Thief of Time

This book is the twenty-sixth Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, and stands as one of my favourites from the whole series that I've thus far eaten. [sorry, read.] It follows a tight ensemble of characters magical, mystical, temporally-abnormal, immortal, disco-ordinated by the shocking revelations of how tasty chocolate is, and/or even relatively normal and just disgruntled by all the weird goings on - even though 'normal' goings-on in the Monastery of Time* is a bit of a stretch. Anyway, no time to give purported summaries of a story that

1. I don't wanna spoil

2. is so fkin weird I don't think I could

3. will make you laugh so much you won't care

* Basically it's a timeless haven in/atop a mountain where Monks live whose duty it is to pump time from places/times where it's less needed to places/times where it's more. Yeh - fair warning, if you're not a fan of Steven Moffat's legacy, this isn't the Discworld novel to get you started. Lots of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey & blink-or-you'll-miss-it infodots

a Generous Orthodoxy

This book by Brian D. McLaren is another truly pivotal vägmärk on my walk with the growing strangeness of my relationship with Christ's body, the Church - as I feel it probably has with a great many of my brothers, sisters and non-binary siblings in the community of us worldwide.
   In it, he dedicates a chapter each to exploring why he can, in the fullness of gospel truth, consider himself to be each of the adjectives in the subtitle of the book: missional, evangelical, postprotestant/protestant, liberal, conservative, poetic/mystical, Biblical, charismatic, contemplative, fundamentalist, Calvinist, anabaptist, Anglican, incarnational, Methodist, catholic, green, emergent, depressed-yet-hopeful & unfinished: - many of these, which are used here as adjectival labels, are more commonly seen and adhered to as "in-group" border-maintenance tools by denominations, and though before reading this book and probably the main thing that led me to reading this book was a sneaking suspicion that if Jesus is truly God's son and the Church his body then humanly-constructed/maintained denominations are kind of a bullshit idea, having now read & digested it I think perhaps there is something else there, something deeper, weirder - so strange, beautiful, sad and perfect that only God could have planned it - that our endless splitting of hairs and ideologies in the bizarre evolutionary tree of Christian history has not led to an inevitably entropic end - but that each strand, each twig, let off freely to pursue its own inklings may do so within the full assurance of Jesus's goodness & promise, to someday, and I pray this might be soon but only God can say - to return home, to a Church unified, where the insights and perspectives of all may be reconciled in Truth and good faith to one another - all having something to share, much to learn, and a great deal more that actually unites them all that they can remind each other of in all joy.
   It's with this book that I can in my brain-heart now rest easier in no longer feeling like I was properly "part" of the ideological-theological community I'd been inhabiting since my home-church joined it nor really a participatingly-up-to-speed part of the one that has since adopted me - I am in Christ, and the labels ultimately, while they don't entirely not matter, don't define me in my being in Christ - and as such I am free to see, and benefit from the insights of, any group that falls under any adjective one might think fit to append to their own particular cell in the great historical body of God's son. How liberating is that?

A Secret History of Christianity

This book by Mark Vernon is a fascinatingly erudite, mindblowingly holistically-applicable and thoroughly thought-provoking exploration of the work of Owen Barfield - probably the least well-known of the main Oxford literary threesome of the inklings, though the other two better known members of this club both cited him as of key inspiration early on in their artistic and intellectual careers.* In it, we're taken on an invigorating mystical romp across the history of an element absolutely central to the metaphysical efficacy of this predominant world religion: that all good, true and proper parts of one's life have their root and essence in the shared life of God - something as bafflingly simple as endlessly complex, a perennial truism that lies at the heart-core of all religions, if not in doctrine then I believe in pragmatic reality; yet it's a notion the sincere realisation of doesn't seem to have been very far up the pastoral or otherwise priority lists of most Christian leaders across the history of the Church and its faith.

   Barfield's work is incredibly potent, drawing on language, psychology, social and historical and cultural considerations, philosophy and poetry in its purest sense - Vernon re-examines the person and teachings of Christ through the lens of Barfield's analysis of said mystical truth; and the theological and practical out-worked upshots herein are massive. World-shaking. The raw powers of inner reflectivity and the human imagination, when enthralled to True Goodness & Beauty, as given in the gospels, is incredible - but to see the scope of such raging paradoxes in their fullness one must accept the mystical element for what it is: once discovered and thusly inhabited, it is not something, I don't think, one can easily then just step back from, if at all, as it is of a profundity, breadth, joy, seriousness, playfulness, creativity and noisy silence that to enter the psychospiritual headspace, the lived consciousness talked about by Christ and Barfield and Vernon, utterly transforms everything about who you think you are and how you think you can be in the world. Which shouldn't sound like much of a surprise, as this is the core promise of Christianity as a faith: but I hope it doesn't sound like a callous barb to say that my gradual apprehension of my lived experience of this fact, the secret hiding in plain sight in Christ's apostolic succession, has been far more like the 'second birth' of a transformative, actual conversion than the course of personally walking with God that led to my being baptised as a pre-teen. Can you become a Christian twice? I'm not even sure the answer to that matters. I've been very lucky to have grown up with such exposure to the faith, but in all the honesty of my heart and mind - I feel luckier to have meandered to the extents I have on that walk so that Jesus found me all the more truly and powerfully somewhere on the border-lands.

   I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in consciousness and the human experience, regardless of what credence you may or may not lend to the Christian faith. Vernon's writing is accessible, entertaining and illuminating, and while readers who come at this book from within a church may find it opens up some strange wondrous new doors, it may also be for you very hard going because the perspective of gospel reality in here is so wild: and for that reason I think readers who remain skeptical of most organized forms of Christian community and faith will find this a refreshingly original, and starkly eye-opening take on the whole matter. I'm going to add some of Owen Barfield's stuff onto my reading pile, then probably read this again relatively soon...

* These being of course J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis - and it shows.

100% unofficial Jeremy Corbyn annual 2019

This book was a Christmas present last year from my youngest brother. I don't think he's read it. As its title suggests, this is a kids-style hardback annual book chock-full of puzzles and trivia and exactly the kind of funny, weird graphics you wouldn't expect your eight-year-olds to be getting Marxist-propaganda'd by the Ultimate Boy from. Of course, I am also writing this after the December of the year which the annual was for and so it comes with an added, six-foot-deep skin of painful nostalgic irony. Maybe next time...

Feminism for the 99%

This book is a manifesto by Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser and Tithi Bhattacharya - and I'm going to be honest, I think if the ideas contained herein got popular traction it could have the kind of impact in the twenty-first century that Marx & Engels' Communist one had on the nineteenth/twentieth - albeit, given the nature of the internal cohesive integrity and built-in safeguards that such a well-developed feminism comes with, I'd hazard it may do so with massively lower risk of spilling out into less-than-ideal post-revolutionary autocratic orders.

   Alongside the postscript chapter which explores the co-current crises of capitalism, ecological sustainability, and heteropatriarchal normativity - and lays out some really helpful pointers for how our ongoing efforts for global lasting justice & peace must involve reimaginings of these things as well as the socioeconomic means of reproduction; the book is comprised of eleven straightforward theses:

1. A new feminist wave is reinventing the strike
2. Liberal feminism is over - it's time to get over it
3. we need an anticapitalist feminism - for the 99%
4. What we are living through is a crisis of society as a whole - with capitalism at its root
5. Gender oppression in capitalist societies is rooted in the subordination of social reproduction to production for profit - this needs turning back the right way up
6. Gendered violence takes many forms - all of them entangled with capitalist social relations. We vow to fight them all
7. Capitalism tries to regulate sexuality - we want to liberate it
8. Capitalism was born from racist & colonial violence - feminism for the 99% is anti-racist and anti-imperialist
9. Fighting to reverse capitalism's destruction of the Earth - feminism for the 99% is eco-socialist
10. Capitalism is incompatible with real freedom & peace - our answer is feminist internationalism
11. Feminism for the 99% calls on all radical movements to join together in a common anticapitalist insurgency

   Pretty radical no?

   I found the arguments and evidence laid out as they were herein mapped extremely congruently onto my current thinking, so it's likely that if you're a sympathetic/regular reader here you will too - certainly a book to be digested and thrown [with generous accuracy and a context-apt gentleness] at Marxists, liberal feminists, those rare but pesky anarchists who aren't also anti-racists & radical feminists, etc.

Garfield Minus Garfield

This is a book* collecting several strips from this webcomic by Dan Walsh, which is in turn an extremely simple ripoff of Jim Davis's gargantuanly-popular** strip - each strip having been subjected to one single edit: Garfield is removed. The comedic effect of this, leaving Jon Arbuckle's horrendously sad life to speak for itself, is consistently far funnier than the original comics they're edited from, coming close to sublime in many of the strips.

* This is an almost totally superfluous aside but this post is short enough that I may as well add, it's my brother's book as I got him it for Christmas or something years ago, and I was delighted to notice he's not only kept it but promoted it to that greatest rank a book can aspire to - small shelf near toilet. I flipped through the whole thing in a single shitting.

** And Really Not That Funny, if you ask me.

Depression & Other Magic Tricks

This book, a collection of poetry by Sabrina Benaim, is broadly themed and toned as you'd expect from the title: a hard-hitting series of world-weary sarcastic-yet-sympathetic reflections on what we do when the Black Dog comes to visit, how we put up with it, explain its housekeeping to others, feed it, take it for walks, etcetera. I felt myself quite deeply reflected in some of these - the minutiae, the tiny borderline-inexplicable agonies, the moments of unadulterated bliss when the fog lifts for a minute or a day - Benaim has written a highly-relatable collection here that never skews or preaches its perspective but paints instead a dynamic series of complex murals, yet laid out in clear strokes. Powerful comfort reading for anyone who has also found themselves adrift in conversations with a doctor or parent or in half-imagined hypothetical reworkings of memories and encounters; sometimes there's just too much noise underwater to make sense of it all, and we fail and feel worse for doing so, but when writers like Sabrina manage to articulate these sinks or cliff-edges in recognisably intuitive chunks of sheer language - it basically is magic, and it will let its reader feel far less alone in the world for hearing so done well.

Sign my Citalopram

This book is a collection of conversational poems by Hannah Chutzpah produced by The Spirit of the Rainbow Heron, a Sheffield-based mental health advocacy group. I really enjoyed this book, it being one of those rare cases of poetry collections that are generous enough to play down the literary subtleties and so make a less intellectually taxing read, but that utterly drip with authenticity, relatable quirks, and character - I teared up at a few and laughed out loud at a few others, and it's really not often a poet will make me do both in the same book. Dealing with themes of self-confidence, power and permissiveness, the narratives in this collection are drawn brilliantly and slice neat wedges of psychological & sociological insights into social interactions and the mental health implications bubbling along under the surfaces of these; overall the book makes for an extremely life-affirming read and did to me the best which anyone can hope their poetry does for anyone else - making them feel less alonely odd in the world, giving them true things to latch onto that are far from unattainable by helping unlock them in the reader themself. Not to say humour or art or attitude alone can cure any mental ailments, but if you're a sufferer and you've never tried to read your way out into some happier less turbulent places, give it a go - you'd be surprised.

the Selfish Crocodile

This book by Faustin Charles, illustrated by Mike Terry, is about (oooooooo spoilers) a crocodile who tends to regard his own interests above those of his fellow river-dwellers, until one day he gets toothache, and a mouse helps, and suddenly he starts opening up. That's it! How wholesome is that? Brilliant, right? The pictures are juicily detailed, adding layers of character onto prose that A. doesn't even rhyme & B. isn't that good but overall makes for a pretty good kids' book, I suppose.

We're Going on a Bear Hunt

This book by Michael Rosen, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, is an undisputed classic of 90's kids' literature by a grandmaster of the genre. Repetitive rhythmic scheme of text and washy adventurousness of pictures all meld together to make this a reading experience that for children anywhere between 2 and 7 years old proves it for almost endless re-readings; it's about a family going on a bear hunt across a variety of natural obstables, and [SPOILER ALERT] they find a bear... Definitely one to recommend.

Slinky Malinki: Open the Door

This book, by Lynley Dodd, is part of the fantastic Hairy McLary & Friends series which I loved as a child and this ridiculous mad cat Slinky was always my favourite of their whole ensemble. The pictures are full, loud, exciting - and the rhyming-couplet text tells in pitch-perfect detail the short-lived escapades of a housecat and parakeet hellbent on all kinds of domestic destruction while their owner is out and about. A great one for kids.

A Quiet Night In

This book by Jill Murphy was one among a series of elephant-family books I had as a kid* and to my surprise my parents retain. It's a pretty boring story, consisting of a family of elephants, whose dad is having a birthday for which the mum is planning [title]. The kid-elephants get variously antsy and annoy their mum while waiting for dad to get home from work, only to all fall asleep as soon as he arrives, and the parents end up having a quiet night in anyway. If any moral can be taken from the story it's that parent life is awful and kids are the fucking worst. I certainly sunk in exactly this from reading it as a juvenile. Whatever. Maybe worth a shot for the tiddlies?

* If you're wondering why I seem to be reading loads of children's books at the moment, I'll remind you that I've temporarily moved back in with my parents, who for a day or two a week babysit a toddler called Isaac, which was weird enough, but he's now old enough to form his own shortish sentences, and having become well accustomed to his being referred to as 'Little Isaac' while I am 'Big Isaac', the sheer power with which he can demand I read him stuff must have bolstered his ego of late - as recently he marched into the kitchen to declare "I'm big Isaac now!" which I can't really argue with.

Reasons to Stay Alive

This book by Matt Haig (much like this one but moreso) is a mishmash: part personal testimonial about mental health and what happens when it goes extremely wrong in context of one's life; part rambling disjointed (at least he's constructed it to feel like that but it flows like triple-ply clockwork toilet paper) meditation on all of this, and how it is going to be differently similar for everyone 'experiencing' it from whatever point of view.
   In a straightforwardly practical empathetic sense I honestly don't think I've come across a better descriptive walkthrough of what it's like to suffer depression and/or anxiety, and similarly the reflections (drawn from both reliably-common-sense research and Haig's own brush with a suicidal inkling) on supporting loved ones going through this are probably some of the more grounded, helpful and well-put bits of advice I've seen given to General Readers on the subject.
   I've been put off reading this book for the last couple of years despite seeing it all over the place on bestseller lists* because - frankly, because I've been scared of the degree to which my own mental health is not entirely stable and I resented the idea that anyone would need to receive reasons for this Very Obvious Thing from a book. But all that said and thought, I found this book so moving and raw and real and just honestly humanly hopeful that I'd recommend it with gusto - particularly good for friends or relatives of someone unduly-acquainted with the black dog.
   For people in such a situation themselves it may help but first up I can't make book recommendations over the Real Important Shit of 1. getting help BEFORE the situation becomes dire & 2. see 1... Mind and the Samaritans both offer free support and can be a real lifeline.**



* When 'how-and-why-to' guides for not killing yourself are bestsellers, it should maybe be a bit of a clue that you live in a somewhat Fucked society. Meh

** Not to disparage though as I've got a hefty hunch Haig's book has probably gone some significant way toward saving many lives. Which - you never know whether you may have helped someone in some way like this before either. Or maybe you do. Mental health can often be a silent killer and so if you know someone who is struggling - don't wait for things to stew, be better as a friend & help each other through this shit

the Little Book of Colour

This book by Karen Haller proclaims, per its subtitle, that it will informatively equip its reader to better transform their lives utilising the psychology of colour. I didn't even know there was such a thing - apart from, of course there is, and it's mindblowingly subtle & powerful in its everyday constant potency. The kinda thing you never think about until you do then you can't ever unsee it - or remove from your daily awareness of such a basic thing as colour some residual echoes of the backdrop; each colour's psychological hefts - which are affected partly by cultural context and personal taste, but weirdly there's a deep-rooted similitude in how colours affect people's brains. What it may make someone think or feel is impossible to neatly predict, as everyone processes things differently and most common colours have widely variably symbolic purposes in different cultures - but I learnt from Haller that each colour actually triggers particular neurological responses and these are pretty consistent across human diversity... which means that carefully chosen & crafted combinations of colours tend to induce reliable effects in those perceiving them.* Visually delicious and accessibly written, this was a fascinating surprise: I bought it for my sister's birthday & ended up reading it all in about an hour and a half on the coach before she got it.

* Obviously yes, there's a good two or three chapters exploring meaty applications of all this theory in workplaces, home decor and personal fashion.

Slinky Malinki: Catflaps

This book by Lynley Dodd takes pains to deeply explore the sociological complexities of a neighbourhood's-worth of cats when they congregate nocturnally to sit on fences & make noises. I can't say from experience how reliable this image is, as though having had a pet cat in the past I don't ever remember it sneaking out in the small hours to meet other cats and sit in prominent places to mewl, screech and whine until people threw shoes at them, but maybe that's just me. In any case - as with all of Dodd's oeuvre, this is a top-notch kids' book with lively characterful illustrations and rhyming-couplet text that rolls off the brain so well that I basically was able to recite it upon rereading despite it being a good two decades or so since I've read this one. Worth a punt as a children-gift.

You've never seen a doomsday like it

This book, another [see other two] poetry collection by Kate Garrett, is as punchy as it is liberating in its core philosophical attitudes. The poems here are apocalyptic, not in the fire & brimstone cliché sense but in the original meaning of the word - apocalypses being uncoverings of new or hidden knowledge. Variably these unveilings can be of kinds which may upend, uproot or uplift our entire hitherto lives: old habits forgottenly conquered, old chains burst free from, old ignorant darkness lit by the fires of sight and reality - however things might turn out in the longer term, it makes these heavings no less intimidating or uncertain a thing or time to pass through, and here Kate dances the twisting line between fortuitous or calamitous change with a shrewdness and learnedness that is truly exhilarating. Short as it is, I took a while to read this for that very reason.

Stickleback

This booklet is a mini-collection of four poems by Kate Garrett, exploring the joys, pains, and oddnesses of being pregnant with a child you know is suffering congenitally from a heart condition. Not something as a wombless person I'm ever going to experience but as I myself was born with a similar defect to Kate's youngest* it was a stimulatingly empathic read and I've gifted the booklet to my mother having finished it - she's not a big poetry reader but I reckon she'll find much of comfort and sympathy in there too.

* Kate, among the million other awesome things she does in & for the poetry world, runs a blog compiling pieces broadly about these themes to raise money for children who need heart-related healthcare. I've been lucky enough to not only survive my ills of birth so far but had a poem titled Salvation published here, which uses my condition as a run-on metaphor to talk about my spiritual wellbeing and journeys therein.