaviours and thinking "this sounds insane, people who behave like this are surely insane to be part of such collectively irrational inconvenient innavigable etiquette"; and simultaneously thinking "this is hilarious, myself and people I know and strangers and cultural archetypes are like this all the time". It exposes the roots of the English psyche, and while somewhat upsettingly it provides no psychological diagnosis as to how we as a nation became so mad or how we can be cured, this is brilliant to read and comprehend. I find myself now recognising behavioural patterns more accurately and being far better able to interact with other Englishpersons (habitual pub-going, acute class-awareness and perpetual self-deprecation are good places to start). Definitely one to read if you're: A) a non-Englishperson seeking to lubricate social interactions with Englishpeople; B) a sociopathic or otherwise interpersonally stilted Englishperson (i.e. most of us) seeking to lubricate social interactions; or C) an Englishperson who might enjoy an amusing tome dissecting their population's behaviour.

No Logo, by Naomi Klein

Picked this up after finishing A-levels and, like the above, read it very slowly. It's widely-reputed as a holy book for the global anti-corporate movement, and I think rightly so. Covering an immense range of intricately researched topics, from sweatshop labour to targeted advertising to brand encroachment to job outsourcing to gagging orders and many other things. In discussion with others of a less left-wing persuasion than myself I often find they're dubious about books like it, suspecting them to be quixotic populist fabrications and distortions of fact with an "agenda". Admittedly, this book does at points seem opinionated and slightly too belligerently anti-corporate, but the sheer breadth and depth and validity of the evidence and arguments brought up against modern corporate activity more than allows it that. It's not needlessly aimlessly angry; it is a direct, calm, thorough exposition of certain things that are happening and why they are bad and what is, or could be, done to stop them. It's the kind of book that you finish filled with motivation to spread; the message is bleak but the implications are hopeful, because there is so little justification outside elite circles for their activity, and if more people were properly exposed to the truth of corporate schemes then they would almost certainly feel similarly inclined to take a stance. Much of the book is outdated, having been researched and written toward the end of the 1990's, but the motives of the corporate world haven't changed, yet their reach and power only continue to grow (as an economics student I would have liked a bit more analysis of these ongoing processes, but other books provide a plethora so no matter), as does the movement against them. So what if a book has an agenda? If that agenda is a more ethically-justified society, why does that matter? Read it and allow its insidiously positive intent to influence you.

Think, by John Piper

Got this at UCCF Forum, a campsite training week training week for students with participatory roles in UK university Christian Unions. They had an enormous budget bookstall. Never can resist those. It's a great book; the core motivation is to reconnect christians with rigorous thought that has an understanding of the gospel at its centre. This cuts strongly against both anti-intellectual sermon-swallowing fundamentalism and overly-postmodern liberal-interpretation potential heresies. A good middle line to steer, I think. As a philosophy student I am often pushed toward applying logic and scepticism to my own beliefs, which is a scary prospect for someone who never has before (most moral, social and theological truths come crashing straight down); but by practicing this we're spurred to find legitimate reasons to hold the views we do. The book holds that this helps us deeper engage with ideas so that we know God's truths better, and can better defend and explain them to others. It's not simply an exhortation to learn apologetics however; it also shows the strong bonds between "mind" and "heart" (I use the terms loosely as the book did) that the focus of mentally-upheld beliefs will also grow into the focus of our emotional passions. Thus by engaging with scripture and theology, thinking more about God, we come to realise more about him and apply it more to our lives, growing in genuine emotional love for him and gospel-centred behaviour generally. This seemed psychologically dubious but still a helpful notion; since finishing the book I've been more frequently engaging with the Bible and thinking about its truths, and do continue to grow as a christian. This is a given though, and while it was a good book, I wouldn't recommend it massively. Instead I would just encourage you (as the book does) to be better able to justify your beliefs, and reflect upon them enough to grow in application and understanding. While it was nice to have a full book of biblically-supported reasoning to hold these exhortations, I think they're basic enough to not need it. Basically, think more and think better.

why & so

By means of beginning, I want to explain why I've started this blog and what I hope will come of it. But first a rough introduction: I am Isaac John Stovell, twenty years old, living and studying in Sheffield [England], and I expect that many more details will be shared and explained in future posts. I don't want to write a blog about my life because (aside from marginally higher degrees of pretentiousness and eloquence) it would be almost indistinguishable from most other humdrum lives. However, other than random events occurring in my everyday life (which I already tweet and facebookpost about if they're interesting enough) or my reactions to current events (which likewise), the only consistent reliable source of interesting things for me to say is my reactions to my reading material.

   So this blog is going to be about books that I've read; which hopefully will be enough to supply a regular stream of posts. I've read a lot since early childhood, but don't give myself enough opportunity to properly digest and derive meaning from books - which is a shame, because books contain a lot of digestible derivable meaning. So I'm forcing myself to (the date of publication is no coincidence - this is part of my New Year's Resolutions and it's easily the most fun part, give me a bibliophile's blog over jogging and sleeping patterns any day) think about the books I've read, by writing a reflective post about each one as soon as I've had a chance to think over it once I've completed it. These aren't intended as mere reviews of whether or not I liked the book and why; I want to properly get my nails into themes, concepts, meanings, characters, genres, dramas, philosophical implications. I'll try to be as reasonably opinionated as possible, for I am a man of strong opinions and strong reasons for holding them. I'll also commit to posting links for obtainment or discovery of each book that I discuss in case I somehow sway your interest.

   Hopefully through writing this blog I will become more in tune with my thoughts and the thoughts that I imbibe through my bookshelf. Hopefully also through reading this blog (if there are any readers; I'm not bothered if there aren't as this is more of a therapeutic personal thought-process, but if people want to read what I've written about what I read, fair enough) you will become provoked into reading a particular book and thinking about something that may enchant, enrage, enamour or otherwise enlighten you.

   So, rules to keep me blogging nicely:

1. Every book I finish from January 2014 onwards, I will write a post about it, as soon as possible after finishing it.
   1.1 Every book, that is, which I read recreationally. Therefore discounting the large array of books I have to read for wider course research and understanding (I'm currently partway through a degree in economics and philosophy); also excluding my regular Bible readings (if one day I should decide to sit down and read through the whole of it, I'll do a post, sure, but habitual devotional readings aren't quite the same as recreational reading).

2. Posts should ideally be somewhat interesting and try to critically engage with the book at least more than a bit. My responses may be excuse-laden but I'll try.

3. Posts should contain as few non-book pop-culture references as possible.

4. Posts should contain full author/title information and links to Goodreads or Amazon or wherever in case readers want to read the books I've read.

5. No spoilers, if posting about fiction. This will be the most difficult rule, but I'll limit myself to books' introductory and thematic elements instead of ruining the endings.

6. Should these standards fail to be kept, any reader who cares enough is encouraged to contact and rebuke me.

   Hope you enjoy reading any of my posts and any of the books they're about.

      Cheers for now,

         Isaac Stovell