The Orchard Keeper

This book, the long-ago debut of legendary modern American novelist Cormac McCarthy, was not at all done justice my attempt to read it. I read the first half of it during the return coach journey from Sheffield to Berlin, and the coach being full of progressively inebriated economics students was probably not the best reading environment - then I had a solid two weeks of trying (and failing) to get elected, so did no reading and kind of forgot everything that I'd already read of it, and upon returning to the poor neglected book a few days ago was completely lost, but decided to slog apologetically through the remainder and promised myself that I'd just read it again properly someday.
   Even given my terrible approach to this probably-excellent novel, it's not that easy to read. McCarthy's writing style is poetic, verbose, verdant, densely descriptive; it resembles painting more than prose. With a deft turn of phrase he can thrust deeply resonant and specific visions of place and person and deed into the reader's head - which he does most shockingly when narrating acts of meticulous violence. I'd prior read his haunting post-apocalyptic work The Road, and it's probably one of the best novels I ever have. His style pulls you in, fills your head with stark atmospheric landscapes and sad solitary animals and humans observed from a distance, never felt, only seen, settings and figures and actions and descriptions and memories and speech all woven together almost indistinguishable from each other but for the larger collected result of a piercing scene. This style in The Road is pure magic, because there are only two real characters and they're nameless, and the plot is fairly linear and progressive. When I found this book in a second-hand shop the day before I was to leave for Berlin I thought, hey, Cormac's a great writer, I'll get that to read on the 22-hour-each-way journey - bleh. The barely-distinct characters in their inexorably-poignant plots get called 'the man' or 'the boy' or 'the old man', similar to The Road, but here rather than just one everyman and his son going on a walk there are several dozen characters living in a range of time periods with complex relational hinges between all of them.
   The style, the being-on-a-noisy-coach; I got very confused and sort of gave up trying to understand the story. I gathered that there was an outlawed bootlegger called Marion Sylder who befriends a boy called John Wesley Rattner, there was a bar called the Green Fly Inn built suspended over a ravine which unsurprisingly collapses one day, there is an old guy called Arthur Ownby who for reasons I failed to apprehend had a shootout with the police one day before running off to scrape a living selling ginseng roots, there's several wildcats who are the protagonists of their own little scenes and more than a few dogs who pop up all over the place, there's an orchard of bitter apples planted around a burnt-out pit in which is buried a car and the rotting corpse of John Wesley Rattner's father who was beaten to death by someone (maybe Marion but I didn't think he was that old). The story takes decades and hops around a lot, with blurry effectively-anonymous characters acting out sketchy ephemeral passages through the collective history of the lawless godless Tennessee countryside they all populate.
   I honestly couldn't tell you a quarter of what actually happened in the novel. Maybe I'm not supposed to be able to? Maybe it's simply a lengthy experiment in description and scene-setting, which McCarthy is incomparably beautifully good at, coupled with an overall wistful dry recognition of the odd suspensions between a continuous place and an ever-changing set of mortal creatures which occasionally commit murderous actions. Maybe it's that and the actual story doesn't matter so much? I feel that might be right. Maybe it's just a bad novel? No, absolutely not, I just read it very badly indeed.
   Sorry Cormac McCarthy, and sorry to my followers - I can't legitimately recommend this book as a novel, though hopefully I will be able to next time I attempt it. Regardless, I can vouch for it as a painting of words, for which it is truly beautiful. Even my distracted disengaged self was swept along by the torrents and droughts of detail that make up the real weight of the book.

Food Rules

This book, a condensation of wisdom and myth-busting on how and what we eat from wise myth-buster on that same topic Michael Pollan, was an easy, interesting and enjoyable read. Several others of his books are on my extensive 'to-read list', and I came across this small volume at a friend's house, coincidentally found a second-hand copy very cheaply the next day, and breezed through it in a spare ninety minutes this morning.

   Please note, I am not concentrating very hard on doing a great post here, as I am running for one of the elected positions in our Students' Union, and voting closes tomorrow, so while I can spare a few minutes to read and write, I do so with laconic urgency before rushing back to brief my campaign team about tomorrow's endeavours and schedule facebook posts about how great I'd be at making stuff sustainable. Wish me luck.

   Anyway. The book.

   It's written as an antidote to America's relationship with food. The typical western diet (he aims it at the USA but here in England much of it rings true too) is horrendously unhealthy for human beings, and so enormous profitable industries have grown up both feeding us this filth (McDonalds et al) and trying to help cure us of it (pseudoscientific nutritional studies, food products with made up benefits, stupid diet fads, etc). Pollan has spent years researching the actual truth of what we know about our food's impact on our wellbeing, and it's actually quite simple. He boils it down into three broad strokes; eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Building on his extensive depth of knowledge and on less-grounded but surprisingly helpful and relevant scraps of folk-wisdom, he works these principles out in 64 easily-digestible apothegms to help reshape our attitudes to food and make us healthier, happier eaters. Some of these smack true ("Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry"), hit hard ("It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language"), narrowing our options ("Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself") but inarguably for our best interests ("Try not to eat alone"). Basically, buy raw ingredients yourself, mostly plant-based, cook proper meals and eat sensibly. I already do* these things so grand.

   As a compact, concise, clear little book, I hope it will be something of a silver bullet in tackling the west's horrific relationship with our foodstuffs. It has the potential to sell extremely widely and be hugely influential in reforming attitudes to the edible, with potentially enormous implications for public health.

   My one gripe with it is the lack of focus on food sustainability, which is a gigantic issue relating at many points to what he discusses. He advocates substantial reduction in meat and dairy, and trying to buy non-processed local produce, which is great as it aids the cause of our ecosystem, but he doesn't directly endorse aiming for veganism, vegetarianism (or even 'ish'). He even takes a stand against meat substitutes,** on the grounds that they are processed and 'fake'. These are things I'd quarrel with him about to some degree but given that his book is aimed at food health, not food sustainability, I can forgive him these.

   It's overall a great little book. Buy one for every person you know whose diet is terrible. Saying that sounds insensitive but if they take heed they may well be able to form new habits and escape a lifetime of miserable obese slavery to America's fourth most revered and third least benevolent god, Junk Food.

* Rule 64, "Break the rules once in a while", I am glad to have, as it allows me to retain the indispensable suffix 'ish' on my status as a herbivore.

** Not all of them. Quorn is literally grown in vats, so while I'd still argue it's far better than meat and should for that reason be encouraged, fair enough. Tofu, tempeh and other such ancient soy-based protein-lumps he allows. I'd like to think the wholly-plant-derived products of certain modern innovators would count too.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: an Introduction

This book, a pair of novella-length pieces (the fictitousness of which are just as dubious as their genre) by J.D. Salinger, is, though I am not in the habit of naming favourites, probably close to one of my preferred books of all time. This was the fifth time I've read it. In tribute to Salinger's dedication of the book to [any] "amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs", and the general soul of the book itself, this post shall be especially lengthy, incoherent, verbose, and almost certainly more meaningful to me than you. How did I come across this book? Well, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a half-intelligent middle-class white male westerner post-1960 will, in the height of his teenage years, read The Catcher in the Rye, and I was no different. Needless to say, it filled me with depressive angst, yet I found Holden Caulfield so compelling a voice that I promptly sought out and read every other book that J.D. Salinger ever wrote (there were only three others, so this only took about a fortnight), and I found that these other books were, though in a similar vein, much more positive, life-affirming, generally excellent. This one most of all.

   Both are written in the voice of Buddy Glass, a quasi-fictional man whose outlooks and present circumstances bear marked similarities to the life of the actual author while he was writing (pronounced resemblances include a deep fascination with oriental philosophy and poetry, a world-weary hunger for sincerity and innocence and a despair in other people's failing to feed that need, and the author's/narrator's living as a recluse in the New York woods), though with familial and background details embellished somewhat so as to provide sufficient texture to write extensively of oneself without betraying many real facts thereof. This background includes the large erratic colourful Glass family, central among which (in these pieces of writing at least) is Buddy's elder brother Seymour, a character whom I am about as much in love with as it is possible for a heterosexual male to be enamoured with a fictional man. Though we do not actually physically meet Seymour in these works, through Buddy we are shown his spirit, we are pulled by the crook of the neck into the intimate incommunicable aspects of their brotherhood and told to drink in every speck of what the words can tell us and still know that those words can never tell us enough. The Glass family may be fictional but these are two of the most arrestingly honest pieces of writing you will ever read; and despite their apparent disparity in topic, style and measure, they complement each other perfectly if you lean into the heart of Buddy's memories of Seymour, as that is what they are both chiefly about. More specifically though? I suppose you deserve rough outlines, given that this blog is about the books I've read and not the non-existent poetic brothers I wish I knew.

   Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is a novella-length anecdote about Seymour's 1942 wedding to a woman called Muriel Fedder. It being the war and most of Buddy's family being inordinately scattered across various American entertainment-industry professions, he is told by his sister that he must attend, as he is the only immediate Glass relative available to do so. He does so, still hindered by the pleurisy that has left him on medical leave from the Army, reaches New York and sits through a service only to be caught up in the mass irritated confusion of a crowd of well-dressed strangers when it is realised that Seymour has bailed. Buddy and a small motley entourage (including the matron of honour and her husband, an obscure aunt named Helen Silsburn, and a short deaf-mute man in a top-hat who in his indefatigable silly sparkle is one of the story's highlights) are held up in a wedding car by a parade, and he suggests his nearby apartment as a rest-stop. Though mild resentment turns his way upon their learning his blood-relation to Muriel's scarpered almost-spouse, they comply. After reaching the apartment, Buddy finds himself further pressed into defending Seymour's character, and slips away to avoid awkward questions by offering to make drinks, necking accidentally-too-much scotch himself before he does so, and then chancing upon Seymour's diary. Fearing one of the spurned bride's friends finding it, he takes it into the bathroom and reads several of his enigmatic brother's recent entries (these are also a highlight - Seymour's voice is similar to Buddy's in tone but so much wiser, full of good sadness and jilted purity), before, really quite drunk, he finally remembers to make and serve drinks to his guests. The matron of honour has managed to phone ahead to the main party, and discovered that Seymour showed up secretly after all and has eloped with a surprised Muriel. Buddy, past all caring, sees them out and falls inebriatedly asleep on the sofa.

   Seymour: an Introduction is of similar length, but what kind of piece of writing it actually is I find hard to explain. Sort of potted character description (by Buddy of Seymour) though with extreme reluctance; sort of elucidation on what it means to be creative or wise or good; sort of discourse on the connections forged by interpersonal relationships and written words, the value and yet the insufficiency of reading or writing or being or knowing; sort of compilation of anecdotes from the Glass family's unusual past; sort of extended complaint about being an honest writer with a properly attuned aesthetic sense in a culture where literature is increasingly becoming overwhelmed by the simple, the easy, the cheap, the fake; sort of autobiographical truth-mingled-with-untruth (Buddy refers to other stories by J.D. Salinger that "he" has written); sort of sad and sort of joyous; both mournful and delightful in reminiscence and completely committed to lacking full clarity. It weaves and bobs and floats its linguistic form in a way that is conversational, frank, unpretentious; incredibly easy to read and in a way quite unlike anything else by anyone else. It is probably one of the best pieces of writing I know; it is, even on fifth reading, one of the only ones that can so fully flood my mind that no semi-conscious distraction can possibly meander its way into the foreground of my concentration, heart clenched all the while.

   Together these two short diamonds of the English word blur the lines between fact and fiction, between written and spoken, between personhood and characterhood, between memory and story, between anecdote and essay, in ways that would be extraordinarily complex to describe were I a literature student. Fortunately I am not one; the work is thrown lovingly into the arms of those who will take truths and enjoy goodnesses (be they in books or persons) as they come, and from this book I well-received much just so. It is not written to blur lines, that's just a happy fact of what happens when one writes as honestly as Salinger does.

   I will stop myself here. The virtues of this book far surpass what I could encompass in a blog post, much as those of Seymour are untrapped yet glorified by Buddy's efforts. Let me not begin to exorcise angels.
   I love this book immensely, almost too much even to recommend anyone else read it, as the fear that you won't be struck similarly weighs too heavily upon me - but if you do happen to encounter this book, treat it well. Think while you read, not intellectually but interpersonally, this is not a test, it is an introduction. Don't be clever, be friendly - and if that's an attitude you find it hard to muster as a reader, leave this book well alone, as you don't deserve it.

Gilead

This book, a masterful novel by Marilynne Robinson, was recommended to me a couple of years ago by one of the internet's greatest humans in a short video discussing his favourite books. The title lodged itself in my head, and though I never sought it out to buy it, I nipped into a charity shop the day after I finished exams last week, and Ze Frank's approval ghosted me as I browsed the bookshelf so I ended up acquiring it. It's truly an astoundingly beautiful work of fiction, one of those ones which I'd like to reread in a single sitting someday - partly to revisit characters who I have come to know better than many real people, but also just to take it in more fully.

   The novel takes the form of an extended series of notes, written in 1956 by John Ames, an elderly pastor, to his seven-year-old son, whom he wants to leave with a breadth and depth of fatherly wisdom after his impending departure. Everything is perfectly written; as if by John Ames himself, possibly the most real fictional person I've ever known, such is the consistency of voice and character laid out in his pages. The notes range from theological insights, meditations on meanings and truths, anecdotal observations of the son himself and others; Ames's old friend Boughton and his family, Ames's late first wife and child and his unexpected new marriage to a godly younger woman, Ames's father and grandfather who had been pastors there before him and his atheist brother Edward whose influence, quirks and deeds resound throughout, Boughton's son Jack to whom Ames is a second father, and most pervasively the dry tiny Iowa town of Gilead itself. John Ames's relationship with Jack Boughton is the most conflicted stream of development in the book, and through rememberings and newly recorded events we are given moving glimpses into the similarly real life of the narrator's "son".* It is an enormously gripping book, despite the protagonist being very much a good, peaceful man, and not much happening in the present of his writing. However, John Ames's discourses of varying length are unceasingly strewn with nuggets of wisdom, bound by a constancy of faith in truth and goodness, often probing and questioning and hoping and regretting but always from the clear eloquent view of an old man whose entire life is, and always has been, in Gilead, and in God. It leaves you with an astounding awareness of the beauty of grace and forgiveness, and how these are fundamental moral components of any human's life if they are to have peace and similarly any relationship if it is to be good.

   I cannot fully give the impression of his voice, or his life, which together in being so real as fiction comprise the novel. It reminds me of another book I read last year which was similar in depth and tone, but this is far more uplifting, less linear, more meaningful and encouraging, more full of love and humanity and rightness. It's actually kind of made me worried as it's the first fiction I've read in 2015 and it's highly improbable that anything else will match up now. Anyway, whoever you are, read it; keep your heart open and as you meet Jack Boughton, several generations of townsfolk in Gilead, an attic full of unread sermons, and the eye-leakingly personal John Ames himself; you will be engrossed by this novel and it will sadden and gladden you to finish.

* Apparently, this relationship between Jack Boughton and John Ames is explored from the other's perspective in another of Marilynne Robinson's novels, which since having found this out I intend to acquire and read posthaste.

Surprised by Joy

This book, the autobiographical coming-of-spiritual-age story of that darling of 20th century Christianity, Clive Staples Lewis, is so deeply thought-provoking and insightful and wise that I actually have very little to say about it. I acquired it second-hand almost immediately after a stunned encounter with the fact that he was an atheist for much of his life. Surely, I thought, any mind as piercing as his sojourning from godlessness to joy in Christ would be worth reading. It was.

   What can I say? C.S. Lewis has a unique ability to describe combinations of feeling, thought, circumstance and motive to penetrate with alarming clarity the truth of what is going on in a person or an idea - and he is well able to apply this skill to the evolution of his own mindset. His overall journey can broadly be described as tasting "joy" early in life and commencing searches in art, philosophy, science and history to find clues as to where it might come from and how he might reliably attain its source (SPOILER ALERT: God). He explores how his conception of a worldview grows and changes, based on aesthetic taste, satisfactory narratives, his character's reaction to places in which he finds himself and people who challenge him, and (though these are surprisingly not as central as I expected) intellectual truths to which he assented.

   Exploratory reading of a huge assortment of books (especially myth and legend, the grandeur of which grounded his inkling of a more meaningful universal story than atheism provides) and formal education (from the violent aristocracies of Wyvern boarding school to the relentless logic of a tutor referred to as "the Knock") are the two main currents of growth and development in his coming-to-faith. A host of other places and people and circumstances are significant in the tale too, but I would rather not list them nor summarise them. From World War One to an aging father to frequent lengthy trips to and from Northern Ireland to tutoring at Oxford; Lewis's life, even the abridged aspects presented in this book, are far too wondrously individualistically interesting to do justice* even in his own words, let alone mine, which here are far fewer, less well-chosen, and read by almost nobody.

   It's very easy reading, which is just as well, because I was breezing through it during the days surrounding my last exam (I am, as of Thursday, free, thank goodness, at least until tomorrow when lectures start again, but hurrah nonetheless). It's insightful and challenging and I would recommend anyone read it; christians will find it an excellent source of pearls regarding wisdom, truth and goodness and one's acquisition of those things in coming to know God; non-christians will be entertained by his lucid cheery writing style and perhaps provoked to reflection by some of the ideas Lewis encounters in books or observes floating about his own worldview.

* Biographies always irk me slightly in that regard. They have value in that aspects of a life can be accentuated to shed light on a particular purpose or meaning, but the sheer inadequacy of reducing something as marvellous as human experience to words on pages is such that most endeavours to do so come across as superficial and sad. Autobiographies are slightly better, as at least it's the mind describing its own history. Truly though, if you want to make a point about something extrinsic, write non-fiction, and if you want to expose something of the untellable beauty of humankind, figure out fiction or poetry that manages. Sometimes I don't mind though, as with this book. The arc is so well-articulated and the points made so important and embedded in the biographical details themselves, that this is the first proper "autobiography" I've been able to engage with happily.**

** Except the political diaries of Chris Mullin and Tony Benn, but those are more of a direct continuous insight into the working life of leftist politicians, which is cool. Come to think of it, a huge amount of fiction I love is semi-autobiographical, and many essays, journalism pieces, and memoirs that I've enjoyed definitely are, not to mention well-worded anecdotes, or even much of the Bible... there appear to be blurred lines here. I'll have a think and come up with a better definition of what kind of biographical works I dislike next time I read one.

The Spirit Level

This book, the groundbreaking culmination of over fifty person-years of statistical study and research into social issues and inequality by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, was worth all the hype it threw up in political discussion when it came out a couple of years ago. I'd intended to acquire and read it for a while until, back in my first year of uni, a friend from the flat above had finished reading it and bequeathed his copy unto me (thanks Mike), but somehow it took me over fifteen months to even start reading it, which I did over summer, and have been progressing through it slowly since. I finished it today, which was rather foolish given that I am halfway through exam season, and with apologies to readers for the unthought-out nature of this post as this evening holds other excellent plans and I don't want to risk delay by putting too much time into this blog. However it's an excellent and important book so prepare yourself to read the output of a rushed burst of mental effort.

   Anyway. The gist: they seek to set out a comprehensive spread of evidence for better income equality being conclusively better for the social, psychological, physical and communal wellbeing of all citizens in an economy. Using indisputably reliable data on OECD countries and US states and testing them in fair, accurate regressions,* they demonstrate significant correlations between worse income inequality and worse rates of community social relations, mental health, drug abuse, physical health, obesity, life expectancy, educational performance, teenage pregnancies, violence, crime, imprisonment, social mobility and developmental opportunities. In each case, other variables that may affect the data are accounted for, so they are clearly showing relationships between inequality and these other undesirable societal phenomena.

   This forms the main bulk of the book; cold, hard evidence that egalitarian economies are simply better for human societies in a plethora of meaningful ways. Linking each correlation to causation, enormous task though it is, they also undertake to some extent. One key explanatory factor for most of the problems they find can be put down to insufficient resources at the lower end of the income distribution to keep up (e.g. McDonald's is cheaper than Waitrose, working class people get fat). Another one, grounded in social psychology and with huge implications for the way our modern world is structured, is that of status anxiety. Humans are relational beings, and if large disparities open up between individuals within the same anthropological structure, the delicate web of trust is skewed. Those with the advantage will start acting more selfishly and those at the bottom in a variety of ways, broadly characterised by defensiveness and hopelessness.** This second aspect, deeply ingrained in and by norms, is exacerbated by a hyper-competitive consumer culture and the pervasive 'everything is for sale including you' philosophy of neoliberalism.

   This second aspect I found engrossing: how humanity's sociobiological nature, our unobserved philosophical groundworks and politico-economic structures all interweave to drop us in a world in which we see entire nations powered by discontent, with ensuing problems left largely among the poor. The last four chapters are a marvellously insightful overview of how these fields overlap and give each other meaning for what we should do with the knowledge that inequality is bad - going on to discuss how global environmental sustainability must entail moves towards much better intra-national and international equality. But this is not the main point of the book, as I will explain.

   Wilkinson and Pickett's main aim in this book is not to push specific policies, as they do not give much discussion to this; nor is it even to stimulate an enthusiasm or agreement with equality, because (they assume this, perhaps wrongly) most people generally have an ethical preference for economic equality anyway. What this book primarily is, rather than a manifesto, a critique, a diagnosis, a call to mobilisation, is a compilation of statistical evidence. The boringness of that is superb - even though large parts of the book are more typically argumentative explorations of equality's betterness, the core chunk is explanations of data analysis. They say in the introduction that they want to spark political discussion into becoming 'evidence-based' - an endeavour that would be far better, were it to take hold, than any one ideological pursuit.

   I love the idea of evidence-based policy. I also love abstract argument, but that's because so much of what is important is normative or not quantifiable or testable; in these (many) cases argument is a rational process of uncovering and understanding truth. Empirical discovery is also an excellent means of uncovering and understanding truth, and arguably a much more reliable one; if we can delegate large portions of political decision-making to doing what best fits the evidence for any value judgements we want to make, that cannot be a bad thing in my thought. Climate scientists unequivocally say global warming is bad? Policies are reshaped accordingly. Psychoactive drugs found to be less harmful than tobacco? Reconsider policy accordingly. Income inequality found to be a key determinant in worsening crime, underachievement, teenage pregnancies, obesity, life expectancy, mental illness, job mobility, community trust, and various other factors which we're going to presume you think are bad because we presume you don't have sociopathic tendencies? Work to reduce income inequality.

   That's my main take-home from this book: we need to start making politics evidence-based where it can be, which, as the authors expertly show, includes socioeconomic trends in health and wellbeing. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone with a political opinion; if you're a lefty it will provide vast ammunition in arguing for egalitarianism, if you're further to the right it will challenge your economic assumptions considerably but in a way that you would be dumb to ignore.*** Income inequality was already something I was well-convinced of as a thing to be tackled and overcome, but evidence-based politics is an exciting and huge idea and I hope that this book helps make it a more serious current of influence in policymaking. Now, if you'll excuse me, without proofreading back through this, I am off to a joyously dingy warehouse to listen to a church pastor play some incredible techno.

* Given that their book is, for the most part, a presentation of statistical evidence, not a polemic, they back this up admirably, with extensive appendices of their data sources (all very objective and reputable), as well as an explanation of their regression compilation methods and how they interpret the results. There's even an intro chapter about how to read diagrams. It made the econometrician within me, tiny and weak though he is, sing.

** It's hard to summarise. Read the book.

*** What? You would. If you feel like complaining then do a better statistical study proving Wilkinson and Pickett wrong. Take huge data samples and test specified regressions and show that income inequality is actually not all that bad and isn't causally linked to any of these social problems, and then you can dispute the book without just being thick. Or you could dispute that they're problems at all and that thus we shouldn't worry about inequality, but that would make you a bit of an arse.

In Praise of Messy Lives

This book, a collection of bitingly insightful essays from journalist Katie Roiphe, has been my lifeline of leisure-reading while I've been skim-ploughing through a large stack of books and papers on metaethics and theology (many of which have been excellent reads, but they still count as work so I get to emphatically sigh upon reading something else). Being a collection of social and cultural insights from an articulate cynic, I was pleased by how easy to read they were, and still thoroughly stimulating*.

   Irrelevantly, but I want to mention; the copy I've got was discarded by the public library in Phoenix, Arizona. The fact that it's ended up on a windowsill in Sheffield amid several other miscellaneous non-fiction books supporting a dying-for-want-of-sunlight houseplant seems an excellent ending to its journey. One of those quirky little nicenesses that occasionally make me half-smile. Almost a tribute in itself to the values of anticlimax and haphazardness that Roiphe extols in her book.

   What are her essays about? Well, all sorts. They're gathered into four rough sections:

• Life and Times - mostly extended prosaic portraits and memoirs, warm and cold snapshots and reflections on some aspects of her own life.
• Books - technically literary criticism, though maybe better described as discourses on the character, style, and variable merits of authors and trends in authorship.
• The Way We Live Now - dissecting current social and cultural norms to expose the dark tides beneath them before biting bloody chunks out of their necks and leaving readers feelings relatively uncomfortable about things they had before considered normal for want of not considering them much.
• The Internet, Etc. - same as above but specifically digital norms and trends. Includes the last chapter which is, in contrast, and extended and very human portrait study of a young New York woman who works as a bespoke sadomasochistic fetish-fulfiller.

   Yeh, there's quite the variety of topics. Recurring topics (because they're so readily relevant to so much about what one has to say about present culture once examining it critically) include feminism, the exclusion of people living outside an idealised middle-class existence, the bizarre twists of communication that occur in the press and online, the vindication of our own standards and values by the indignant capacity of other people to live without them (and vice versa). There's insight into the wholesale incorporation of Joan Didion's unique journaling style into contemporary feature-writing; musings on why angry commenters do what they do; a story about how a close friendship was deliberately but unthinkingly severed; damning appraisals of how the use of sex in male novelists' works has changed from aggresively patriarchal a few decades ago to only embarassedly patriarchal now.

   The common theme underlying each essay is, as the title suggests, mess. Katie Roiphe is, assuming no change of status since she wrote the various pieces in which she proudly describes herself as such, a woman in full-time employment with two children from two different men neither of whom she is married to. Like giant swathes of modern westerners then, she is marooned in social "messiness" - sustaining a lifestyle that defies both tradition and prudential convention, and having an excellent and valuable life despite it, thank you very much. She implies that the expectations of normality and tidiness in modern middle-class lives are unrealistic, unhealthy, even oppressive. So much of "surviving" nowadays is to be coddled and to coddle; to take far too seriously the prospects of perfection in all we do, with sour erosions in our friendships, careers, passions and even familial affections when the reality of flawed humanity sinks in despite our refusals to scrub it better; we'd be far happier to shrug off the imperfectible nature of our acquaintances, our homes, our work, our families, and to get on with enjoying them in the midst of the mess. Though a large part of what she discusses will be alien to someone who is not a middle-class American parent** I'm sure anyone vaguely familiar with a certain western-middle-class culture of paranoid perfectionism will get the gist of her gripes enough to see the truth in them and be made to squirm or frown slightly.

   I don't know who I'd recommend this book to, if anyone. The content is so broadly variable that it would make more sense to track down individual articles online and send links to people who are interested in that topic. To read the book entails several pieces that one would almost never read online simply because they are so irrelevant to most interests - however there is a value in reading the book rather that just disparate components to get a wider thoughtscape of her conception of messiness and a deeper insight into the pervasiveness of what opposes it. If you like reading and you're not fussy what as long as it's good; if the modern compulsion to derive the absolute best out of everything in denial of future disappointment also unsettles you as it does me and Katie Roiphe, then yeh you'd probably enjoy this.

* I use this word rather than "interesting" or "thought-provoking" because the topics of most of the essays were not things which I would typically be interested in reading, nor did I spend much time after reading each one thinking about it very much at all. However while reading each I was stimulated with vague grips of engagement with new ideas and perspectives that were either new to me or that I had not heard put in such terms before.

** Including me. As a poor (ish, I'm a student, that kinda counts as poor) childless Yorkshireman I was able to only superficially grasp most of the conventions she was skewering, through their incessant seepage into TV and film, even here across the pond.

God's Call

This book, compiled from three lectures on moral theology from John Hare, was another in the large pile of stuff I'm having to blast through for research for a philosophy essay. Most of them I'm only reading sections but this one was shortish and the whole book was quite relevant so I dedicated a day in the library to it and here we are, I have to write a post about it now.

   I'll be brief because it is academic philosophy and I don't want to effectively rewrite portions of my essay, or indeed an abstract. The book explores a new attempt at interpreting divine command theory, with specific focuses on the fact that God communicates with humans in a way subjective to them, and therefore how objective moral realism is reconcilable with human autonomy in following theistic commands. The points were argued well, with a thorough overview of the history of 20th-century ethics and how John Hare believes shortcomings in developing theories of meta-ethics throughout having various reconsiderations and revisions, culminating in his own view which he calls "prescriptive realism". This is strongly compatible, though not dependent, on theism; and so he goes on to discuss the divine command theories of Duns Scotus, an influential medieval thinker, linking prescriptive realism with a coherent moral system and also with christian theology. He then finishes the book with a chapter on Kant, re-reading the great philosopher's work on meta-ethics with a conscious awareness of its originator's sincere christian beliefs, and in taking them seriously thus shows that they are not at all incompatible with divine command theories, as most modern writers in ethics would say Kant is. For a short book, John Hare presents some big ideas, and in his approach through the history of philosophy he does great justice to them in many ways, but one does wish a longer, more thorough, more systematic exposition and explanation of his ideas and their implications were given.

   I've already made loads of notes on my responses to the ideas of the book and my thoughts on them, but they're handwritten in my essay binder in my bag which is on the other side of the room, so I can't be bothered to go through all the motions necessary to recount them here, especially since I also need to get on with other essay reading. Most of the remaining books I only have to skim or read sections of, which is fortunate as it keeps resultant blogposts to a minimum.

   Anyway, it was great help for my essay, and I enjoyed reading it. Anyone who's interested in theism, ethics, the history of philosophy, and the boundaries between these three, should consider checking the book out.

2014 overview

Sorry, this post isn't about a book I've read. However, this whole blog was started about a year ago in an effort to encourage me to read more critically; to retain more of what I read from non-fiction books, to derive more meaningful enjoyment from fiction books, and generally to force me to keep up a regular reading habit in case strangers on the internet got the impression that I was slipping.

   Anyway, with 2014 behind us and an arguably admirable thirty-three books (of massively varying length and intensity) under my belt, I'm glad to announce that this blog has become a pleasurable habit, one which I will continue into the foreseeable future for all books I finish reading.

   But before I start dumping my reactions from books in 2015 upon you, I'm going to reflect on some of the ones I finished this year, with a handful of books best befitting a series of arbitrarily-selected categories. These will probably just be the ones with the most memorable reading experiences, but I will have distinctly separate reasons for choosing each one. So, here we go:

1. A novel that made me somewhat teary;
• Stoner, by John Williams.
• The Humans, by Matt Haig.
• The Damned Utd, by David Peace.
2. A novel that made me laugh so hard that I missed my stop on the bus;
• Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome.
3. For the sake of pretentious future conversations, and also because it was rather enjoyable, I'm glad I read;
• Ulysses, by James Joyce.
4. Worst novel I read this year;
• The Stupid Swedish Forrest-Gump-esque Thing With a Really Long Title Which I Sort of Wished Would Climb Out of the Window and Disappear, Much Like its Arse of a Protagonist.
5. Only book I've ever read that was outright bad/wrong/infuriating enough that I ripped it apart and recycled it after reading;
• Wild at Heart, by John Eldredge.
6. Vaguely magical for very different reasons;
• Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman.
• The Human Animal, by Desmond Morris.
7. Made me thoroughly enjoy being an economics/philosophy student;
• The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner.
• Finite and Infinite Goods, by Robert Merrihew Adams.
8. All christians should read;
• Generous Justice, by Timothy Keller.
9. The bonus christian-encouragement award;
• The Good God, by Mike Reeves.
10. All those passionate about society say aye;
• Economics: the User's Guide, by Ha-Joon Chang.
11. All those passionate about nature say aye;
• Feral, by George Monbiot.
12. And finally, cats;
• Cats cats cats.

   I don't know if you're a regular reader or not, but I hope you enjoy and maybe continue to enjoy my spewage of half-thunk reactions to prose well into the future. [Also, I've realised I barely read anything written by non-white-males last year, which was not deliberate but is pretty bad in terms of limiting my intake of human experience and viewpoint. I will be making a conscious effort in 2015 to read more things from groups who haven't always found it ludicrously easy to make their voices well heard in the publicity of verbage. Hopefully the module on feminism I'm taking this spring will kickstart that...]

To words! To writing them, reading them, thinking and speaking in them; may they always be found in quantities, qualities and orders in which they are wonderful!

Finite and Infinite Goods

This book, an incredible work of philosophy/theology by Robert Merrihew Adams, has been the core of my educational reading for the last month. I'm writing a philosophy essay on the christian concept of love and how it links to the meta-ethics of motivation in a variety of theories of moral obligation (yeh it's a genuinely fun topic), and this has been my bulk inspiration book. I've been struggling to get it finished over the last couple of weeks because it's christmas-season and I've moved home, hence my reading of several less strenuous materials (see every other post this December), but have been thoroughly enjoyed it with interest nonetheless. I don't say this about many academic sources, but it's awesome.
   Adams has attempted to construct a framework for ethics centred around the Platonic concept of a transcendent Good and our relation to it. Strongly compatible with theism, especially christian belief systems, Adams takes this Good to be God. As the transcendent Good, all "good" things in the world can therefore be said to in some way resemble God in their intrinsic properties (which he calls "excellences") and are therefore appealing to a rational well-oriented human mind, because the universe was made by God in his nature as Good and so goodness is a naturally-diffuse characteristic of recognisable creation; that aspect specifically which lends value and rightness to it by affirming its unity and coherence. All excellences, especially morality, are good in that they are God-like and are to be encouraged, enjoyed, exercised, treasured. Evil then is not an equatable opposite power, simply an absence of or opposition to the Good.
   I am far too unskilled a philosophy-abstractioner to do justice in summarising Adams' book properly here, particularly because I myself so deeply enjoyed and agreed with it. I've ended up with several thousand pages of wrist-crampingly handwritten notes on it which at some point, bugger everything as a I now realise, I will have to transcribe onto a computer are they to have any use for my essay. However I hope the rough overview I've just given has made it sound interesting. If it hasn't, here's a very brief description of the topic of each chapter:

1. God as the Good - why is the metaphysical/theological person of a God the best fit for his central concept of transcendent Good?
2. the Transcendence of the Good - what are the implications of this Good's being better and definitive of other goods?
3. Well-being and Excellence - how are we to judge good outcomes in human lives?
4. the Sacred and the Bad - what significance does the Good lend to this that do (or don't) resemble it, and what does this imply for right attitudes towards them?
5. Eros - how does God (and do we) love things for their own sake?
6. Grace - how does God (and do we) love things for the Good's sake?
7. Devotion - how do/should we organise our motivational structures in making decisions involving goodness?
8. Idolatry - what happens what the Good is not the centre of the motivational structures discussed in the previous chapter?
9. Symbolic Value - is there a place in relating to the Good for acts that proclaim but do not effectively serve it?
10. Obligation - given systematic social use of guilt as a structure for obligating certain behaviours, how does this apply here?
11. Divine Commands - how do social-style obligations work when it is the Good (i.e. God) themselves that obligates certain behaviours?
12. Abraham's Dilemma - are the obliged commands of the Good always good?
13. Vocation - are there particular decisions or behaviours specific to individuals that we can take to be obligatory goods but not universals?
14. Politics and the Good - what are the implications of everything discussed so far for how we approach political systems and concepts?
15. Revelation of the Good - how do we even find out what goodness is in the first place, or relate it to a Good?
16. Moral Faith - is a certain trusting leap required to accept any system of morality, including this one?

   What struck me hard from the book is how coherent his system of ideas is, though drawing so deeply on academic philosophy and on sets of ideas completely alien to it. Adams has refashioned the divine command theory of moral obligation (hardly a popular theory anyway) in a way that is bold, efficient, edifying, and makes a lot of sense; it doesn't depend upon assuming but fits perfectly well with vast chunks of theist thinking, mostly christian theology, especially given the primacy of love as an importance in our relation to the Good.
   Robert Merrihew Adams, to me, has gone from being being a name on the module's recommended reading list (when I first heard of him) to being a world-famous eminent philosopher on theological ethics and metaphysics (when I googled him later) to being a supremely agreeable and intelligent man with whom I find immense common ground and cannot commend for his excellences enough (when I finished his book). This book meshed with and enhanced my own thinking really well: so much of what I have always vaguely felt but never articulated philosophically about ethics he outlines with casual accuracy; so much of what I have given much intense thought to about theology, politics, metaphysics and faith he adroitly encompasses in a cogent intelligible system that helps justify and unify my own thinking about these things.
   Anyone who is interested in ethics, anyone who is a thinking christian, and especially anyone who is both, I wholeheartedly exhort you to put this, my last book of 2014, on your reading lists for next year.

Beano annual 2015

This book is the annual compendium of special comics from that archaic weekly sort-of-funny children's comic and relic of when your parents were kids, the Beano. I've been at the family home over the week surrounding Christmas, and I found myself stuck in inactivity.* My brothers are elsewhere so games, conversations, or just annoying them with my presence aren't doable; the books I brought with me have tired me somewhat in their length and seriousness; the three inches of snow outside froze over in the night and I'm too cowardly of an Englishman to go for a slippery walk in it; the internet is a bottomless hole of boredom-inducing-boredom-prevention material; TV is obsolete and I don't know entirely how the new remote control works. I found this annual on the coffee table and decided to shoot my nostalgia in the face by reading it.

   The Beano is a weekly children's comic published in the UK since 1938, familiar to any English people who were children during the second half of the 20th century (or in the early noughties, if your parents swamp you as they did me and my siblings with hundreds of back-issues to keep you so occupied in reading them that you neglect to notice and thus ask for such expensive new-fangled contraptions as Playstations or SNES consoles). It features a host of characters that I will not be able to fully list at their present population (some of them have died because of cutbacks or retiring cartoonists, others have been absorbed from complementary "rival" comic the Dandy, others have been newly created to try desperately to find something that will turn the comic into a product that doesn't routinely hemorrhage its printers through children these days simply having far too many better things to do). To give some disappointedly-cynical overviews of examples of characters (most of whom have been around for decades) from the heyday of Beanodom back when I was aged 3-9 and a devoted a reader as there ever was, characters included:

• Dennis the Menace, a boy with spiky black hair who wears a red-and-black striped jumper and deliberately irritates people. Vocations range from systematic bullying of wimpy kids, subversion of all generic authorities,** and causing mess and upset. He has a dog called Gnasher who helps with these endeavours, which also for some reason looks almost identical to his hair given eyes, legs and teeth.
• Minnie the Minx, literally just the girl version of the above but ginger and wearing a beret with an inexplicable pompom.
• Roger the Dodger, a classic anti-authority wise-guy who uses far-fetched pranks and tricks to avoid doing work, get out of trouble, avoid normal healthy social interactions, and so on.
• Ivy the Terrible, a toddler who pretty much just shouts and causes mess and upsets her dad lots.
• The Bash Street Kids; the incorrigible class 2B at an ineptly-run school. One of the favourite classics, probably because it's the only one that was funny more than 40% of the time. It was always my favourite as well, so I'll do it the justice of listing the characters - of whom there are about as many as there are in all the other Beano comics combined. Comprising them are:
• Teacher (the teacher, duh). Like Dennis' dad he also has a Hitler moustache; stoically resigned to a life of misery, he very rarely manages to teach anything.
• Danny, the gang's supposed leader; he proclaims naughtiness more than any of the others and managed to be the favourite of none of the readers. The comic-runners should have picked up on this and had more cartoons about people being funny instead of people just throwing tomatoes at policemen.
• Sidney, generic boisterous child.
• Toots, token female, who is Sidney's twin.
• Smiffy, a boy whose borderline-severe learning difficulties are accommodated for laughingly by his inclusive classmates. Or maybe he is all there and, for want of better-defined personality and friendship, has taken to saying and doing silly things all the time so as to retain a niche as the beloved social joke-butt.
• Wilfrid, a very short kid whose entire gimmick is that he is shaped like R2D2. Turtleneck extends halfway up his face. Says very little but seems well-meaning.
• 'Erbert, shortsighted boy who walks into things when people are looking at him but the rest of the time is perfectly able to join in the mayhem-causing.
• Plug, who always gave me the impression that he was one of the smartest in the group, but will never fully find acceptance because his whole being is centred around his Shrek-like ugliness.
• Spotty. Has a gimmick that his name makes rather predictable. Bald. Also has a very long tie for some reason.
• Fatty. Guess.
• Head (the headteacher); looks identical to Teacher but fat and in a suit. Eats biscuits. Avoids responsibility. My personal favourite, possibly tied with Spotty.
• Janitor (guess what his job is); looks identical to Head but in scruffy clothes. Gets annoyed when the kids make mess, which is like, every week.
• Winston, janitor's long-suffering cat. Can handle a broom. Possibly enslaved.
• Olive, the cook, all of whose concoctions are burblingly hideous.
• Cuthbert, the one good kid in class 2B, who looks like a miniature version of teacher and gets lots of stuff thrown at him for being sensible.
• Billy Whizz, a kid who can run very fast. All his comic strips are basically just not-even-funny explorations of what it would be like to be a really fast kid in a variety of mildly inconvenient situations.
• Calamity James, an unfortunate soul to whom everything bad that would likely be socially ruinous and/or actually fatal happens. Used to have a really visually-witty cartoonist, but in this book there's a new one, very closely imitating the style of the character's inventor with none of the panache.
• Bananaman, a boy called Eric who is really dumb and turns into a superhero whenever he eats a banana. This superhero is great at saving the day but is still really dumb. Imported from the Dandy after it collapsed from shifting demand.
• The Three Bears, literally just a family of three bears who, instead of hunting normally, devote endless outrageous plots to stealing food from the supermarket of a blunderbuss-toting rightly-annoyed man called Hank.
• Lord Snooty, basically Billy Whizz but he's rich instead of fast.
• The Numskulls, five tiny things that live inside a guy called Edd and respectively control his brain, eyes, nose, ears and mouth. Things happen to Edd because of them which are apparently amusing.
• Little Plum, a probably-racist portrayal of a Native American kid whose main task in life is to follow the orders of Big Chief regarding something to be done to buffalo.
• Crazy for Daisy, a girl called Daisy who has to frequently resort to pugilism in repelling the advances of a devoted stalker called Ernest. He is ignorant of being repeatedly spurned in his efforts to woo her.
• Ball Boy, the captain of Beanotown's (yes all the characters live in the same fictional town, calm right down) incompetent football team.

   There are many others who have come and gone over the years, but these are the core bunch that I recall. It definitely used to be funnier; this isn't just a nostalgic projection of my endless childhood afternoons reading these cartoons onto the disappointment that this annual was, nor is it that my age has tripled since my peak enjoyment of them and a more mature sensibility cannot as much find pleasure in them. No. They've actually got worse, and it's no fault of the publishers, whose commitment to still making a product that almost nobody wants I find kind of inspiring. Kids these days just aren't bothered about a cartoon boy throwing flour at his neighbour - why would they be if the alternative source of entertainment for them is throwing grenades at digital soldiers controlled by their friends? I feel like such an old person. Dammit.

* Yes, it's fair to say that December has thrown an odd spanner into the spokes of my reading habits: rather than plodding through a half-dozen pretentious novels and a half-dozen even-more-pretentious non-fiction books at a time and finishing them almost by accident, this month I have read a fair few random easy-go lazy-books. Cat poetry, regional trivia, weird cartoons, this; it's that time of year. Allow it.

** His dad used to have a Hitler-style moustache back in the 1990's. New artist now though. Thought you should know.

The Chickens Are Restless

This book, one of the many collections of The Far Side cartoons that lay so ubiquitous around my family's home that they are outnumbered on the bookshelves there only by John Grisham novels, Beano annuals and books on childcare, is, like all other collections of Gary Larson's superb comic, amusing and bizarre.

   I've moved back into the Stovell family home for the week surrounding Christmas, which is very generous of my parents (even though they did convert my bedroom into some sort of waiting lounge in my absence), and has the added benefits of free food and warmth, pushing my negligible budget that extra bit further until student loans come back in. I jest, material security is but an extra gratefulness; I love my family. Even the new dog, though she may never live up to the standards set by the brilliantly useless mongrel preceding her.

   Anyway, I hadn't unpacked yet and everyone was busy, so the first hour or so after getting home and making a brew I spent perusing this collection of comic strips. This blog is for any book I read, after all, not just the intellectual or deliberately interesting ones that I ostentatiously purchase and progress through.

   For those of you who don't know The Far Side, it's hilarious. A single-panel newpaper comic that ran from 1980 to 1995, it never fails to be weird. Comics are hard to discuss without dumping loads of links to examples them; the pictures and words are inseparable in most of the jokes, so I'll try to explain what characterises them. Mad existential retorts and logical fallacies, anthropomorphism and civilisation run amok, childishness and maturity blended together in the pits of half-recognisable awkwardness, the familiar and common turned inside-out and upside-down and still comprehensible enough to provoke a chuckle - these are the styles Gary Larson uses in his distinctive style of surreal comedy. The content of each strip is thoroughly unpredictable, even within this short collection of (still very random) ones, and there are no recurring characters, though regularly featured are overweight suburban humans, insects, nerds, monkeys, men trapped on desert islands, farmers, aliens, fish, dogs, scientists (including mad ones), exotic wildlife, amoebas, hunters, farm animals (yep, including chickens), and a plethora of others that I cannot possibly hope to list. Each strip is as unexpected and yet as similar as every other; the main thing you can rely upon The Far Side to do upon reading is a brief moment of uncomprehension followed by a strange lateral click when you notice a particular choice of word or frame of situation or detail of image that propels the whole comic into something so utterly odd (and occasionally genuinely witty) that you cannot help but laugh. This of course goes for the comic as a whole, and so if surreal humour does tickle your fancy and you weren't already aware of this comic, simply googling it will yield thousands of strips online, and collections of them such as this one are almost always to be found in the discount cheap section of comedy shelves in second-hand shops.

   Anyway, it's mid-afternoon on Christmas Eve and here I am talking to a handful of future strangers on the internet about a weird comic I've just read. I'm going to go get a refill of tea and see if my brothers want a Mariokart tournament. Merry tomorrow, dear whoever.

I Could Pee on This

This book, a collection of poetry "by cats" by humour-journalist Francesco Marciuliano, is not one to which I will devote much discussion. Much like the previous post's book, this was bought because of Secret Santa, albeit here I bought it expecting to be able to bestow it upon a friend who has an almost unhealthy predisposition toward all things cat-related (I have three of these, and planned to give the book to whomever I saw first). Sadly, all three of such felinist acquaintances of mine left Sheffield before I saw them while I had the book with me, and so I was left with a book of cat poetry. It's quite short, so literally in the time since I wrote the last post I've just been for a leisurely toilet sitting and read it then. Probably won't give it to any of them now - unless I can be certain that they do not also read this blog from time to time. Nobody wants a book that has accompanied a friend's turd.
   Despite my fairly ambivalent attitude toward cats, I seem to have read lots of books attempting to enter their psyche this year (one through Japanese literature and one through artsy satire). Perhaps I am gaining a subconscious affinity for them by spending too much procrastinatory time in the corners of the internet devoted to gifs of their failings. I probably am, but who isn't these days?
   Anyway, sorry, the book. It's alright.
   If you find human-verbal constructed interpretations of the mindsets and internal monologues of cats amusing, you'll enjoy this, but only about as much as the average stint of scrolling through funny online cat material anyway. The book is pretty much redundant in that respect, except as a present for someone who you know likes amusing cat-related stuff, which was my intended use for it, and while it did vaguely entertain me as I casually emptied my bowels earlier, it did so for less than half an hour, an infinitesimal fraction of the time one could invest in laughing at silly cats on the internet if one were so inclined. Not to mention that the latter is effectively free whereas the book goes for an inexplicable £8.99 recommended retail price. 
   If you're looking for a token gift for someone who does like funny cat-related stuff, then this is, while probably far from the best among the plethora of choices you have, not a bad choice; as long as you don't repeat my mistakes of rendering it ungiftable. I now find myself with a book of cat poetry that I will never re-read and cannot really give away given the situations in which I read it. Ah well. Sometimes that's just life.


Edit [April 2015]: this book was resident in the bathroom of our student house, next to a pair of lavatory trivia books (you know the type). Following a recent house party, it has gone missing, presumed stolen by one of the party-goers. If you're reading this, I unflinchingly forgive you immediately, because, as the rest of this post made clear, it wasn't a book I really desired to retain, and also, it was probably covered in micro-flecks of excreta from spending several months within three feet of our toilet. I also have a reserved sort of admiration for minor inconsequential antisocial acts such as this, so well done you for stealing a book of cat poetry from the bathroom during a party that had so much else to do at it. Enjoy. You could pee on it.
Edit [July 2017]: it occurs to me now that one of my housemates could quite plausibly also have thrown it away, for all the reasons already cited.

The "Northern Monkey" Survival Guide

This book, a slim humourous compendium of trivia on and tributes to the North of England by Tim Collins, was bestowed upon me as a Secret Santa present by my good friend, future housemate and (most importantly) fellow-Yorkshireman Andrew Robertson.

   My current leisure-reading life is largely non-existent, as I have realised with a panic simply how much research for my philosophy essay I haven't done yet and so have been scrutinising lengthy tomes on christian meta-ethics; therefore I can firmly say that to have a book thrust into my life that was deliberately light-heartedly entertaining was a relief, especially with it being one that could quite easily be read in an afternoon of stoic Northern amusement.

   It's not a hugely thought-provoking book, as you'd expect, nor did I have many gripes with it: in the 140ish A5 pages we are toured through the customs, complaints, accents, foods, places, histories, characters, prides and follies that comprise the caricatured cultural landscape of England's top half. To a Northern reader it cannot fail to be pleasantly familiar as it raises a chortle of recognition here and there (there is one part in particular I found extremely funny - a "currency conversion" chart, whereby 35p in the North would get one, say, "crisps" whereas the southern equivalent would be £1.25 for "hand-cut vegetable shavings").

   However, rules is rules, sorry Andrew - having read the book I must react to it somewhat moreso than descriptively, and so here are a few constructive critical responses:

• Having been originally published in 2009, recent events have somewhat skewed the pleasantness of certain folks presented as otherwise grand heroes of the uplands. Leeds doesn't want any cigar-toting paedophile to go down as legend there, thanks.
• On the topic of what celebrities to include - a whole book celebrating the North with literally no mention of Patrick Stewart, Brain Blessed, or Sean Bean? Come on man.
• Though I can (and half-do) forgive this somewhat given the very evident caricatured nature of the book's humour, much of the jokery is a tad classist, sexist, racist, and homophobic, in various parts and degrees, which isn't really okay.

   These aside, this book was expected to provide a diverting afternoon of chuckling and feeling proud about my not-southern roots (psh nobody cares about the Midlands anyway), and that's exactly what it did. It's not a book I ever would have bought myself, but it's the kind of book one can't help but enjoy if one identifies with it; if you're struggling to find a cracking Secret Santa gift for a fellow-Northerner, take a tip from Andrew Robertson and go for this.

   Although most of us wouldn't say no to a chip butty drenched in gravy either.

Feral

This book, an extended study on rewilding by veteran environmental activist and journalist George Monbiot, was, even moreso than are most of his books, eye-opening and incredible. I was lucky enough to pick up a pre-release signed copy at a SPERI lecture he gave at my uni last year, browsed through a couple of chapters over summer, and have finished it in a spurt of ecological interest over the last few days.

   It's about our misjudged place in nature: how this has been lost over the past few millennia of human civilisation gradually conquering and flattening the ecosystems it moves into; how this has been forgotten over the enforced retention* of systems that prevent those ecosystems from properly recovering; how this has been distorted by vast industrial processes reaping finite natural stocks and processes as though they were limitless income. Running common to these scenes of destruction and degradation are veins of hope and potential - rewilding, the main topic of the book. Rewilding is basically handing over control of ecosystems to nature; reintroducing missing species that play key ecological roles of predation, habitat manipulation, resource creation and such, helps revitalise the balanced diversity of flora and fauna in those systems.**

   The text resembles a sort of ecosystem of prose in itself: a jumbledly overlapping yet coherent and cogent mix of writing. There are impeccably-researched-and-referenced scrutinies of ecosystem development policy successes and failures, insightful discourses on biological and philosophical perspectives of man's place and part in nature, and enthralling anecdotes of George's personal experiences with people, plants, animals, landscapes that have helped inform and shape his perspectives. You will be bowled over by gorgeous descriptions of sublime natural explorations and encounters, wholeheartedly inspired by introductions to selfless hippy-type individuals involved in rewilding projects, shunted into enlightenment by a chunk of analysis and into astonished outrage or delight by a series of statistics or facts, often all within a page or two of each other. It really is a bizarrely multitudinous reading experience, and make so much the better for it. It strikes the head, the heart and the gut with equal measure, never supplanting reason for emotion but finding the root human passions that lie at the base of all his arguments and laying them together perfectly.

   It's a book that makes one want to re-engage with nature, to do all within one's power to remove human corruption from the ecosystems it has enslaved and despoilt, to hand control back to Mother Gaia. Anyone interested in ecology should read it for enjoyment, anyone interested in social and natural justice should read it to inform their opinions, most people should probably read it to broaden their anthropocentric worldviews and bring about pressure for change. Quality, timely, and deeply important.

* This book might make you rightly despise grouse hunters, fishing trawlers, and especially sheep.

** This book might make you rightly adore beavers, oysters, wolves and dead trees.

Is God anti-gay?

This book, a concise 80-page response to the controversial topics of homosexuality and Christianity by Sam Allberry, was roughly what I expected it would be. It was on a discount bookstall on a christian weekend away (I never can resist those discount bookstalls, but fortunately this time I only bought one book - this - so my wallet remained unbattered), and given its shortness I ran away from one of the ludicrously christian-weekend-away-esque sessions of organised "fun" and read it in a prolonged tea-fuelled sitting.

   Sam's book claims to answer its provocative titular question,* among other questions about homosexuality, the Bible and same-sex attraction. It does so quite well; the author identifies himself as experiencing SSA so clearly he is able to approach the issue in a thoughtful and sensitive way, avoiding the patronising, homophobic assumptiveness which often characterises christian viewpoints on issues of sexuality and gender. His points are strongly-reasoned, biblically grounded and gospel-centred, and though I half-wanted to I couldn't find anything that I disagreed with on theological grounds. His conclusions are positive (the chapter on how we construct our identities is particularly liberating), but one would have to subscribe to christianity to think so - which is where I think the book falls short. It is mainly aimed at christians: both those "struggling" with their sexuality to reaffirm the gospel to their context, and those who need their views on how to deal with the topic more sensitively while retaining a biblical grounding for it. Given these aims I think it's an excellent little resource. Obviously no 80-page book is going to revolutionise christian views on homosexuality, but if accessible enough one may ease the psychological and emotional distress of gay christians, and push other christians into dealing with them in a more reasoned, human, loving way - and I think this book may well do that.

   Returning to its shortfalls, I would've liked more discussion of mission to non-christians and homosexuality. There are many deep issues in how non-christians are to percieve God's commands in relation to the gospel and their [un]acceptance of it, and therefore how christians are to talk to them or relate to their lifestyles. Westborough Baptist-style public condemning of homosexuals who don't know Jesus is utterly useless, unfounded, even evil; it excludes them hatefully and prevents them from ever wanting to know more of the "gospel" that such "christian" groups proclaim. I also would've liked a more critical assessment of some of the biblical passages: fair enough they were already exposited very tactfully and with substantial contextual explanation, but surely a more in-depth analysis or consideration of normative aspects of language, culture, sexual psychology and such and how they might change the way we approach such passages could have shed light on the possibility of some different conclusions. It's only a short book though, so avoiding these deep bogs of meta-ethical and postmodernist-historical argument was probably wise.

   Overall, it's a decent book. If you're a christian who thinks they might not be entirely hetero, this book will assuage some doubts you might be having. If you're a christian whose views on issues of sexuality are lacking, this book will help bring you into a more thoughtful and tactful way to talk about them. If you're a non-christian, this book will probably offend you because its fundamental premise is Gospel-as-core-identity rather than sexuality-as-core-identity: so in the interests of me, a liberal freethinking christian, not wanting you to be put off the gospel by a book you approached with the wrong mindset, I only recommend reading it if you do so understanding that it is aimed at christian readers and certain aspects may grate.

* SPOILER ALERT: no.