Semiotics: A Graphic Introduction

This book, by Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz, is another in the series of graphic introductory guides to enormous complex topics like logic or critical theory. If you don't know what semiotics is, you should probably get out of this post before it's too late.* If you do, then this book, I can guarantee, will provide a helpful overview of international academic trends and disciplines influential within and upon the field of semiotics - i.e. the study of signs. It's a relatively new field for me to be reading much into, and it's like discovering metaphysics all over again - somehow, everything leads back to it, and however much sense it makes there's nothing in the middle and nothing holding it together. Language and communication and concepts and objective reality and subjective perception all spiral away together in an inexplicable tautological circle-shaped puzzle.

   This book, indeed this whole intellectual field, has added a dense and complex extra layer onto my own mentally-experienced-and-rationalised self, which is always exciting, but means I can't really write anything substantive about it right now.

   A decent introduction, then, I suppose.

* Google it. I know, right?

the complete Calvin & Hobbes: volume three

This is the third and final volume of a box-set (this) comprising the whole roughly-a-decade span of newspaper comic Calvin & Hobbes, of which I've already done posts for the first and second volumes. In the post about the first volume, I try to give a general overview of what, superficially the comic is about - in this post, I'm going to go into more depth about some of the recurring themes Bill Watterson explores through the world he's created in this comic, and try to give some shape to why I think it's so timelessly special as well as timefully poignant as an enduring body of artistic work.
   Okay...
   I'm returning to this post having left that first paragraph sat as a neglected unclosed tab on my browser for a full week. I simply don't know where to start. There's too much that could be said about this comic and it's too dear to my heart to devise a deconstruction, so I'm just going to do what happens to a small (lol) proportion of my posts and gonzo it. Or whatever the term is.
   Reading the comic in its entirety, a ten-year span, had somewhat of a Groundhog-Day-esque feel, in that Calvin is, of course, perpetually a six-year-old, but Watterson, as part of his construction of a real-feeling world to a daily-newspaper-reading audience, allows the change of the seasons to permeate Calvin's environment, activities, and moods. You watch him spend ten years in first-grade, struggling to restrain his over-active imagination for long enough to learn simple addition, struggling against alienated boredom within an education system that genuinely fails to engage lots of children, his brief respites at recess and lunchtime hampered often by the bully or by his own weirdness driving away his only real friend (Susie Derkins - well, both would deny being the friend of the other, but they live on the same street, and she's the only kid in the comic who Calvin regularly talks to who doesn't tend to end their encounters by thumping him and stealing his lunch money; arguably as a know-it-all she is on a similar popularity level to the out-and-out weirdo with a stuffed tiger that he fights with (and loses to sometimes), Calvin). Much of the comic explores the regularities and routines of a child's life as part of an incomprehensible structure of disappointment - evident in everything from waiting for the bus to performing household chores to bathing to keeping oneself entertained around the house - and Calvin's imagination provides gateways to 'play his way out' of these all-too-commonplace scenarios. But the comic strikes a careful balance between his reality and his dreams, such that the adult sensibilities of the boring traps laid out for Calvin's everyday experience and the childlike excitements of escaping these are both avenues for the comic: his parents, I think, provide an extremely important presence of normality. The burden and joy of parenthood, the thankless domestic life of the stay-at-home mom and the paper-weight drudge of an office-working dad, are shown through the admittedly extreme prism of raising a kid who is just as likely to be found sitting quietly reading a comic by the fire as he is hammering nails into the coffee table, assembling some sort of catapult to fire rocks at Susie, or trying to sell glasses of pondwater to passers-by - he's a handful, to say the least, for all the good his father's attempts to get him to do 'normal' (i.e. unpleasant) activities to 'build character'. Calvin's imaginativeness lets the comic take some brilliantly broad-ranging directions in terms of illustration (the dinosaur ones are often among my favourites), but it is his real-world high-demand six-year-old-style selfishness that forms the core of the comic's capacity for social commentary, of which there is a lot, neatly diffused into it bit-by-bit over the decade of its run. Bill Watterson, if it be his own worldview that he allows to flourish in the words of Calvin and Hobbes, has a considerable uneasiness around the political, economic and cultural trends that were becoming all-but-unstoppable in the years the comic ran (late '80s to early '90s; basically the Soviet Union fell, and suddenly everyone in the world was an American style democratic liberal capitalist, a universal consensus masking neoliberal hegemony, which had been developing an extremely strong base of consumer culture in the West for centuries, and the '80s was when it centralised itself as the Western way of life); work was unproductive and unfulfilling, advertisements for stuff people didn't need was everywhere, supplemented by sociocultural pressures to feel needs for the stuff being advertised; people were losing their connection with nature, their capacity to trust each other and the media, and their capacity to actively care about anything substantive or meaningful in a world where suburbia could become everything, where TV replaces thought, and kids are primed to expect to find a place in this world where they can follow their dreams - even when their actual dreams (of day-to-day imagination) are constantly shattered and grounded by representatives of the same grown-up community perpetuating their being kept in the dark about the vacuousness of the whole endeavour. That was a horrific sentence, I know. But some of the hardest-hitting strips are simply Calvin watching television, or his dad's thoughts on the drive to work, or his mom's thoughts upon receiving junk mail ads; surprisingly subversive for a comic that was printed in thousands of American popular newspapers. The anti-consumerism critique* ramps up toward Christmas each year in the comic, alongside, interestingly, vaguely theological and moral ponderings about the nature and possibility of being good in the hope of a reward (from Santa). The winter periods also see Calvin making many bizarre, grotesque, or as he calls them 'avant-garde' snowmen - these ones are as visually amusing as they are littered with topsy-turvy commentary on the world of art that any aesthete would appreciate. Likewise Calvin's summers are crammed with school-free romps around the wilderness, riding carts down perilous hills while making casual existential chitchat, throwing water-balloons at Susie, finding frogs, meetings aliens, holding club meetings in a treehouse - all of these elements are completely dependent on the comradeship of Hobbes, who, ostensibly self-evident to everyone except Calvin, is an inanimate stuff tiger, and also the voice of Calvin's self-doubt in the comics - which means the things Hobbes says (Calvin's self being one of TV-raised fantasy-embroiled narcissistic noise) tend to be on the wiser side. As well as enabling exploration of a child's developing understanding of his place in the world through Hobbes taking up one side of the inner dialogue, Hobbes is Calvin's constant playmate - they scheme together, invent games, explore, argue, snack, fight, find new uses for cardboard boxes, rest, and muse. It is through conversation with Hobbes that the depth and nuance of Watterson's voice in the comic shines through best - this is not a strip that shies away from big questions, and though it doesn't claim to have answers, reminding people to ask them is often good enough.
   This comic achieves more, artistically, in terms of both writing and drawing, than any other newspaper-daily comic I have ever encountered. It is well worth discovering, even if you don't plough through it in its entirety like me - this post has been a structureless shambles, but I hope it gives some insights into the sheer breadth and depth of what makes Calvin and Hobbes such endearing characters at the heart of this lovely comic.



* Something that Bill Watterson stuck to his guns about IRL - he spent years fighting his publishing syndicate for the rights to the characters so they couldn't be used for corporate merchandising.

the complete Calvin & Hobbes: volume two

This is the second volume of a three-book boxset (this) of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson - introductory comments are given in my post about the first volume (here) and all (well, at least some) my actual reflective thoughts about the series will be given once I've finished reading it in its entirety after the third volume (this). I'm using it as 'comfort reading' while I read loads of dense and depressing stuff for an essay about environmental political economy, and lemme tell you, it's doing the job.

Have a nice day

Living High & Letting Die

This book, by Peter Unger, I've just finished in a several-day spurt after it being unexpectedly recalled by the university library (I've had it out since late 2014) - is one of the hardest-hitting tracts on practical ethics I've ever read. Utilitarianism on steroids.
   It opens with a simple factual statement: that a relatively small amount of money, sent by the reader (who is, in all likelihood, a relatively affluent American academic philosopher)* to a humanitarian charity, will be able to substantively extend the expected lifespans of tens or hundreds or thousands of children in developing countries. However, when readers encounter donation-requesting-leaflets from such charities, it is not widely considered morally reprehensible to ignore what, upon reflection, seems to present itself as an unshakable moral obligation. Unger goes on to develop an ethical position he calls Liberationism, whereby such obligations are laid bare through a thorough scouring of our responsive processes and painstakingly weedling out all the common psychological, social, and behavioural hurdles of irrationality (i.e. half-thunk excuses) that we have to learn to leap before we can join him in assenting to the Liberationist's ethical position.
   This development of an admittedly extraordinarily challenging view of ethics is demonstrated at regular intervals by thought experiments, which Unger devised and threw out at a sample group of Moral Agents (i.e. people) to see how they responded, then comparing general responses about right and wrong behaviours to the Liberationist position. These thought experiments are varied and colourful - there are bombs rolling down hills, fat men in remote-controlled rollerskates, the spare and easily-hijacked yachts of selfish billionaires, and more innocent children tied to train tracks soon to be crushed under a runaway trolley than you could shake an envelope from UNICEF at - and ultimately do serve to demonstrate, develop and gradually expose the Liberationist ethic extremely well, also serving tangible detailed examples where the irrationalities of non-Liberationist ethics become murky or troubling. That's all I'll say about the content of the book: it's one the core message of which I am enthusiastically-but-shrewdly for, yet I would not recommend this book** - unless you're an academic philosopher (of course including students of this) who shares my fascination with altruism.
   Nor do I have many particularly original reflective responses to the book. (However, it does fit nicely into my personal map of ideas, so prepare for a final paragraph chock-full of hyperlinks to old posts.) Liberationism is a strong ethical position, sure, but not too dissimilar from that advocated by someone whose moral teachings I take quite seriously - Jesus Christ (google him if you must).***
   As a Christian, I believe the nature of God as purely good means that the entire of reality is structured around and toward goodness, including ethics, including socioeconomic justice as a necessary pursuit. But the nature of God's holy loving goodness so far surpasses our capacities to imitate (as explored beautifully by Kierkegaard here) that we are prone to blind spots; the ultimate blind spot is other people in need when our needs are our priorities - the fundamental tendency toward selfishness is innate to our brokenness, and corrupts our worldly understandings of good and right. Economics is a great starting point - despite having originated as a field with just as much moral concern as material, it is now largely unreliable, and at worst, the academic arm of neoliberal hegemony's ongoing reign. Neoliberalism is a philosophy that fundamentally feeds off the selfishness of the already-successfully-selfish, and then basically just kicks everyone else in the self-esteem their whole lives unless they strike lucky (and then probably even moreso). This means the person-level blind spots of the real needs of others (generally on a socioeconomic scale this whole element can just be referred to as 'the poor') are elevated to social-level blind spots, rampant poverty and inequality goes unaddressed, despite the obviousness of a solution - give them money. This book seeks to make the non-theistic philosopher's ethical case for the worrisome undeniability of such an obligation (which is also tried-and-tested one of the best ways to actually help). Our world's richest economies are living well beyond their means, using resources unsustainably to prop up grotesquely wonderfully convenient lifestyles while billions live precariously on the brink, and that brink is only growing nearer and less predictable given the economic-ecological crisis we face - I believe that richer nations have a duty to both massively reduce their own impacts and support less-developed neighbours in mitigating the worst of climate change and transitioning their economies through huge transfers of money to the poor (this idea comes from not-too-far down the degrowth rabbit-hole, see this and this). While making a lot of sense to me in a political-economic sense, it also neatly brings to bear the demand of Christian ethics on the way our economies operate - a demand that is radical, costly, and difficult, like Unger's, but there doesn't seem to be a way out of it but for irrationality or selfishness.



* Unger states this 'target audience' himself. This book is not written for the layman.

** He states himself that the purpose of the book is not to convince a general reader, as it would far more likely alienate them - he's trying to further the debate within academic philosophy, in the hope that straightforward hard-talking solutions such as his may bloom longer-term and lay the socio-cultural groundwork for radical economic altruism.

*** As I'm aware, readers may well just give up on a paragraph offering only my own opinions which have been hewn into the imperfect chambers of my worldview by many a book, conversation, or short period of time staring at walls; if you can't be arsed to read it, fair enough, and so as an alternative (or, if you did read it any only just got to this bit, consider it a reward), here's another Vulfpeck.

2016 overview

Every year on this thing I do a recap of the project, and while it's very early in the late night and I'm knackered having been travelling back from London most of today before going to a pub quiz (priorities), 2016 has been an absolute shitter* of a year, I'm sure many will agree, and I wanted to get its review over and done with, because in terms of books I've read it's actually been a pretty good year. My blog has endured its third year of my spewage of thoughts about stuff I've read cover-to-cover, and while this year has seen the fewest completed books since the project started, I feel this year I've read a lot of really good books - certainly ones that were right for me to read, being where I currently am, in terms of life and worldviews and everything.

   Excuse #1 for this relative lack (actually there are no 'excuses' as I don't owe this blog anything, it's a personal project, but whatever) is that lots of the time I'd usually spend reading I've spent writing (more info here - link also, incidentally, leads to the book that page-by-page brought me the most immediate joy all year). Excuse #2 is that through a variety of complex causes that I've given up trying to decipher, for a lot of last year I was (mildly? moderately? dunno, wasn't diagnosed but wasn't well - but these things come in waves) a bit off-key, and I ended up reading quite a few books about happiness. These included:

• Happiness by Design, by Paul Dolan - blandly good for the well-structured mind.
• Status Anxiety, by Alain de Botton - slightly-less-blandly slightly-less-good for the slightly-less-well structured mind, or anyone with general angst.
• The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck, by Sarah Knight - samey and not as blunt as you'd probably like it to be if you like the title.

   However, the two books** that genuinely deeply helped me in this time were:

• Kierkegaard's Works of Love - a must-read for Christian intellectuals.
• Emily Dickinson's selected poems - just pure transcendent beauty.

   Anyway, time to start handing out singular end-of-year recommendations from out of the twenty-nine (a contestable figure given some of the 'books') I read last year.

• Best word-to-picture ratio - the Snowman, by Raymond Briggs.
• Best novel*** - How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid.
• Another must-read for Christian intellectuals - Paradoxology, by Krish Kandiah.
• Highly-recommended for Christians who feel they are on the verge of becoming more mature in their faith - Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands, by Paul Tripp.
• A commonly-praised extremely boring 'classic' that I recommend you avoid - Moby Dick, by Herman Melville.
• Must-read for anyone with, or wanting, a leadership role in groups of any kind, especially activism - the Consensus Handbook by Seeds for Change.
• Disarmingly universal religious-smelling poetry - the Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran.
• Strongly recommended for anyone interested in psychoactive substances - Drugs Without the Hot Air, by David Nutt.
• Strongly recommended for literally everyone - Teaching Critical Thinking, by bell hooks.

   I've read books about Jeremy Corbyn and Kanye West (both of which I'd recommend if their names stir anything within you), but core to much of my non-fiction book choice is an attempt to build up a coherent holistic understanding of how the world works and how it needs to change. And this year, through my studies**** as well as my independent reading I feel I have, for the time being, settled on a system of ideas which more or less make sense of the world and give me tangible goals and ideals in a political-economic-social sense: degrowth.

• Prosperity without Growth, by Tim Jackson, is an excellent case for this radical and unpopular but ecologically-urgent and sociopolitically-appealing idea.
• Kathryn Tanner's the Economy of Grace lays out a Christian view of economics which seems to me highly congruent - but further reading is probably required on that, as it is on most topics one is trying to learn the truth about.  

   Accessible, digestible, applicable truth, now more than ever, is oh-so-important, and if you are a regular reader (you're probably someone I know anyway) then please at the end of 2016 may I implore you, having witnessed the horrors capable of being brought about by mass ignorance, to think for yourself, to read for yourself, to run away with ideas and fight them until you know where you stand, because the truth is always out there but it is rarely simple, and never irrelevant.

   Peace & love,

   Isaac J. Stovell

[edit - I've just realised that my last post of 2016 promised that this post would include a longer explanation of my writing project, but honestly I can't be bothered at the moment and will provide one of these once my plans are more properly in place.]

* I know I don't usually swear on this blog, but if you're more offended by the term 'shitter' than you are by the current state of the world given how it's changed in 2016, go read an online overview of everything that's happened this year and have a good long think. And then, because it has been a stressful year, here's a brilliant thing to offset the upset.

** Except the Bible, obviously, but as I said in this blog's founding post, that doesn't count. Also, this book was a good help in bringing together calming behavioural practices that help reinforce one's rest in the truth of the gospel.

*** Hands-down. I usually really struggle to pick one. Helps that I didn't read many novels last year but honestly that one is just brilliant.

**** I'm shortly entering my final semester (before a dissertation) of a part-time Masters in Global Political Economy, and honestly, I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this course but also how much I'm looking forward to not being a student any more.

the complete Calvin & Hobbes: volume one

This book, the first volume of a three-volume hardback collection (this) of a newspaper comic called Calvin & Hobbes,* by Bill Watterson - I have been nibbling on it over the last month, as something familiar and beautiful for my comfort reading while I commence work on another inevitably-bleak essay on the political economy of the environment.

   Since there are another two volumes to go before I've properly "finished" reading the full collection, I'll save up all my proper thoughts and reflections (of which there will be a lot: this is an utterly fantastic comic strip, possibly the greatest of all time, certainly to my mind, for the quality of writership and pen/brushwork, conceptual depth yet childlike accessibility, sheer adventurous joy - and it's also one that I've known and loved since I first encountered it as a nine-year old, but have never read through the full collection, so I'd like to let my words stew awhile as I ingest the other two volumes) for my post about the third volume. Nevertheless, they are separate books, so warrant separate posts.

   Cool? Cool.

   One thing I will add about this one though is that the first volume comes with a longish introduction from Bill Watterson about the comic as a project - an unexpected success that blossomed with artistic possibility that he took full advantage of in ways no other newspaper comic artist I can name off the top of my head (except Charles Schulz? - no, Bill trumps here) had ever done before and which few have probably tried to do since; his work developed a readership that both deeply touched and connected with the comic, again, not what you'd usually expect from the daily funnies. His telling of how he, having surprised himself at landing such a successful project, tried to make it the best comic he could make, was of immense encouragement and inspiration to me reading it as I am now; the craftsman of one of my oldest cultural loves offering up a straightforward and honest story of struggle and joy and finding fulfilling work in art - which is what, at the end of 2016, I've come to realise I want to do. I've mentioned in previous posts that my excuse** for barely having read anything since a family holiday in early August has been that most of the leisure time I usually direct into reading has gone into writing - and this is still the case, to such an extent that completing this project is now my primary goal for the next few years. I'll be finishing my Masters of Arts (which ironically prepares me very little for an actual career as an artist, those tending to be fairly stereotypically shambolic) over summer 2017, find a non-committal job to pay the bills, and then spend my mid-twenties writing a series of novels**** that I've been planning extensively since around May. Frankly the organicness with which this project has replaced my previous ambitions is deliciously welcome - and so inspiration from masters of the arts, like my much-esteemed Bill Watterson, has been great soul food for me this last fortnight. And I'm sure the next two volumes can only deepen that.

   So, thanks for reading this year, it's been an odd year all round - happy end of 2016.

* If you've never heard of it - it's about a six-year old boy called Calvin with an extremely active imagination and a real-only-to-him best friend in the form of a stuffed tiger called Hobbes; the pair's playfulness drops them into regular trouble, as the immensity and constancy of a child's imagination rubs up against the disappointing mundanity of a child's actual life (leading to many a clash of worlds - with long-suffering mom and dad, the teacher, the sensible girl next-door, the school bully, and the only babysitter in town who has the patience for Calvin's antics). The strips are infused through-and-through with altered realities - earthquakes, dinosaurs, monsters, detectives, fearless space-faring heroes, you name it - as Calvin's imagination runs away with him, Hobbes close behind.

   It was first syndicated in 1985, and by the time Watterson felt his brilliant characters had told all they could and he had achieved his artistic vision as a comic writer/drawer, this uniquely-charming childhood-nostalgia-heavy perfect lovely little strip was going out daily in over 2400 newspapers - until its final strip on January 1st 1996. Lots of them are online for free (see), and while the complete collection is a heavy investment, these books are ones that will stay somewhere on my shelves for the rest of my life. I cannot recommend this comic highly enough. Keep your eyes peeled in charity shops - you can often pick up smaller books collecting C&H strips for a few quid/bucks (in the UK and presumably USA too - dunno how internationally-loved it is). They work extremely well in book form, as unlike most newspaper comic-writers, Watterson frequently embarks on narratives that span several 'weeks' - each individual strip amusing and often surprisingly poignant, the longer stories truly delightful.

** Well, one of them. I also made the mistake of taking on a full-time seven-week research assistance*** position in which I was wayyy out of my depth and that was stressful and huge and certainly not conducive to my quasi-normal quasi-healthy habits of time management. It may have been this that led to my decisiveness in aiming for a break in academia and flying after creative pursuits.

*** Don't ask what it was in.

**** Yup. There's eight of them. They're sort of a series, but each readable as a standalone story, with books varying in tone, topic, and genre, following the same three characters (Amina Nadir, John Ezekiel Smith, and Naomi Moss) over about sixteen years. Lots of things happen to these three. I won't ever put any of my draft material or even outlines of plans up on this blog, but I will give a slightly more in-depth description of the general broad thrust of the project (basically just to fish for volunteers to offer constructive criticism) in my 2016 recap post,***** which you can expect in about a week probably - I'm off to London for NYE and staying for a few days. Without laptop. As true holiday time should be.

***** You know, the thing where I go back and think about some of the best things I've read in a year, or have other thoughts, or make cheesily over-enthusiastic statements about the joy of books. See last year's.

Paradoxology

This book by Krish Kandiah is one of the best books in Christian apologetics I've ever read. Through scrutinising biblical figures and stories in context, with immense theological and philosophical rigour, Krish tackles head-on some of the biggest and most problematic question-problems posed to Christian faith - those that are seemingly irreconcilable, as scripture seems to imply, or allow the possibility of, opposite truths existing in paradox (hence the title). He covers the following aspects of God:*

• needs nothing but asks for everything (through Abraham)
• is far away, but so close (Moses)
• terribly compassionate (Joshua)
• actively inactive (Job)
• faithful to the unfaithful (Hosea)
• consistently unpredictable (Habakkuk)
• indiscriminately selective (Jonah)
• speaks silently (Esther)
• is divinely human (Jesus)
• determines our free will (Judas)
• wins as he 'loses' (the cross)
• effectively ineffective (the Romans)
• fails to disappoint (the Corinthians)

   Alongside these brilliant chapters, Krish includes in the book a short introduction, mid-way reflection, and epilogue, about the nature of paradoxical understanding and how we can live with it. His pragmatic and intellectually humble approach to the complexities and enormities of transcendentally infinite divine realities, and how human understanding can, if not at least grasp them, then grasp what is meant by the apparent contradictions, leads to some profound insights into the depth and mystery of God's truth and character. I would strongly recommend this book to any Christian who has been waging the ever-present inner wrestle with doubt in perplexity; this book strikes right to the core of the biggest and most common of these niggling doubts and uncertainties, and though they cannot be perfectly resolved in neat explanation (as is the nature of paradox), thorough examination of them certainly helps us understand how contradictory doctrines may both hold true, and strengthen the reader's heart and mind in faith along the way.

* The nature of the subject matter makes these chapters hard to summarise, so I'm literally just using the subtitles from the contents page... sorry. Hey, if it piques your interest, read the book!

How to Be a Mindful Christian

This book, by Sally Welch, is very much what it says on the tin - a practical and helpful guide to incorporating aspects of 'mindfulness'* to one's walk as a Christian. The bulk of it consists of forty bitesize chapters, sectioned by how we engage with silence, sound, smell, sight, touch and taste; each of these is a passage of scripture reflecting an aspect of the glory of the gospel, or life with God, and then a short reflection on how we can have such feelings of restfulness or gratefulness or gracefulness as perhaps are inspired by these passages present in our minds more and more, the aim being constant enjoying and rejoicing in God in the moment. Exercises are provided (meditative breathing etc) to help orient minds thus. A further seven chapters along these lines are given for each day of Holy Week, and a final section about pilgrimages. This book has, I feel, really helped me develop a stronger, deeper, more persistently self-aware relationship with God - though I suspect most Christian readers will be wary of a book claiming that a practice more commonly associated with Buddhism can help in any way.** To these people, I simply say this: don't be daft. You are called to love God with all your mind - and oriental practices of mindfulness, even if unattached from Christian traditions, are demonstrably effective in clearing out the kind of mental clutter that prevails so much in our 21st-century culture of distraction, anxiety, and entertainment. Why not use these tools to help properly orient your mindset and thoughts in such a way as to consciously inhabit Christian truth more fully? If you keep a firm grasp of your Christian identity and Christian theology, you have nothing to possibly lose from trying a meditative breathing exercise or two - and from me at least, using the kinds of exercises outlined in this book have truly helped me become more pervasively cognizant of the gospel's centrality in my life and thoughts, bringing me joy and peace and motivation to serve others and glorify God; and while the murk of the world still clouds my mind with tremendously normal regularity and intensity, the gospel is the ultimate anchor, and practicing mindfulness with it in sight a tried-and-tested means of bringing your own knowledge of the gospel to spread itself out in your mental and emotional life. Give it a go!

* A buzzword that gets bandied around all too much these days, but still an important and culturally-timely concept.

** Interesting articles on this topic (linking is easier than paraphrasing): one, two.

Just Give Money to the Poor

This book by Joseph Hanlon, David Hulme and Armando Barrientos is an extremely well-balanced between scholarly and readable overview of a 'new' means of tackling poverty, the nature of which you may be able to guess from the title.

   Conventional aid and development strategies,* especially those led by Western academia propping up entire industries of Western people whose jobs it is to find ways to help the poor, are pretty wasteful and inefficient - in the context of a single simple misapprehension being pointed out: however effective an organisation seeking to alleviate poverty is, would the money it takes to pay their (probably Western) staff or fund their (probably paternalistic) projects be more effective at actually alleviating poverty if, instead of paying those staff or funding those projects, it was simply given to the poor? The authors of this book answer: probably, yes, with a few large caveats. Central to their argument is a very reasonable faith in the non-idiocy of poor people - i.e. if you give money to a family in poverty, they are likely to use to it for productive and worthwhile ends, so any expensive NGO scheme seeking to tell them what might help them be less poor is redundant; moreover, such schemes assume that poor people remain poor because of ignorance or particular personal failures to act in certain ways, rather than that poor people remain poor because they do not have enough money. It almost seems too obvious. Giving poor people money helps break the poverty trap - pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is impossible if you're too hungry to bend down and you can't afford any boots anyway - thus improving basic living standards and empowering people to engage with healthcare, education, small-scale investment, and so on, stimulating their local economies and nurturing upward spirals of development. These schemes, called cash transfers, come in a wide array of forms, and are emerging across increasing numbers of developing countries in the global south in response to the abject failure of Western development strategies to alleviate poverty, and (subject to the caveats, which I'll come to) are proving incredibly successful almost everywhere, such that they attracted the attention of skeptical Western academic economists** who promptly conducted a flurry of skeptical studies into these cash transfer schemes and were even more surprised to find their own studies supporting what the governments, academics, and straight-up socioeconomic evidence from the global south was suggesting was true - giving money to poor people helps them be less poor! Wow!

   Anyway, the caveats. Basically there are just loads of problems with deciding who gets the cash transfers - everyone, or only old people, or families with children, or the poorest 10% or 20% or 50% of the population (and how do you means test for this?), or people living within particularly poor areas? There are also extensive problems with ensuring that the people receiving cash transfers get lifted out of poverty; some schemes require work or participation in programmes to qualify; a larger issue is that for poor people to be able to engage with education or healthcare or entrepreneurship or markets or whatever those facilities need to be in place and adequate - yes, paying Pedro's family $7 a month might enable them to afford enough food that he can quit shining shoes and go to school, but if there are sixty kids in his class and no effort is put in to bring him up to speed, the future benefits for Pedro are dampened.

   So this book provides an excellent overview of 'just giving money to the poor' as a poverty alleviation strategy, key debates and problems with the idea, outlines of schemes currently in action and how they're faring, and summative pointers about what makes such a scheme effective and how practicalities can be approached. Worthwhile reading for anyone interested in understanding the global political economic struggle to end poverty, especially for those supportive of bottom-up common sense solutions.****

* Microfinance, while not in quite the same league of paternalistic resource-intensive aid strategies broadly described above, has been super popular among liberal progressives and is often heard touted as a key means of alleviating poverty. However, it has problems which I can't be arsed to write so google it if you're interested, and the core concept of this book was the nail in the coffin of my thinking it was worthwhile. What's the point loaning money to someone who's in a poverty trap? Just give them money instead. On that note, I've withdrawn all my outstanding Kiva funds after five years of recycling loans of questionable helpfulness. Ah well.

** I mean, trust an economist to be confused at the notion that giving money to poor people helps them be less poor. The mind boggles.

[this book was the first of an enormous*** pile of university library books, mostly about global political and economic issues, that I'm using as practice for speed reading. partly because the nature of these books' content means I'm unlikely to have particularly interesting thoughts or reflections on them (instead just drinking in large quantities of information to flesh out or refine my views on pretty niche topics) and partly because I've had some of them out for over two years and there are quite a few of them and I've only got ten months left with a valid student card. also partly because it'll mean I'll get to do lots of blog posts, as compensation for how relatively few books I read this summer and (so far) this autumn. one final also - because speed reading is a skill someone who blogs about books they've read should probably have, but it takes lots of practice to get high-speed high-comprehension. anyway. hope that's cool.]

*** Just counted - there were fourteen including this one, so now thirteen.

**** It also slots nicely into my ever-growing personal-opinion-critique of global capitalism and conceptualisation of systemic change: somewhere in the overlaps between grace-led economic structures and radical redistribution from the global north to the global south.

Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands

This book, one of many by Paul Tripp* written to help Christians be more Christ-like, is actually one of the most uplifting, challenging, encouraging, and practical books of this type that I can remember ever reading. (Don't worry, Tim Chester, if you're reading this, which is highly unlikely - you're still way up there.) My dad lent it to me months ago and I've been reading it very slowly but progressively** so as to carefully and meditatively digest its wise, helpful, gospel-centred insights.

   There is so much excellent stuff in here that I can't and won't discuss or overview it all; I simply exhort Christian readers to slowly and progressively digest this book. Tripp knows the nature of the human heart as well as he knows the glory of the gospel, and he is excellent at helping us focus on Jesus so we can navigate our own and others' brokenness so as to allow the Holy Spirit's work of sanctification to be seen and delighted in. This book is, technically, written as a guide for Christian leaders to help them model personal holiness and to counsel and disciple others in their communities, but as Tripp points out, all Christians are called to strive for holiness and to speak the gospel in encouragement and rebuke to one another to keep us all in the body of the church; so both elements of the practical advice given in the book should I think be applicable to any maturing Christian. Tripp writes clearly and powerfully, reminding us of our own need of God's work in us to make us holy, reminding us of the beautiful redemptive truth that we know in Christ, helping us diagnose blind spots in our attitude to personal sin, helping us develop meaningful relationships with other Christians so that we have a more-than-superficial understanding of their lives that enables us to see not just surface sin but the deeper struggles warring in their hearts, helping us develop effective conversational methods to work through our and others' understandings of these heart struggles and where we can turn the gospel light onto it to show them up as redundant and sinful, helping us establish personal and relational and church-community accountability for processes of change as we and others are reminded of our identity in Christ and soften our hearts to allow the Holy Spirit to work in us for Christlike change.****

   This is a book that I feel has substantively sharpened my attitude to my own sin and that of others around me, has substantively re-oriented my proper and clear thinking about my identity as a Christian and its implications, has substantively empowered me with a practical toolkit for loving and knowing and speaking truth to and seeing real heart change in other Christians (and likewise helped me in responding to all the same) as we, together, as a church, seek to put old ways behind us, seek Christlikeness; a collective process involving lots of broken pieces, but we are in the hands of a God who can - and does - do great things using weak unreliable sinners. Including fixing them, bit by bit.*****

* A lovely and godly man with, if I remember, a delightfully Ned Flanders-esque moustache - I met him when I was about 11, as he was in the UK visiting various churchfolk, including my dad.

** Like, seriously, reading half a chapter or a chapter and then having to sit and think and pray about it and then do something else so I don't let any of the wisdom leak out. This book has been with me to Manchester, London, Catalonia, Amsterdam, Derby; to a beach and a campsite and a countryside villa, to the houses of four different friends, to two pubs and three parks and six or seven cafés; finally finishing it this morning in Marmaduke's - one of my favourite little places in Sheffield - also incidentally the last place I met up with Rowan, who's probably up there with my dad and Tim Chester as men who have helped me mature as a Christian; it seems fitting that I finished this there as we used to talk a lot about what we were reading. Needless to say, the book, while it wasn't in mint condition when my dad lent it to me, is now fairly battered and stained. The worst damage was done on the ferry from Calais to Dover during my return from the Netherlands - the book was in my secondary rucksack with a bottle of water which leaked all over it, and while it dried out fine and none of the pages have run, the top third of the book's pages throughout are forever bent together in a rigid wavy deformity. There's also a considerable coffee ring on the front cover, from when I couldn't find a coaster for my bedside table and didn't realise how drippy the mug was. Blemishes like these add character though.***

*** Needless personal digressions like this are what make these posts sometimes go on for so long, and yet also what make them so easy/fun to write. Structured writing takes intensive thought. When the stakes are low enough to allow it, I much prefer aiming generally at a cluster of ideas and reflections and allowing my brain to burp out as much as it can be bothered - needless digressions and all.

**** There are also several quite extensive and really practically helpful appendices about 'data gathering' and 'homework' (basically strategies for working out and working through and working to change what's going on in sinful hearts).

***** Note: I'm on about progressive sanctification here, not salvation generally. #theology!

the Snowman

This book, a wordless (yes) children's Christmas classic from Raymond Briggs, is another that I feel a bit iffy about writing a blog post about, not because it's so short (I've read a few short things on here) but because it has literally no words in the actual content of the book. But alas, I find myself a month on from the last post on here, without having finished any more actual substantive books - this is largely because of the ongoing writing project I mentioned in my previous post, as well as having started back at uni (two jobs, a part-time postgraduate degree, several churchy or extracurricular or activism-ish endeavours, a social life, eating and sleeping and also enjoying TV - this combination does not allow a huge amount of time for recreational reading, sadly), and also because the one substantive book I was recently getting more of a groove into (Spinoza's Ethics, if you must know, which makes the following anecdotal excuse for postlessness quite roundly ironic) was in a bag of mine which was stolen by a drug dealer who crashed a party I was at in Manchester a couple of weeks ago.*

   So as an excuse for a post, and also because despite the immense cultural impact of this particular snowman I had somehow never seen or read it, I seized the opportunity (it's a birthday present for my sister, and being a book made of child-style cardboard, was able to be pre-read without a trace) - and you know what, it's pretty good. The whole story is told through the medium of pencil crayon drawings evocative of 1970s childhood nostalgia - all toast and wellies and fireplaces, when winters were genuinely snowy and snow was genuinely magical, when you had easy access to actual lumps of coal with which to demark facial features and buttons upon any snowmen built, when, let's face it, kids actually built snowmen.** Simpler times. The Good Old Days. Whatever.

   The actual story is as follows [SPOILERS]: boy builds snowman, boy goes to bed, boy wakes up in the night to see snowman moving about, boy invites magically-living snowman inside, shows it a variety of hot (oh no!) and cold (oh yes!) and funny (haha!) items therein, boy is then led outside by snowman - who seizes the boys hand and flies off dangerously into the night, in what can either be taken as a bizarre exploratory abduction or a glorious flight of youthful imagination (probably the latter), snowman returns boy home, boy goes back to bed, can't sleep due to excitement about the occurrence, goes outside at sunrise to discover a melted snowman.

   For what it is, a wordless book of pure nostalgic imagination, it is actually brilliant - its status as a classic should probably attest to that. There's a purity in its simplicity, it's the kind of story that a small child who can't quite confidently read yet could fully engage with and be absolutely spellbound by, and for that, big thumbs up. Despite how flippant and digressive this post has been (aren't they all though), don't think I don't know this book would be a perfect wintertime delight for kids - indeed, one to stoke and spark their love of both alternative methods of storytelling and old-school play, two of the finest imagination-pumps in existence.

On that note, if you're a six-year-old or younger reading this, go outside!***

* Upon realising this, I was annoyed about losing the book but also amused that such an item had been, if only as part of a bag-to-chuck-other-stolen-stuff-in type deal, stolen, and wondered if its new owner would get round to seeing what Baruch de Spinoza had to say about God and metaphysics and inner peace and whatnot. Whatever the case, it turned up stashed in a cupboard the day after, and is still in Manchester. The whole debacle has made me slightly wary of getting stuck into any other of the several interesting books I currently have on the go, lest they meet a similar fate. Key lessons here are probably not to leave your bag in the kitchen of a party where there are people you don't know, as some of them may turn out to be party-crashing super-shifty dealers (we weren't to know), but also probably don't take philosophy books to those kinds of parties. Even if it's only for reading on the lonely train ride home.

** I mean, they still do, but have you seen them? Calvin and Hobbes would despair. Kids these days get cold hands after constructing a cylindrical lump any taller than a foot or two, whinge out and finish quickly by sticking a carrot, a twig, two small stones and a flatcap on said lump, and whisk back inside to warm their fingers up on a games console. I blame global warming - there's just not enough snow to make it worthwhile anymore.

*** Or read a book!

The Angry Spider

This, admittedly, is not really a book. It's a single-page-worth of internet fanfic ('fan fiction' for those among you with better things to read, which is hopefully all of you, and is usually also me), based on a single line from episode 8 of season 3 of BBC political-satirical comedy The Thick of It.* It is, however, quite funny, and if you're a fan of the show, I'd strongly recommend giving it a read,** especially since it'll take you five minutes tops. Anyway, even though this isn't really a book, I felt compelled to do a post about it, lest the whole month of September 2016 lie empty upon my blog's archives - an increasingly likely prospect, as I just haven't been doing much reading over summer. Well, other than that huge week-long splurge while I was on holiday. This is because I've been working on a big personal writing project, and my summers, while generally happily filled with recreational reading, have this year become much more word-output than word-input heavy. So, apologies to any post-starved readers - but fret not, I've not stopped reading entirely, nor have I given up on this blog. It might just be a bit sparse, especially since uni starts again soon.

* MILD EXPLANATORY SPOILER ALERT: Malcolm Tucker, the sweary Scottish hyper-connected hyper-angry spin doctor extraordinaire at the heart of the British government as portrayed in the show and at the heart of the show itself, temporarily finds himself jobless. Someone reads a list of increasingly absurd-sounding little jobs he could take on to fill his time post-political-career, one of which is "write a children's book called The Angry Spider". Malcolm mutters "for fuck's sake" and stands to leave. I found the line quite funny upon rewatching, and from somewhere the notion popped into my head that TTOI does have quite a cult following, and like anything with a cult following, probably inspires occasional online fan-fiction, and this was almost asking for it. So I gave it a quick google, and was not displeased. Hence this post.

** If you've not seen the show, there's probably no point, but you should also watch the show, because it's one of the finest satire series ever committed to television.

How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

This book, a novel by Mohsin Hamid, was not at all what I expected. I included it on/in my holiday reading-pile as a bit of light relief from the non-fiction otherwise comprising the pile, assuming from the blurb-quotes and title that it would be a very well-written exciting funny satirical romp of a rags-to-riches romance story. And, to be fair, it is. But I was unprepared for the sheer brilliance of Hamid as a writer - this is a novel that sucks you into the life of its protagonist with all the raw power of a momentarily-startled goose getting sucked through a jet turbine. I would've finished it all in one go did circumstances not conspire against me.* Before I even start discussing the plot, style, themes, character and setting, various other general brilliances, in any detail - I fully exhort anyone who likes a good novel to bump this one up to near the top of your To-Read List** as it's one of the most original, powerful, and downright gorgeously life-affirming things I've ever read. Maybe don't even bother reading this post - I don't have any particularly interesting reflections on it, I'm just going to talk about why I think it's such a great novel, in considerable detail.

   So.

   [Having just finished writing this post I feel obliged to add - SPOILER ALERT.]

   Basically, the novel is about a man from Asia who is born in poverty and becomes extremely wealthy. We never learn his name - the book is written in second person, as if you, the reader, are this character - and far from disorienting or gimmicky, this serves to hit home the interminable squalour or dizzying privilege experienced throughout. The novel spans this man's entire life; starting out as a sickly rural toddler teetering on the cusp of possibility and prospects seeming minimal (even survival only down as a maybe), before your father moves the family to the city, you enrol in school and do well, you get a job and put in the effort to learn business smarts as well as a bank of global cultural reference-points, you make it into higher education and navigate the ideologues and religious-political activism that dominate there, you gain further work experience paying close attention to the modes of a man who knows what he's doing, you turn an entrepreneurial hand and start producing and selling bottled water (a much-needed good) which, following a few of the standard hiccups and ladders (violent clashes with more established business rivals, greasing the right palms, striking back-room deals with political figures, you know) blossoms into a hugely successful corporate entity - well, for a while - and finally, you take stock of what's been worthwhile in your life, and you die. Somewhere along the way you marry a wife*** whom you go on to neglect, but more importantly (to the novel), as a teenager you strike up a friendship with a girl, fall for her, only for her (following a youth-shattering pleasurable encounter) to leave and pursue a career in modelling, which you follow closely for the next decade or so, semi-accidentally running into her later in life, and then slowly fading from each other's memory (until, spoilers).

   The narration does occasionally lay off from being purely second person recount of your life to take flights of descriptive detail about other characters' lives, situations, struggles; and similarly to describe the frenetic dynamic surroundings enabling the events of the story - that of massive rapid socioeconomic development in Asia.**** These latter passages help place 'your' story in context (one poor kid who made all the right moves and got lucky out of an enormous continent of poor kids who, largely, don't make the right moves and/or don't get lucky - the former passages about other characters help flesh this out, often twisting a dagger of bleak realism through your gut with a single deft sentence).

   Awareness of making these right moves forms a large part of the basis of the structure and style of the novel - it's written (very loosely) as a parody of a self-help book.***** Chapter one, where you begin as a child on the brink of serious illness in the helpless deserts of opportunity that are the underdeveloped countryside, is titled 'Move to the city' - which, in that chapter, thanks to your father's family spirit, you do, and you have taken the right first step in becoming filthy rich in rising Asia. In subsequent steps the narrator (i.e. the writer of the self-help book) walks you through the successes of the protagonist (i.e. you) in becoming filthy rich, 'Learn from a master', 'Be prepared to use violence', 'Befriend a bureaucrat', and so on - with the exception of the chapter in which you fall in love with the girl, which is titled 'Don't fall in love' on account of infatuation's (especially with a girl who soon after your first encounter runs off and becomes a famous model while you're still struggling through entry-level business experience) being a hindrance rather than a help in your striving to become filthy rich. However, this element takes on a new vigour in the book's later chapters, when you are old and losing control of the empire you have built, when you are verging on being forgotten and dead: the narrator (who to be fair is playfully insightful throughout, in short bursts at the fore of each chapter) takes stock of the fact that you, though having become filthy rich, seem to have lost steam.

   The 'How To' intentionality lends a dogged single-mindedness to the protagonist's pursuit of wealth (one that, given his abject poverty faced in early chapters, can be entirely appreciated) that leaves by the wayside relationships with parents, siblings, wife, son - not ignored, but not prioritised: through the bulk of the book, you are following the self-help guide to getting filthy rich, and your mislaid attention is of course attended to by the narrator and it hits home superbly. Only when your energy is spent and your business in the hands of another do you reassess your priorities, regret the marriage you allowed to crumble, and by a chance meeting with the girl (also now very old) stumble into a more-or-less happy ending. I don't think by losing the bulk of his wealth and re-encountering his first love the protagonist's plight is meant to show us that young love is what really matters, or even in a skewed way to show us the opposite (classic novel trajectory): I think Hamid is doing something far more fundamental - to make us attentive to real life as it is lived, in the moment, shared with people one loves. The protagonist's pursuit of wealth tears him away from his birth family when they need his help (and he does help out financially but his relationships with them stultify until they, having not become filthy rich to escape the oppressive conditions of rising Asia, succumb to various ills long before he does) and even when he starts his own family his prominent position occupies all his concerns - so that while his wife and son are provided for far above the majority of the population or the protagonist when he was young, they are starved for him relationally. Hamid is not saying 'oh but then he meets the girl again so it's a happy ending' - he is saying DO NOT FORGET WHAT IS IMPORTANT: PEOPLE - especially across the span of a whole life, mislaid priorities can leave us empty even when we achieve great things in one particular field, and when these achievements are stripped away, what are we left with? The protagonist and the girl meeting again in old age is not a solution, it is a consolation, where you, with all your friends and family dead, your wife moved on, your son busy with work as you were at his age, and you not even filthy rich anymore - find some comfort in finding someone to share the last few lonely years with, and appreciate properly, living in them as they are, loving who you are with.

   The whole style and structure and story is a magnificent testament to the fundamental importance of empathy: of it being part of how we are as human persons that we constantly seek to know and care how those around us are feeling, and respond rightly to that, rather than assuming people to be ticking along aright and continuing following whatever self-help guide to a less important goal is playing itself out in our heads. Reading and stories are part of this learning process, as the narrator sometimes discusses - indeed, getting emotionally involved in a good novel is probably about as empathetic an experience as one can possibly have on your own. And this novel does so like very few others (no doubt, literally making 'you' the protagonist helps). I rarely quote passages from books I'm blogging about, but here's a relevant passage from the final chapter:

"As you create this story and I create this story, I would like to ask you how things were. I would like to ask you about the person who held your hand when dust went in your eye or ran with you from the rain. I would like to tarry here awhile with you, or if tarrying is impossible, to transcend my here, with your permission, in your creation, so tantalizing to me and so unknown. That I can't do this doesn't stop me from imagining it. And how strange that when I imagine, I feel. The capacity for empathy is a funny thing."

   Truly, Mohsin Hamid is one of the greatest novelists I have read, and this paragraph I hope serves to show that he genuinely understands the raw power that stories have, and is using the medium of the written word for its greatest possible use - to inspire and empower us to do what we know is fundamental: empathise.

   I'm done. Read this book.

* I started it during the Megabus journey from Barcelona to Paris to Amsterdam (a 25-hour crawl but I hate flying on eco-principle and this was super cheap for such a long drive), hopping from a family holiday to a techno festival, and was engrossed after about three pages, but eventually had to sleep. And then I couldn't read it when I got to Amsterdam because there was a bloody festival going on, and my engrossment passed during all the Quality Music - so I had to wait a few days for a truly spare moment (the Megabus back to London) to dive back in. I think this might be the only novel I've completed having read exclusively during international bus journeys.

** Do people other than me have To-Read Lists? Dunno. You should. To start you off, here's three novels with a life-spanning emotional heft similar to this one: 1, 2, 3.

*** None of the characters have names - they are all referred to either in immediate situational context or via their relationship to you (e.g. 'your wife', 'your father', 'the girl'), a touch which lends the reader's walkthrough of the protagonist's life an earthy, human, memory-like quality. You have to picture the scene, because there aren't specific verbal labels to latch onto in your head.

**** It doesn't really matter where in Asia - the cultural references are so generic that it could be anywhere from Afghanistan to China to India to Myanmar - what is important is the enormity of globalisation's impact on the societies and economies on the continent where this is happening, which has been by no means uniform, but the events of the novel are characterised so much by this process above country-specific culture that the vagueness probably helps the reader get sucked in, fleshing out the look and feel of the protagonist's environment with whatever Asian culture we're most familiar with. Nifty trick to grab a global readership - 'How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Pakistan' (cited as that's where Mohsin Hamid is from but I haven't a clue if he wrote it with a specific nation in mind as setting) just doesn't smack of the same seismic shift, which is a key ingredient in the book's punch. 

***** Hence the title.

the Economy of Grace

This book by Kathryn Tanner is a veritable nuclear submarine of well-argued scholarship. I won't say much about it, partly because the content of the book is more the fruitful-and-thorough cross-pollination of ideas I've already read other books about and so can easily just dump loads of relevant links (see final paragraph) into this post, partly because I'm rushing so as to join my brother for a game of giant backyard chess (yes I'm still on holiday), and partly because if this post piques your interest even in the slightest I think you should just read this book.

   Tanner seeks to explore 'theological economy' - how religious truth might yield any implications for systems of material resource distribution. She argues that such a link is undeniable if we look at Christian theology with any degree of serious application, especially when regarding worldly structures such as capitalism which literally thrive on collective selfishness - the opposite of the rightly-aligned heart-motives called to by Christianity - in competition that inevitably leaves winners and losers, and more often than not the former feel exempt from any responsibility to extensively care for the latter. She goes on to explore philosophical and theological conceptions of property, of ownership, of gift-giving, of interdependence; and chiefly asks where grace, the central component of Christian ethical reality, fits into our understanding of economic systems - she concludes the grace sits at considerable odds to the atomised individualistic competitiveness that characterises capitalism. An 'economy of grace' is not one of everyone-for-themselves-competition nor one of purely-reciprocal gift-giving - it is one of plenty and prosperity, because people understanding the nature (in a Christian worldview) of their existence as an individual human among the wider human society/community have a radically different attitude to other beings, to resources, to their own time, to their own needs and wants and those of others; one that completely upturns basic presumptions about how markets work, how welfare works, and more. Toward the end of the book she tentatively explores some structural changes that could take place to bring us toward this model of economy, alongside a hefty prayerful caveat about how lost and broken the world is and the need for such economic change to be known to be unsustainable unless supported by genuine heart change.

   It is an extremely interesting and thought-provoking book, and I would challenge any Christian who takes social justice seriously and has an interest in critical understanding of our global economic system so as to work for what is good and right to read it.

   I promised a final paragraph full of link-dumpage, so here you are: for excellent explorations of how non-competitiveness in global systems can complement and accelerate many aspects of social, political, economic, and environmental justice, from a non-theological approach, check out Tim Jackson and several scholars from the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. For a general further reading on Christian views on social justice, check out Tim Keller - but for a much more in-depth nuanced reading on grace, God's love, and the nature of rightly-oriented human preference in ethical decision-making, check out Robert Adams. Finally, if you're up for something quite dense but incredibly encouraging, challenging, and enlightening on the topic of 'love' as something that God does and that we should do, I cannot recommend better than Søren Kierkegaard (obviously ties directly into Kathryn Tanner's discussions of grace).

Consensus Handbook

This book, the handbook for consensus decision-making published by Seeds for Change, the group who run training workshops about all that jazz, is literally what it says on the tin. I don't really have any substantive thoughts of my own on it - it's just a really helpful book for anyone engaged in community-level organisation or activism, or any group that could potentially benefit from making decisions using consensus (could be interesting for groups of church leaders/elders - whole congregations even maybe). As such, if you're currently involved in a group that makes decisions and you feel that that group's method of making decisions often doesn't take full account of everyone's viewpoints or concerns, and would be open to investigating a super-democratic super-inclusive surprisingly-streamlined method of decision-making that is great for effective solutions and group cohesion (speaking from experience as someone who's been part of a couple of groups that use consensus decision-making for over two years), check consensus out. The whole book is available for free as a .pdf from the link at the head of this post.

   It walks through, in helpful terms and constantly setting its principles in the context of its values, how to do consensus decision-making, how to facilitate meetings using it, techniques and activities that can be helpful in consensus-facilitated meetings, and common troubleshooting problems that may arise when trying to make decisions or run meetings by consensus. (if you've got this far through the paragraph and you don't know what consensus decision-making is, I'm not going to bother to explain it, click here.) There's a fairly thought-provoking chapter at the end too about some of the problems we have in the lack of democratic decision-making in wider society, and how community organisers starting to favour consensus plays a role in slowly changing that.

Moby Dick

This book, an indisputable classic and oft-touted 'Great American Novel' by Herman Melville, is basically about whales and the men who hunted them, more specifically one big white whale nicknamed Moby Dick and one big white male human named Captain Ahab who becomes obsessed with the pursuit of the eponymous cetacean. Notably (to my blog, not to general discourse on this book) this book is second to Frank Herbert's Dune as the book that has taken me the longest to finish ever.* I've just finished it in a mad day-long splurge because the last hundred pages or so start ramping up a little bit (and the last sixtyish were actually gripping) and, well, I'm on holiday in Spain with my family, and everyone else has gone to the beach (regular readers will know that 'holiday', to me, in large part consists of setting aside Time For Reading, i.e. eschewing more sociable activities for a four-to-ten-hour chunk, perhaps every other day) which means it was a Nearly Get Sunburnt Back At The House While Finishing A Book Day for me.

   I did not enjoy and do not personally recommend this book.
   At the same time, it is an immensely deep, complex, and powerful work of genuine literature, and I'm sure many people would find a lot in it to make it worth reading. Certainly I didn't hate it; I'll try to talk first about bits I liked. The overall style of the prose was probably my favourite aspect - Melville writes with an eloquent ruggedness that carries the novel, a balance of pragmatic jargon and poetic flights; as such the text's atmosphere feels both hyper-endowed-with-meaning and like a cross between a classical library and an actual whaling-ship. Then there genuinely are many good parts, truly excellent parts that one cannot help reading without feeling the recognition of a fantastic writer: occasional brilliant turns of dialogue, or extended reflections** from the narrator (Ishmael***), or descriptive passages that paint such gorgeously atmospheric scenes of whaling that I found myself looking at harpoons on eBay.
   Now, onto things about it that I didn't like so much. Firstly, while this is admittedly more of a hippy's whinge than an actual complaint against the novel (but what kind of hippy would I be did I not make one); the romanticised masculinised glory of man's conquest over nature, as portrayed in one of the most enduring grudges in literature (Ahab & the whale), has, given the novel's culturally ubiquitous suffusion in the West, undoubtedly contributed to the development of an anthropocentric social normality which at this point a century and a half since its publication has all but severed humanity's felt and known relationships with nature, to our peril and to the peril of many animals we now unthinkingly steamroller in the name of progress. Less hunting, more saving - and forget about the dogged hunting-down of one single specific whale, that's actually bonkers.****
   Secondly, while this is probably more excusable for an 1851 Nantucketer than a 2014 Swede, it's still unpleasant and uncomfortable to read and almost just feels clumsy - the non-white characters, of whom there are several, are portrayed within the narrowest array of affectionate caricatured stereotypes of 'the exotic'. Though that said, literally none of the characters except Ahab***** (unless you count Ishmael on account of his endless paragraphs of reflection) display any emotional depth - they're rough-and-ready experienced whale-catchers whose actions and words betray nothing of even a hinted-at internal life, instead dutifully fulfilling the slow-burning chain of events that constitutes the plots or spouting the author's thoughts in clunky dialogue. This leads me to my final and main thing - either there has been a genuine lapse in constructing interesting and believable characters, or it's all part of the plan...
   Finally, the main thing that annoys me about the novel is the fact that it might actually be, in ways I suspected during the reading of it, genius; all the things I found most infuriating and tedious about the book are (quite probably) in there for very good reason, to create a text that further illumines both the narrator's inner life during the plot's events and the author's inner life during the book's writing, and to thus create a readers' experience that amplifies the very core themes of the book. This core theme is the meaninglessness of obsession, the futility of straining to assert oneself against the void; obviously explored via long dragged-out metaphor in Captain Ahab's vengeful pursuit of Moby Dick, a whale that, while it may have wronged him, bears him no ill, and has no frameworks for comprehending the vindictive nature of its being hunted - Ahab, throughout the course of the novel, descends into madness and pushes his crew out of sensible patterns of activity as this obsession takes hold, only for both encounters with the white whale to be completely devoid of any reciprocated sense of poignancy, the beast merely doing what whales-avoiding-capture-by-whalers do.
   Back to infuriating and tedious - the bits of the book that rendered my enjoyment of it so difficult. Primarily, an enormous proportion of it (like, seriously, between a third and two fifths) is huge dumps of non-fictional information about whales, whale anatomy, whale-catching as an economic activity and its history and techniques, cultural or anthropological or philosophical reflections on whales or whaling, various tools and processes using by whalers when whaling, and so on - in painfully exacting and extensive detail. Some of these chapters were among the most boring passages of novels I think I have ever read (but they are still written beautifully, however far that goes). Secondarily, it's strewn, especially in Ishmael's 'inner monologue' parts, with extensive and obscure references to 'classics', to such a degree that it genuinely feels like Melville was insecure and thought he'd chuck in as much of these as he could, even when adding barely anything to the flow or stock of the prose, to come across as a Legit Man Of Words.
   Here's the really annoying bit: these aspects actually complement the theme of obsession perfectly. Ishmael draws us into this story about Ahab keenly chasing a whale. We are slowly introduced to the crew and the world of whaling, and before long, we are plunged into chapters and chapters of Just Stuff About Whales/Whaling - reflecting Ishmael as he is forced by necessity to learn, extremely in-depth, more of his trade and its objects (whales). Likewise, Herman himself must have accrued an immense amount of knowledge about whales and whaling to have been able to write this novel - I quite enjoy the speculation that once his research hit a certain point he might've just thought "allow this, I'm basically a genius on whales and whaling now, I'm gonna paraphrase this into atmosphere-enhancing prose and stick it all in there to make it seem like the character's getting sucked in"; and once at that stage, he may have further thought "if obsessiveness itself is an aspect of how I'm choosing what to put in, I may as well decorate and flourish it with literary and historical and sociocultural references that would seem ostentatious in any other context!" Who knows what Herman thought? This theory would also explain why all the non-Ahab characters are so flat (they're only there to help display obsessive whaling!), including Ishmael himself (he's only there as a viewpoint for watching Ahab's obsession but also to vent his own meta-obsessive stuff about whales!). Regardless, I am more inclined now to think that some degree of deliberation went into the novel as a whole and Herman Melville wasn't just some cetacean-mad writer with a grand vision and literally no skill at self-editing. Even so, the sheer amount of these bits just makes the whole experience of reading the novel a frustrating and sometimes seemingly endless one - remember, I only finished it at all out of persistent refusal to let Moby Dick beat me.
   Wait a minute, that sounds familiar.
   So maybe the reader's experience is meant to mirror that same grudge-building patience-testing dogged-pushing-onward-to-the-finish of Captain Ahab and Ishmael and Herman Melville himself? Maybe it is. Whatever the case, my gut feeling when thinking back over this book is "I'm glad I read it but I am more glad that I don't have to read it anymore." Annoyance, mainly.

* Arguably longest, depending on whether you count Genuinely Giving Up as a factor. I started Dune when I was 13 and then had it more or less on-the-go very slowly before finishing it in a spurt of realising it was actually excellent when I was 22. Moby Dick on the other hand, I ill-advisedly embarked upon as a 7-year-old, having just seen Matilda (she reads it in that), only to bail out after a chapter or two, understandably spooked by the dense prose and scary exotic characters (though for whom upon more recent reading, my 'wow this character is a bit much' had matured into 'wow this portrayal is very racist'), and then re-attempting the novel in my second year of A-levels. I'd planned to do some kind of comparative coursework thing about narrators using Ishmael alongside Pi Patel and Holden Caulfield and Christopher Boone, but ended up just using the other three, as Ishmael's story was an epic one horribly told, and it took me the next five years to finish reading it. The only things that kept me going were a grim (almost Ahab-like) determination to not be defeated by the infamous Moby Dick, itself the white whale of classic novels (by which I mean fatty, not elusive or supreme), and the creeping hope that the ending would be epic, which it sort of almost was. There were a fair few good bits - read above.

** One part that springs particularly to mind, for me at least, is the first paragraph of chapter forty-nine - Melville's capacity for sweeping-yet-accurate philosophical musings couched in well-textured writing shows well. There are many other bits like that but this is the only one I can summon from the top of my head, as it resonated with me.

*** Narrators are (complete the sentence) [vessels for the conveyance of story] AND/OR [vessels for the conveyance of reflective musing] AND/OR [vessels for the conveyance of factual information relevant to events in the story] AND/OR [characters].
   When I asked Herman Melville to complete that sentence, he excluded characters! That does explain why despite Ishmael's inner monologue comprising probably way over 70% of the book, we finish Moby Dick knowing nothing tangible about him - except that he knows a lot about whaling - which is something I vaguely expect of a narrator. See the paragraph above about obsession being a theme of the novel having an influence on its content choices - it may excuse Ishmael somewhat.

**** Suggestion for a sequel: Ishmael, some years after the [SPOILER ALERT] death of Captain Ahab during a misjudged attempt to bring a certain white whale to justice, goes full circle. His insane obsession with whales (see above) brings him to value them above their economic instrumentality, and he gathers a ragtag troupe of whatever the equivalent of PETA activists was in mid-19th-century America, and they row about all over the world forcibly but peacefully disrupting whale hunts. It ends with Moby Dick showing up and trashing their boat - Ishmael is holding his harpoon when it swallows him, and at the last moment he thinks "you don't deserve to be saved you evil whale!" and stabs it through the roof of the mouth. They both die, the end.

***** And to an extent Pip, a black kid who nearly drowns and dies on the inside.