The Shack

This book by William Paul Young is a powerful theological novel (a quote on the front claims it has the capacity to do for our times what John Bunyan did for his with Pilgrim's Progress) about suffering, forgiveness, sadness, and trust, wrapped around an exploratory picture of our relationship with God. I've just breezed through it in a few days because though I have read it before (years ago) my friend Charlotte and my little brother Ryan have both mentioned they're currently reading it, and I decided to revisit one of the more poignant stick-in-your-memory stories I've read. The book itself, in terms of the (non-God) characters, the plot, the writing, etc - to be completely honest is pretty contrived and average. Were it not for the fact that the bulk of the book comprises its main character (typical, if jaded, American everyman called Mack who has recently lost a daughter to a random kidnapper-murderer) basically just hanging out with corporeal embodiments of the three members of the Trinitarian Godhead* then I would find very little compelling about this book - but oh boy, the way he writes the character of the trinity is just kind of under-the-skin-tingles familiar and brimming with wisdom and truth. Loads of respectable theologians complained about this book's portrayal of the Trinity as three distinct persons as committing this heresy or that - but ultimately I don't really think it's meant to be taken as a speculative attempt at realistic imagination, more a leap into 'what if God wanted to do this, what would it look like, how could we observe the members of the Trinity interacting in ways that were recognisable to everyday human life?' - and this, I think, it does very well. Mack and God eat together, run across a lake, do some gardening and digging, and have several chapters-worth of extremely poignant gospel-infused conversation about his pain, his faith, the complex nature of right and wrong in a broken world and the God who is right there around him who he refuses to humbly and lovingly accept. These conversations are where the book comes alive and is where the meat of its being worth reading occurs: W. P. Young has wide and deep experience with worldly loss but also knows the character of God well, and this comes across in his writing - ultimately it's a book about how Christians can learn to practice living in joyful awareness of and sensitivity to the presence of God, regardless of how much confusion or trauma they feel separates them from that same grace and love. Many are the lines in this book that I think have a particular, soft-spoken but powerful straightforwardness in making a point rooted in biblical thought that speaks of our relationship with God, and couched in the (arguably heretical but artistically allowable?) interpersonal manifestations of these characters' conversational responses to human questions often deep truths will bubble to the surface and you will think, 'oh, I'd never thought of it like that before,' and you may be prompted to revisit your own attitudes and find them growing in humility and joy. And frankly, what more can one reasonably expect as a good outcome from reading a Christian novel?

* Jesus is portrayed with historical-ethnic accuracy, which is refreshing. God the Father is a motherly Afro-American woman who goes by the name of Elousia. The Holy Spirit takes the form of an ethereal Asian lady who calls herself Sarayu.

Meanwhile, Trees

This book by Mark Waldron is the first book of poetry I've ever bought purely because of its title. I am trying to read more poetry, but aside from the obvious span of classic or well-renowned names, it's hard to discover new ones - so in my last jaunt past a local bookshop I simply browsed the shelf of poets for any titles that sprung out at me, and obviously something about Meanwhile, Trees did the trick. And as haphazard and noncommittal as that sounds (and if it sounds so it's because it is), I actually very much enjoyed this book. Mark Waldron's poems have a darkly kind of twisted character to them, but also a bizarre and often verging on surreal current of playfulness, weirdness, irony and levity. The blurb proclaims, 'these poems may pretend they're joking but they never really are' - and that comes across; one can find oneself laughing out loud at a turn of phrase throwing a stanza headlong into absurdity only for the following lines to drag it back into a larger grimmer picture of, well, still absurdity. Would recommend to poetry-readers with a stomach for visceral imagery and shapeshifting ennui.

Jesus and the Earth

This book by the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, is a powerful short little tract on the implications for Christian environmentalism that can be derived directly from the life and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament accounts. Long-term readers will probably be aware that Christianity and environmentalism are both very much up my street - and I'd like to devote a longer post to some relatively in-depth discussion of how these two things overlap and converge, but I'm gonna do this in a later post as there's another book I'm reading at the moment that will empower a much juicier wodge of reflection. James Jones here has provided an extremely accessible text both strongly grounded in biblical text and mainstream theology as well as capable of discussing ecological issues without risking confusion or alienation of the average Christian reader (times are changing, but I still often get the impression that many in the church are almost hostile to environmental concerns, or at best actively passive - on numerous occasions my voiced concerns about climate change or whatever have been brushed aside with a deft 'oh well, it won't matter if Jesus comes back before then!'). In the years since this was published, the urgency of environmental matters facing humankind has rocketed, and the church could be doing so much more to pursue a renewed and beneficent stewardship of this one planet God has given us to live on; but such change is always a gradual process, with different persons or parts progressing at different rates - with that in mind, this book is one I'd recommend (as a text to recommend to or give to) to Christian readers who are for want of a nicer word ignorant about environmental issues: Jones' faithful and scriptural approach makes this book probably a good one to nudge those who love Jesus closer to practical up-to-date realisations about what that means for lovingly living in Jesus' creation.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

This book is the fourth in Douglas Adams's cult classic trilogy (of which there are five parts) sci-fi comedy adventure. In this instalment, Arthur Dent winds up somehow back on Earth, where he meets a young woman called Fenchurch (who turns out to be the person who worked out the meaning of life shortly before being destroyed by the Vogons - or at least, this happened on the previous iteration of Earth). Most of the book is a not-so-sci-fi pretty standard issue English comedy love story between Arthur and Fenchurch, as they try flying together, meet a rain god, win a raffle, and go in search of a madman (Wonko the Sane) who claims to know what happened to all the dolphins (who, I hasten to add, all disappeared - the title is their last message to humanity), before Ford Prefect rocks up in the last chapter with a giant space robot, shoplifts a load of films he'd never got round to finishing before Earth got blown up last time round, and the three of them go in search of God's final message to his creation, which is a tad anticlimactic, although the actual scene is very touching and has Marvin in it.

Probably read the post about the first one for a bit of context about how I'm doing posts for the whole series.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

This book is the third in Douglas Adams's cult classic trilogy (of which there are five parts) sci-fi comedy adventure. In this instalment, having been trapped on prehistoric Earth for about five years, Arthur and Ford escape through an eddy in the space-time continuum (on a sofa, no less) and find themselves at Lord's Cricket Ground, only for evil robots left over from an ancient galactic war to disrupt things - they are rescued by a friend with a spaceship/bistro, and go on to rejoin their Trillian, Zaphod and Marvin to avert the robots from rekindling the enormous galaxy-threatening war. During the course of all this, Arthur also meets his archnemesis and learns to fly. It's pretty zarking hoopy.

Probably read the post about the first one for a bit of context about how I'm doing posts for the whole series.

selected poems 1923 - 1958

This book, a collection of poems by e. e. cummings, was just gorgeous. I mean, if you like a good poem then (well there's no shortage of them but) dive right in - cummings's work is modernistic and incredibly inventive in places, but his style is so polished and honed that they are immediately accessible too (perhaps on second or third reading for some of the more experimental ones); you will be swollen with feelings from perfectly-constructed abstractions; you will come to learn the truly immaculate power of well-chosen/placed punctuation; some of the simpler ones are like drinking a warm mugful of springtime sunbeams blended with honey and rosepetals and lovers' embraces. There is blazing romance and raw human joy and natural beauty in these poems, and sword-sharp satire in some of them too. As with it seems most of the poetry books I've done posts about, I don't have any particularly strong reflective thoughts about the book overall, as these like all true and great poems are transcendent, and thus resist being directly digestible by mere intellect: they are to be felt, not made into some ingredient for a hodgepodge mishmash whimwham of ideas none of which could possibly grasp the elusive core of meaning upon which a body of poetic work ultimately rests. And so, to that end, I will conclude this post by copying one out.

no man,if men are gods;but if gods must

be men,the sometimes only man is this

(most common,for each anguish is his grief;

and,for his joy is more than joy,most rare)

a fiend,if fiends speak truth;if angels burn

by their own generous completely light,

an angel;or(as various worlds he'll spurn

rather than fail immeasurable fate)

coward,clown,traitor,idiot,dreamer,beast-

such was a poet and shall be and is

-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend

a sunbeam's architecture with his life:

and carve immortal jungles of despair

to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand

the Dave Walker Guide to the Church

This book is a collection of cartoons by Dave Walker making very Church-of-England jokes about the Church of England and those who are part of it. Though I am not one of those such people, most of the gags are either recognisable enough from watching shows like Vicar of Dibley or Rev or otherwise recognisable enough from general aspects of English church culture and organisation. It was mildly amusing; I would go so far as to say that perhaps a dozen or so did actually prompt me to emit an audible quasi-laughter-noise. But overall, to me the book highlighted (whether unintentionally or not is utterly indiscernable) the crushing depraved stiltedness of English culture, and how poorly this translates into the development of grace-abundant church environments that are properly outgoing, diverse, inclusive, engaging, and generally just good at facilitating basic human community. I mean, fortunately we have the gospel and that arguably offsets the Englishness to a considerable degree but still - I'm not gonna say it's no laughing matter, it just meant that the book doesn't read as particularly funny because lots of the things it's satirising are legitimately endemic cultural aspects of how organised Christianity in this country is clinging to institutions and traditions and whatnot that, bluntly, alienate the average majority in this our post-Christendom era.* The best use I can think of for this book is as a toilet book in a church office loo (tbh I read most of it on the loo anyway); it may bring one or two smiles and prompt three or four vague concerns about missional efficacy or entrenched legalism.

* I write this as one who is not a member of the Church of England,** and despite my devout faith, am strongly of the opinion that the church in this country should sever its historical-institutional ties to the state, for reasons which I can't be bothered to explicate in the asterisk-footnote to a post about a cartoon book even though I usually wouldn't hesitate at all before doing something like that but Giles Fraser basically makes the best case for it here, and links are easier.

** Although on the 24th I will start a job at the Church Army - which is kind of part of the Church of England, but yeh, whatever, dunno.

Ethics

This book (available from that link as a complete ebook from Project Gutenberg) is the best-known work by rationalist philosopher Baruch [a.k.a. Benedict de] Spinoza, and represents perhaps one of the most singularly ambitious acts of holistic thinking in the history of the western modernist tradition: to devise a completely cohesive logical explanation of basic metaphysics, epistemology, metaethics and ethics based on axioms (like Euclid did for geometry, a field widely known for its similar level of complexity to All Of Philosophy). Parts of this book were core readings for a module on the rationalists I took in second-year of undergraduate (wow that was a long time ago now), and something about Spinoza seemed more endearing and/or accessible than the other rationalists whose books I acquired cheaply (in the days before I became wholly reliant on the university library and only bought books I wanted for personal use) - so I kept reading it after the module finished, but it's fairly dense and there were lots of other things I was reading so it fell by the wayside; until September 2016, when I went in pursuit of meaty things to read alongside my [then]-new writing project and this fit the bill - only for my bag containing this book to be stolen from a house party in Manchester that same month when I was only thirty or so pages in (it was a whole ordeal); fortunately, it showed up the next day discarded in a cupboard as apparently the party-crashing thieves had only needed a bag to chuck people's phones left on charge in and were happy to leave behind a classic work of holistic rationalist philosophy. Crazy, huh?
   Anyway - onto the book itself.
   Spinoza lays out his axiomatic philosophy in five sections: on God (which explores the metaphysical nature of all reality and considers how this operates in component parts, including humans), on the mind (which explores from these metaphysical standpoints how self-awareness must be made possible and what the nature of its being is, as in humans), on the human mind's being intrinsically connected to physical existence and therefore subject to all manner of 'affects' (emotional-mental micro-reactions that underlie and inform rational agency) and what these are, how this plays out psychologically, and finally how individuals can transcend their affects to live by reason and find true freedom.
   Now, the intricate detail arguments of how effectively comprehensively cohesive a system of philosophical thought this all is is a question far beyond me, and if you want an answer (probably read this first anyway) then google John Cottingham or just read some of the Stanford commentaries about Spinoza's work and how it stood up to later criticism but basically, while it may be riddled with slight twinges of illogic and feature occasional propositions that do not clearly follow from previous axioms or propositions and seem to spring 'rationally' out of nowhere, likewise the explanations and corollaries and scholiums in each point often seem to harbour nested presumptions that certainly haven't been justified by the previous work - and fair enough, as it was a gargantuan task, attempting to literally distill the nature of reality and the good life into a provable, axiomatic, impenetrably logical system - and the sheer sincerity with which Spinoza goes about this effort is testament to the (in my opinion) incredibly strong ethical centre, and therefore transcendent moral drive, of his work. Cynical readers may think I'm just starting to slap words together willy-nilly with no regard for whether it's a tangibly-meaningful phrase, and well, they'd be half-right. What I was trying to say is that Spinoza inevitably gets a lot of the details and mechanics not-quite-spot-on, presumably because he's not omniscient (although, if you take his metaphysical arguments seriously, there is a case to be made for his being God, at least a bit*); however the general thrust of Ethics elucidates a world that is ordered, rational, explicable, where unity and humility and togetherness and reason are implicitly better than assuming one is already right regardless of psychological context - and these basic thrusts form the heart of his work, axioms and propositions and syllogisms devised and twisted around these to try to form as cohesive and self-supporting system of rational explanation as possible but never quite succeeding because he was, as I am, as you are, a finite being, intrinsically incapable of grasping the nature of the infinite or eternal, let alone penning comprehensive descriptions of its function and nature, but let the tautological nature of some basic truths preclude their being taken by faith as irrationality: that reason and compassion and joy and freedom are good things to be sought in our own and others' lives, and that these facts have some cosmic significance for, at the very least, us, who knows them.
   My edition's text was translated by Edwin Curley and, in prose if notsomuch argument, was actually extremely readable (and it gets easier as it goes along): if you love mindblowing hypotheticals but never even actually read a philosophy book before, Spinoza's Ethics could be an interesting and weird but manageable and inspiringly nice ride.



* I could do a whole post on religious nitpicking with Spinoza - he was denounced as a heretic by his contemporaries, and while there is much of interest and much to like in his philosophy, it certainly does not reflect stable Christian theology, and is more like quasi-humanist transcendental pantheism if anything.

the Restaurant at the End of the Universe

This book is the second book in Douglas Adams' cult classic trilogy (of which there are five parts) sci-fi comedy adventure. In this instalment, the gang go for lunch at Milliways, a restaurant housed in a time-bubble at the literal end of the universe (though their journey there is delayed by an unplanned trip to the Hitchhikers' Guide head offices, where Zaphod totally fails to gain any perspective); after this Zaphod and Trillian meet the man apparently in charge of Everything (a superb character and his shortish scene is one of my favourites from the whole series) while Ford and Arthur wind up with themselves surrounded by idiots in an unseemingly familiar place.

Probably read the post about the first one for a bit of context about how I'm doing posts for the whole series.

the Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness

This book by Tim Keller is a potent little* meditation on the nature of Christlike humility, and how we as Christians trying to live faithfully and lovingly for the good of others and glory of God must seek to transcend the whining itches of our own worldly desires: we do this not by putting ourselves down, concentrating on our faults and trying to pull ourselves up by whatever the moral-theological equivalent of a bootstrap is, but by resting in the grace of the gospel, and simply thinking of ourselves less - devoting more mental effort and space to how we can glorify God and serve others. Humility is not something you impose upon yourself, like cold turkey of the soul, but is something that grows naturally in a heart that is day-by-day moment-by-moment reorienting itself to the gospel, which implicitly inspires God-glorifying and other-serving attitudes and actions, and as we grow in this so will the itches slowly subside.
   It's a great booklet, and one I'd recommend church leaders or whoever to pick up a few dozen of to throw people's way when seemly; there are indubitably fuller, more practical, more theologically-enriched books on more or less the same topic out there, but honestly Keller boils it down to its doctrinal essentials here in a work that is simple, applicable, and truthful, and what more can you ask of this kind of book?



* Key word - this is a very short book. One could read it, without rushing at all, in an hour.

the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

This book is the first in Douglas Adams' trilogy (of which there are actually five) of novels based around the radio show of the same name. As I am currently endeavouring to embark upon my own writing of several comedic sci-fi books it seemed prudent to revisit some of my core influences, and well, this is one of those - I read all five when I was nine, and again when I was thirteen and seventeen, and frankly it's been quite a while so they seem pretty fresh to me upon new readings (guess I've read quite a lot of other stuff since), and so it's safe to say I will finish the whole series pretty soon, and I'll save up my more typical reflective passages for the post about the final instalment (as though actual happenings of each book vary wildly, the characters and general themes are the same and should be fairly straightforward to track across all five), instead just summarising the book here.
   And now the point where I realise how difficult of a book this is to summarise.*
   Okay.
   So there's a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is basically a pan-galactic form of wikipedia, and a roving researcher for it, after adopting the name Ford Prefect and visiting Earth to find out what's going on here, gets stranded here because it's the bum-end of nowhere. He befriends a human called Arthur Dent, but one days picks up a signal that Vogons are on their way to destroy the Earth completely - which they do, but Ford and Arthur escape, only to be caught, thrown into space, and rescued at the last second by Ford's cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox (who is also the president of the galaxy), Marvin the manically-depressed robot, and Tricia MacMillan, a very nice intelligent young woman whom Arthur once met at a fancy-dress party in Islington and totally failed to get off with. Together, they then go off in pursuit of both the people who made the Earth and an answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.**
   If any of these arrangements of character and plot sound somewhat improbable - don't panic, that's just how the story works. And it does work. This whole series is to my mind among the cleverest science-fiction and outright funniest most inventive popular fiction out there, and utterly indisputably deserving of its massive cult classic status - if this series is alien to you, well, it starts here, and unless you're secretly a Vogon or something you'll probably find a lot to like about it.



* I'm gonna do the summaries for the first four all as spoiler-free as I can reasonably make them, but in the post about the last book, since I'll be doing some more in-depth stuff on the series' overall themes and arcs and things there will probably be a lot of whole-series spoilers in that. Fair warning.

** To which the answer is, of course, forty-two.***

*** It would have helped to know what the actual Question was.

Recreate Your World

This book by Ron and Charity Luce is designed to turn teenagers who are over-obsessed with pop culture into discerning social critics who reduce their unthinking consumption of goods, services, entertainment and whatnot, and start proactively constructively coming up with ways of being and defining themselves as people in God's good world. Now, the actual value judgments underpinning a lot of the argument in this book in my opinion seem to come from a place of dogmatic adherence to traditional norms and ideals - i.e. it is very puritanical, and insofar as it challenges status quo culture it only challenges it in superficial ways and nowhere in the book does it encourage teenagers to critically or proactively think about applying the same radical scrutiny of the values embedded in pop culture to political society at large - but hey, most book-writing American Christian pastors all run megachurches that depend for religio-economic survival on a deformed version of the gospel which neuters its critique of worldly wealth and power, because, duh doy, monotheistic organised religion and liberal-nationalist economics proved to be an incredibly good hegemonic combo - basically it's unreasonable of me to expect this book to be anything less than a philosophically shallow and spiritually half-hearted nudge in the general right direction of becoming skeptical of worldly culture. Anyway, I reread it* because it's really short and, despite my many complaints about it, I'm now pretty sure it's close to exactly the sort of book my fifteen-year-old brother needs to read to puncture his adolescent faith in the Popular - all the niggles and nuances we can try to work out when he doesn't laugh at me for trying to talk about non-fictional non-pop-culturey stuff. Make of this post what you will. I don't really recommend this book, but I am literally bequeathing it to my sibling in the hope it will help him. It may serve a purpose, and its many inadequacies are probably forgivable in that it's meant to be read by teenagers who are unlikely to retain most of it for long anyway.

* Having read it once before as a fifteen-year-old and retained literally Nothing from it, apart from remembering the phrase 'culture zombie' which still sometimes vaguely pops up in the unreliable-haunting-guilt part of my conscience when I'm thinking/talking/doing summat about the kind of pop culture that Ron Luce dislikes.**

** They represent an ilk (sadly not, I fear, a minority) of the contemporary Western post-Christendom church who would genuinely be less offended by a story with persistent and damagingly insidious sexist undertones than by one which uses the word 'fuck'.

the Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

This book by Terry Pratchett is one I love so much I sort of don't want to write a post about it (same way I was with all the Salingers); it's another that I've read multiple times (not even sure how many*) and has been in storage in my parents' house for the last five years (so including all the time since this blog started), finally being liberated alongside a couple hundred dusty assorted books now that I have moved into a post-studentdom flat with enough space for an adequately-sized bookcase for my ludicrous library - and as I found it in the penultimate box I noted, "that is a brilliant book, I've not read it for like nine years", and bypassing the PURP entirely it went straight to the top of the CRRP*** and by the same time less than 24 hours later (so, nowish) I'd finished it again. It helps that my new flat doesn't have internet yet.****
   You may have astutely got the impression so far that I like this book a lot, but would I recommend it? Yes. Absolutely. To pretty much anyone capable of and open to reading books - there is just a great deal to like; it's an unpretentious classic of modern kid's lit, that can be appreciated thoroughly on many levels (see *).
   It's about a cat called Maurice who has befriended some rats that became intelligent after eating waste from the dump behind the wizards' University, and together with a stupid-looking kid who plays the pipe, they have devised the perfect scam - move into a town, the rats put on a plague, the kid offers the mayor his services for far cheaper than the actual official Piper (who apparently is a scary bloke), all the rats scamper out of town along with him and once they rounded the corner meet up with Maurice to count their gains. However, when the gang descends upon a town called Bad Blintz, there are factors they hadn't predicted: the town is suffering a plague of rats and the Piper has been called for already, there seems to be a terrible food shortage but the rat-catchers are doing well for themselves, a fairy-tale-obsessed girl called Malicia inconveniently befriends the stupid-looking kid, the rats can't find any non-intelligent rats anywhere to be seen, and Maurice detects a dark lingering evil in the air... all of which adds up to an inestimably brilliant conspiracy-romp that is also a powerful, morally-charged story with some fantastic characters. Oh man, I want to read it again already.



* At least three, potentially up to five or six, but before this time last reading was I'm pretty sure summer 2008 (on a family holiday, obviously). I first read it from a school library when I was a keen pet-rat-owning nine-year-old, acquired a copy for a subsequent birthday, and just kept going back to it - because the first time I was only reading it because it was about rats and obviously a pre-teen bookworm with a pet rat will go for that (I even named my third (and last) rat Sardines, after my then favourite character), but even though it's written for a younger audience** it's still just pure genre-shattering Pratchett; hilarious and heartwarming and skewed and flippant and dark and silly and common-sense and thought-provoking and utterly mad yet entirely believable within its own world all at the same time, and there was a simplicity and easiness and real honesty and depth to the story that was unlike anything I'd ever encountered in fiction before, let alone kids' fantasy - needless to say, it stuck with me, and with each re-reading my slowly accruing experience of life and humour and whatnot made the book ever more brilliant.

** Good job too - this brought Discworld to the peripheries of my bookshelves' attention much sooner than the series probably otherwise would have entered it.

*** Pre-selected Upcoming Reading Pile and Currently Recreationally Reading Pile; see here for full explanation - basically I'm just enjoying having made-up important sounding acronyms to dish out on here.

**** "Oh so how are you writing a blog post!?" Alright wise guy, I've taken artistic license with the time-prepositions, and am writing this after wifi's been all sorted out here also after having worked through the backlog of dissertation-season posts that this blog had accrued. What difference does it make? I feel like this is getting banal.

Project Öcalan & beyond

Okay, so this post isn't about one specific book.
   (This is my blog, I'm allowed to transcend its self-imposed boundaries.)

   Basically, as devoted readers will know (who are you?), this summer I've been completing my last and biggest piece of uni work ever, my dissertation [for a Masters of Arts in Global Political Economy], and it's involved reading tons of stuff about the Kurdish Question, and truth be told I've built up something of a backlog - there are currently nineteen draft posts with only the title and date I finished each sat in the backstage-area of Thoughts on Books, sixteen of which were dissertation reading and three which because well I had to read something else recreationally right? Anyway, I'm not confident at this stage that I would be able to do full justice to each book were I to attempt giving them a full-on standard-issue reflective post, but since the bulk of these were dissertation reading, I would like to hazard the suggestion that my dissertation itself comprises a synthesis of my thoughts on not only these sixteen books but the three I've already done posts about as well, not to mention the couple of dozen other books that I only read a chapter or six from and so didn't warrant a post at all, further not to mention the forty or so academic journal articles I also read - in short, if I were to do justice to my thoughts on books about the Kurdish Question etcetera, it would probably be best just to read the actual finished dissertation that I wrote having read them for.

   So here's the deal: I have uploaded it as a pdf to my Google Drive and there is a universal access link below, and the sad backlog of sixteen posts will be dealt with in a relatively minimalistic manner (there is quite a lot that I would like to say about some of Abdullah Öcalan's writings, but since his most theoretically-comprehensive book is also the one that I didn't read [The Roots of Civilisation] as it wasn't as directly useful to the dissertation but I am still definitely going to read it at some point, I'll air these thoughts then). The three non-dissertation books I read over the backlog-accrual period will however receive full and proper attention, post-wise.

   Sound alright?

   Good.

Project Öcalan [or, Is post-nationalist ideology reshaping the Kurdish Question?]

You may, astutely, be wondering what I mean by the addition of "& beyond" in this post's title - well, that brings me onto what I am doing now that, dissertation submitted as of yesterday, I am free from postgraduate academic bondage.
   In previous posts I've occasionally mentioned that I'm developing plans for a big creative writing project - this, I may as well (since I've already embarked upon a post that's not of the typical ilk) now confirm, is a sprawling eight-book series called Selected Earthlings - it's partly dark-but-sincere post-ironic comedy, partly haphazard thought-provoking millennial drama, and partly science fiction; and follows the lives of Naomi Harmony Moss, Amina Nadir, and John Ezekiel "Zeke" Smith across a span of about sixteen years, apart from the books themselves won't be in chronological order. If this tickles your pickle, let me know, as I will probably need feedback from the kind of people who would read that kind of thing.
   Anyway.
   That's what I'll be doing now that I've finished being a Masters student of Global Political Economy.

Revolution in Rojava

This book by Michael Knapp, Anja Flach and Ercan Ayboga, is one I would recommend incredibly highly to anyone interested in feminism, democracy, liberation movements, and politics in the contemporary Middle East - as it is the most comprehensively detailed single book currently available on the astonishing revolutionary developments that have taken place in northern Syria since 2011 (and as the book was published in mid-2016 these developments only became more astonishing and revolutionary since, see). The authors provide some helpful sociopolitical and geohistorical context for the events, and then walk through how the revolution unfolded, remaining formally unaffiliated with either opposition or regime amid a popular uprising that collapsed into civil war, and expanding in the power vacuum, cooperative and democratic grassroots institutions establishing themselves with remarkable speed and organisation to continue fulfilling the functions (producing economic resources, managing regional security, governing, etc) previously performed by the defunct Syrian state. The developments that have taken place there in my view constitute possible the most morally-legitimate popular revolution that has taken place in modern history, and demands to be more widely-known and supported, as its longevity depends in large part on whether established powerful nation-states will formally recognise its autonomy - but more on that in my actual dissertation.

Biji Rojava!

the Roadmap to Negotiations

This book, the third volume of prison writings* by Abdullah Öcalan, was produced as a negotiation document between himself and the Turkish state's military intelligence tasked with talking through ceasefire options with him. It comprises a concise explanation of his ideological system (see other posts about his books) couched in a critical discussion of the history of Turkey's (admittedly very patchy) democratization, and thus generates proactive and reasonable compromises for the Kurdish question in Turkey in the context of the PKK's shifting away from militant separatism toward grassroots autonomy.

   Unlike the majority of other dissertation research books I've done minimal posts for, this one wasn't from the university libraries - I found a super cheap copy at the last anarchist book fair in Sheffield, and have only just noticed having held it at a funny angle against a sunbeam that there is the imprint of some biro writing on the front cover from where someone (a previous owner?) had written an address in Leeds: this is almost certainly meaningless but I like noticing little details like that on books.

   For some reason (and yes I am sure of this I've just tried fixing it like nine times) this post is refusing to justify its text body, which is annoying, but I'm assuming you don't mind having a jiggly-edged paragraph for just one post. For some even more inscrutable reason, this very paragraph has now decided that it is going to justify the text body anyway! Urgh. I don't know.

* He has been in solitary imprisonment on Imrali, an island just off the Turkish coast, since 1999, for being the founder and leader of the PKK - while there, he has written extensively trying to change the wider dialogue around the Kurdish struggle away from separatism toward democratization and peaceful compromise.

the PKK and the Kurdish Question in the 21st Century

This book, the second volume of prison writings* by Abdullah Öcalan, is probably (given its author's personal experience at the origin and around the centre of developments) the best book one could read to learn about the PKK in broader geopolitical, social, and historical context. It introduces the theoretical frameworks of Öcalan's ideas clearly, then tracing a cogent and clear overview of how existing dynamic power structures originated in ancient societies (from the Neolithic up to capitalist nationalism), and also presents his ideology of 'democratic confederalism' as a cohesive response to the historical critique: the arguments he makes are interesting, if not compelling, certainly moreso in light of adherents of Öcalan's ideas working to implement them in Turkey and Syria - and these practical activities are the core focus ultimately, as the rethinking of the PKK could never be merely academic, as the PKK existed as an organisation at war with the Turkish state: its rethinking was a pragmatic as well as moral decision to reformulate strategy to best and most peaceably work toward a resolution to the Kurdish question in Turkey, which (on their side, at least - Turkey still seems happy violently suppressing the crap out of pretty much every Kurdish political organisation, PKK-affiliated or not) is an enormously positive step. Most interesting from this book I think though are Öcalan's first-hand accounts of several major events and developments - these obviously include the international plots surrounding his abduction and illegitimate trial, but also go into relatively detailed discussion of how the PKK suffered severe internal power struggles, from loss of control over tribalist and ethnonationalist elements prevalent among its large and disparate militant body, which corrupted its liberation mission and saw leaders exploiting their positions to effectively conduct organised crime or petty warlording - which exacerbated militant and civilian death rates and attracted enormous military reactions from the Turkish state; conspiracies and fear dominated the party's leadership in those years as betrayals, subversions, infiltrations by the authorities, and such, came to swamp Öcalan's day-to-day concerns while the PKK itself devolved into a disorganised terrorist gang. Interestingly this seems to have changed a great deal for the better since his imprisonment, as the programme of democratization as opposed to separatist struggle came increasingly to characterise the wider party's leadership and was heavily promoted among the guerrillas too. If you read one book about the Kurdish question, it should probably be this one.

* He has been in solitary imprisonment on Imrali, an island just off the Turkish coast, since 1999, for being the founder and leader of the PKK - while there, he has written extensively trying to change the wider dialogue around the Kurdish struggle away from separatism toward democratization and peaceful compromise.