Wednesday, 6 November 2024

American Fascists

This book by Chris Hedges seemed topical for some reason.*

    If you are even halfway familiar with the actual biblical ethic of Jesus Christ and the actual political ethic of modern-day American 'Christianity', you do not need me to tell you how grossly divergent these things are. The roots of this go pretty far into the past but since the latter decades of the 20th century have metastasized into something truly dangerous and that I can only imagine how much God grieves over. Hedges, who studied at Harvard Divinity School before becoming a foreign correspondent, goes into great and granular detail about how the intricacies of personal faith are distorted and manipulated by the nationalist right-wing of American political actors, and just how far so-called 'Christian' leaders have either been complacent or wholeheartedly capitulated to this scheme of outright power-grabbing.

    This is not an easy read for a Christian as it so depressingly and thoroughly shows how the fabric of our faith can be manipulated for truly hateful ends. The lengthy anecdotal passages in this book are just as harrowing as the insightful theoretical explanations of what exactly is going on. I know I am too young and thus too late for a blogpost about this book to have any meaningful impact on future politics, as we have already swung far enough that I genuinely fear there may be no coming back for American democracy. The only way in which I would thus recommend this book is if you want to salve your confusion by knowing a bit more about how exactly the religion of the world's superpower became so co-opted by capitalism, racism, anti-intellectualism and so forth, that we now face ANOTHER FOUR FUCKING YEARS with the "leader of the free world" being a draft-dodging, tax-evading, bigoted rapist who prior to his entry into politics was most famous for telling people on reality TV that they were fired - ugh, but yeh, if you want a fragment more insight into how American Christianity became so horribly un-Christlike, this book would be a good place to start. If only my blog had a large-ish readership and I'd read this when it came out nearly twenty years ago - then at least this post would have maybe had some kind of impact. Now it just feels like a whinge.**



* I actually meant to read it the first time Orange Fraudster Man was running for president, but never quite got round to it. This time however I beasted the whole book in a day out of desperation to understand a bit more about how a country could be so utterly dumb.

** Assuming I have readers - which is a stretch in itself - but assuming any of you are American - if you have them, please take close care of your LGBTQ+ friends and family in the days to come. Their fears are by no means illegitimate. Remember even Hitler came for the trans community well before any concerted attack against the Jews.

Thursday, 31 October 2024

Driving Short Distances

This book is a graphic novel by Joff Winterhart - it was a birthday present from my brother, and I've just read the whole thing in a single sitting. It made me profoundly sad, and hopeful, and a tad confused about the relationship between these two feelings.

    What's it about? So there's a 27-year-old called Sam who is failing at life and needs a job. The second cousin of his absent father, a man called Keith, offers him one in his delivery business - the work essentially entails driving about for brief periods of time, getting out of the car, then getting back in and repeating the procedure. Over the course of the several months that Sam works for Keith, the pair make the same several dozen stops several dozen times, eat the same pair of pasties for lunch every day, and allow us as the reader an insight into a dizzyingly well-realisedly mundane community of genuinely believable characters, from a diversity of receptionists to jocular compatriots of Keith's from the local business community to a particularly flirty bakery employee to acquaintances of questionable history.

    Mundanity is the key word in that last paragraph. Almost nothing of import happens in this story - it's essentially a twinned character study between Sam's aspirations and Keith's mystery. And this is exceptionally well-drawn.* One almost feels as if postgraduate dissertations in psychology could well be written about these people, so complex and yet on-the-surface their portrayals are. Ultimately I think it's a story about hope - what we have always wanted to be the possible case of things despite where we start our stories, where we compromise to accepting our place when these plans don't quite work out, and where we desperately long to be when all chance of achieving what we once wished for have long since evaporated - yet how if we're lucky, or simply of a certain mindset, there is always either a get-out clause or the option to just decide to be content with out lot.

    This is a delightfully human book. I love the illustrations and these are at least half the fabric that carries the vibe of the story. The dialogue is so natural it almost feels like reading a comic-ized documentary shooting at times, and it is chock-full of minute profoundly-human observations that resonate deeply with the kinds of things one has always noticed but almost never heard authors mention. It's a brilliant well-told pair of character studies that goes on no longer than it needs to and doesn't try to do anything beyond its own scope. Even if you're not a fan of graphic novels per se, if you're a fan of any kind of pure fiction that's good because of what it says and affirms about humanity rather than because it has Big Exciting Moments, you'll almost certainly like this.



* And I'm not there talking about the art style - though that too is exceptionally well-drawn, with a minimalistic blue-and-brown colour palette that fits the soul of the story perfectly, and a shabby but detailed habit of portrayal that lends every frame a depth of character that makes the goings-on, basic as they may be, viscerally relatable and recognisable.

Wednesday, 30 October 2024

the Prophetic Imagination

This book is one that I have read before since the start of this blog, hence the link above leading back to my prior post. I've been re-reading this in chunks with my dad, and frankly have to say I found this an incredibly edifying procedure, as not only was I re-treated to Brueggemann's incisive theological points but also the rich and often surprising conversations with my dad after each chapter or so. I said before in my original post that this book is challenging but well worth a dive, and off the back of this more recent experience I will add that I particularly recommend this book as something to go through as part of a small-group study, as it has plenty of practical provocative material from both Old and New testaments that should get a cluster of Christians thinking prophetically, and that can hardly be a bad thing.

Friday, 25 October 2024

the Didache

This book, by anonymous first-century Christian authors, is one of those key texts that were fundamental to the early church and it is thus often asked "why isn't it in the New Testament then?" and I can't answer that. If you're interested it's available as a free online .pdf at the link above and it's very short - I read the whole thing (appendix* included) in fifteen minutes.

    As to what this book is - it's essentially a practical guide for early Christians on how to do stuff. All manner of ecclesiastical practice as derived from the habits and insights of the apostles (the book is more widely known as "the teachings of the apostles") - from behavioural ethics, to church organisation, to appropriate liturgies and sacraments, with a final chapter dealing with how one is to think about eschatology (the end times). It's such a short and orthodox text that I don't think I have much to say about it that hasn't already been said many times on this blog in relation to Christianity and its history and practice. Though this is, I will say, a very interesting document if one is interested in delving deeper into the consistency and integrity of the early church.



* By appendix I mean a small collection of early Christian hymns and prayers.

Thursday, 12 September 2024

Being Good

This book by Simon Blackburn (author of Think) is, as was his other book, a general introduction to some key philosophical issues and themes; it's also one that I had already read before I started this blog but I'm re-reading it now to see whether it's worth giving to my youngest brother who has just started studying philosophy for his A-levels.

   Anyway - Blackburn, in three large chunks, covers:

  • Threats to ethics
    • The death of God
    • Egoism
    • Evolutionary theory
    • Determinism & futility
    • Unreasonable demands
    • False consciousness
  • Some ethical ideas
    • Birth
    • Death
    • Desire & the meaning of life
    • Pleasure
    • The greatest happiness of the greatest number
    • Freedom from the bad
    • Freedom & paternalism
    • Rights & natural rights
  • Foundations of ethics
    • Reasons & foundations
    • Being good & living well
    • The categorical imperative
    • Contracts & discourse
    • The common point of view
    • Confidence restored

   And that's the book.

   Though I have a lot of nits to pick with Blackburn in the minutiae, every philosopher has to come to their own conclusions, and he does to be fair present the things he discusses with a certain detachedness that enables the reader to continue their own explorations without being too bogged down in their introductory text. A good book to kick off a habit of thinking about ethics with.

Monday, 9 September 2024

Think

This book by Simon Blackburn is a general, broad, accessible introduction of some of the key areas in philosophy. I had read it before, but shortly before I started my undergraduate in philosophy and therefore before I started this blog - but decided to re-read it because my youngest brother is currently studying philosophy for his A-levels and I want to give it him for his birthday but also make sure that it was an appropriate text for his level.

   Blackburn writes well, as eruditely as accessibly - he never introduces jargon terms without pre-empting them in common sense language, he never presumes that his readers are familiar with any particular thinkers or concepts, etc. Anyway, throughout the bitesize-enough-but-still-meaty eight chapters of the book he deals with: knowledge, mind, free will, the self, God, reasoning, the world, and 'what to do'. Across the brief sketches of philosophical history he outlines in these chapters he does manage to convey a largely helpful picture of some of the key themes that philosophers have been wrestling with for millennia, as well as diving somewhat deeper into particular thinkers who seem to shed further insight (though if you ask me, Blackburn has a bit too much of a hard-on for Hume).

   I'm confident that this book will be helpful to my brother - and in saying such, I'm saying I would probably recommend it as an introductory text for anyone of the age of fifteen or up starting to study philosophy from scratch. One small gripe I have is that this book barely deals with ethics, that being only around half of the final chapter - but Blackburn has written a whole other book similar to this one on that topic, my copy of which I am also re-reading to see if it's worth gifting to my brother, so watch this space.

Tuesday, 6 August 2024

Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes

This book, composed by Rob Wilkins based on autobiographical notes made by the subject, Terry Pratchett, is a brilliant biography. I won't say too much about his life or character as portrayed herein as in an early (post-wise) recommendation I think everyone should read this book - it's a heartfelt and complicated and beautiful image of the man who probably has done the most anyone has done for fantasy fiction since Tolkien, and I do not say that lightly.

    Wilkins's prose is passable enough but it's the pictures carried therein that really move this book to something brilliant - one really gets to know Pratchett in an intimate sense, from his childhood as an under-achiever to his unwanted death to dementia.* Some of the earlier chapters are genuinely idyllic - his lifestyle throughout the 1970's read to me like some kind of fantasy it was so much so. One also gets a thorough picture of the blue-collar attitude he took to the business of writing novels - perhaps most perfectly displayed in the discussion of when Pratchett took six months of sabbatical to rest his mind, and then following this when Wilkins (as was at the time his personal assistant) asked him what he did with his time off, Terry grumpily replied "I wrote two books." Further from this though is an image of a man with an insatiable aptitude for practical learning - even though he'd never done particularly well at school, Terry would take an interest in something and learn the skills to master it. From his room full of old hardware that he never dared throw away in case it might still prove useful to the brilliant story of how when he recieved a knighthood he bought a small knob of metal from a meteor, found a local blacksmith and learned himself how to smith metal, personally mined a bunch of iron, forged a sword using this iron and the meteor-metal he'd obtained, and got knighted using exactly that sword.** Basically the man was a living legend, full of so much humour and wisdom that I sincerely believe the Discworld series will survive for centuries to come.

    As already said, I would recommend this book to anyone. It's a lovely read. But if you are already a fan of Pratchett's work, or at all interested in the kind of character who could produce such diverse and prolific literature - this is a must-do.



* I will say that this book, especially in the latter chapters dealing with Pratchett's struggle with early-onset Alzheimer's, is a hardcore manifesto for the right to self-dying. The tragedy of everything that you are, that you know yourself to be, degrading as your body decays, is an abhorrence, and though before reading this I had qualms about it, since, I am fully on Terry's side and think that one should be able to of sound mind & heart choose the time & method of their exit from this world. After all, if there's one thing Terry taught us overall, it's that Death is a friendly dude just doing his job.

** Tangential I know, but as a D&D dungeon master I've always had it in my head that were I to plan a campaign set in a magical post-apocalyptic England, then 'Terry Pratchett's Meteor Sword' would have to be a legendary item. I haven't worked out its stats yet.

Wednesday, 24 July 2024

Union with Christ

This book is a collection of essays by the Puritan thinker Thomas Boston, on a theme which the title probably makes clear enough. I've been reading this through with my dad and have found the experience soundly edifying and an effective mode of discipleship, intellectually and spiritually. Boston's prose, though old, is not archaic, and thus relatively easy to read and interpret. The points he makes are very gospel-grounded; I don't think anything in this book would be at all controversial to most orthodox Christians, and I do think that much of what is in here would be of great help to those same in the deepening of their conviction as regards their union with Christ, as is the gist of the New Testament.

Sunday, 19 May 2024

the Corpus Hermeticum

This book is one I've read before and thus blogged about before, see prior post - although this text is very easily available for free online, I've not included links either there or here as maintaining an air of mystery seems key for me in these kinds of cryptic ancient documents. I can't really say I got much new out of it on a second reading - it still feels like wisdom farting in your face for fun. To discern anything meaningful from these writings would either take a lifetime of arcane study or an unthought-out kneejerk series of seemingly-brilliant hunches, neither of which I really have time for. As lurid and enjoyable as the Corpus Hermeticum is, I really don't think it has, or arguably has ever had, really that much to offer philosophy, science, or faith. So, yeh. Don't take my word for it - give it a google and read the .pdf of the thing. It will confuse you and illuminate you in equal measure, ultimately leading nowhere special.

Monday, 13 May 2024

Stories of God

This book by Rainer M. Rilke is a collection of thirteen inter-related short stories, framed through the device of an unnamed narrator telling these stories to various elderly or disabled friends. It was written in 1899 after Rilke visited rural Russia where he met many spiritually inspiring peasants - the text has probably been translated into English a few times, but I used the Shambhala 2003 version.

   Anyway. Whatever God these are stories of, it is not the Abrahamic one. Rilke's God is vaguely easy to like as a character but very hard to imagine one seriously worshipping as a deity. 'God' comes across as benevolent, yes - but also impotent, neurotic, infantile at times; the stories may have poignant poetic overtones but they are rather devoid of any meaningful insight into God's character as understood by orthodox tradition, or even mystics - it reads like the excited scribblings of someone who has found themselves suddenly entranced by mysticism & wants to dabble in it despite having minimal understanding of spiritual or theological frameworks underlying all said authentic mysticisms. Which, knowing Rilke's biography, is probably a fairly astute judgement.

   The human characters in these stories too are quite boringly sketched; they seem to have one personality between them and that largely a mere mechanism for delivering authorial ponderings (except in the last chapter, where they behave more like actual characters) . This collection of stories may be titillating to the heart & provocative to the mind but they have virtually nothing to offer the soul. Which I for one found disappointing for a book of such a title. Sharpish prose & dullish ideas; interesting & entertaining, but not particularly helpful for any real, deep explorations in faith. A few of them are fairly edifying, but chapter eleven, about the artists' association, is in my opinion the closest any of them come to making an original potent point.

   I would maybe recommend this if you'd be interested in well-written curious little folk fairy-tales with 'God' as the core character - but if you're looking for profound, challenging, spiritually-insightful fiction, this probably isn't it.

Tuesday, 16 April 2024

Easy Esperanto Reader

This book by Myrtis Smith and Thomas Alexander is a collection of five* short stories with Esperanto and Spanish translations included alongside. The stories themselves are of a shockingly diverse range in genre and tone, and were mildly entertaining, though I can't say I would have ever been prone to read them had they not been offering the opportunities to deepen my grasp on a pair of languages I'm trying to learn. Their uses of vocabulary and grammar are simple enough that a halfway competent student of Spanish or Esperanto can dig up a fair amount of new intuitions as to words and rules through reading these closely with regular comparison to the English translation, for which purpose I did find this a useful little book. And it's very cheap on Kindle, which is what prompted my buying of it. I do think though that I'm going to try to finish the Duolingo Esperanto course before I try to read any more actual fiction written in the language as then my confidence and comprehension will be greater. But as a halfway testing point for learners this was pretty solid.



* There is a sixth story included though this lacks translation, and was thus of much lesser utility in learning any new vocabulary.

Friday, 12 April 2024

the Trinity and the Kingdom of God

This book by Jürgen Moltmann is one I've read pretty recently, hence that link leading to my last post about it. The reason I'm doing another post is that I've been reading through it with my dad, to help prompt us to challenge each other into thinking deeply about theology. I can only say it's been a pleasurable and edifying experience, and on a second read a lot of his arguments hit home far more clearly.

Sunday, 7 January 2024

Zen in the Art of Writing

This book is a collection of essays by Ray Bradbury on the art of writing. He was an exceptionally skilled writer so it goes without saying that this is a very readable text. Moreover the nature of the thoughts and insights he has on the writing process, from the quandaries of inspiration to the mechanics of typing, are incredibly useful - I read this as I am suffering from somewhat of a creative slump in my own writing activities, but I have to say I found Ray's words here to be immensely liberating, empowering, and so forth. If you're already a fan of Bradbury's work you might find this an interesting insight into his process, but really the main bulk of potential audience I would recommend this to is creative writers themselves. Take good advice from an expert.

Saturday, 30 September 2023

History of Western Philosophy

This book by Bertrand Russell is pretty much what it says on the tin,* being in itself one of the most famous and influential academic works of the twentieth century. Russell being a thinker of incredible stature in his own right, this more broadly germane outline of the key figures and trends in the history of western philosophical thought never fails to be an insightful, illuminating, and surprisingly easy-to-read book.

    To give a coherently satisfactory summary of this weighty tome is far beyond the scope of a blogpost, so I will merely list out the figures and trends covered, and then give a few reflections of my own on the text as a whole. Russell divides the history of philosophy in the west into the broad chunks - ancient, Catholic, and modern.

    The "ancient" section starts with the pre-Socratics: after an initial chapter about the rise of Greek civilisation, we look into the Milesian school, and then more closely at Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, and Protagoras; we also have chapters on the relation of Athens to cultural developments and the influence of Sparta. Following this we get onto the Big Three Boys of classical thought - elusive as he is we only have the only chapter on Socrates, but then Plato has distinct chapters covering the source of his opinions, his notion of utopia, his theory of ideas, his ideas around immortality, his cosmogony, and his thoughts regarding knowledge and perception - Aristotle has almost as many chapters too, covering his metaphysics, politics, ethics, logic, and physics. A supplementary chapter details ancient Greek developments in mathematics and astronomy. The final section of this first third of the book ties up the ancient period with a brief consideration of Hellenism's impact more broadly, then covering the cynics and skeptics, the Epicureans, the stoics, the changes culturally wrought by the Roman Empire, and finally the only individual thinker in this part to get his own chapter, Plotinus.

    The "Catholic" section is divided between the older Fathers of the Church and the latter scholastics. We begin with a broad sketch of the history of Judaism and its evolution into Christianity, then tracing intellectual currents within the first four centuries of Church history. A particularly meaty chapter then lumps together three 'doctors' of the Church - saints Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine; the last of which gets an extra following chapter diving into his theology and philosophy more intensively. A vaguer but still fascinating chapter covers the dark days of the fifth and sixth centuries, and then the influences of St Benedict and Gregory the Great, before we consider the impact of the Papacy within the dark ages. John the Scot gets his own chapter, before we zoom back out for a wider take on ecclesiastical reforms in the eleventh century, as well as the multifarious impacts of Islam, and then the general trends of things in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. While no individual thinker is predominant in these looser historical chapters there were still many profoundly interesting people discussed who I'd never heard of. St Thomas Aquinas gets his own chapter, unsurprisingly, before the section is finished off with discussions of Franciscan schoolmen and the eclipse of the Papacy towards the end of the medieval era.

    The final third of the book, concerned with "modern" philosophy, opens with a double-barrel of general characteristics of the Renaissance and then how this manifested in Italy specifically. After smaller chapters on Machiavelli, and Erasmus and More, we plunge back into more broad historical analysis, as both the Reformation and its counter-Reformation were taking place against a backdrop of the rising tides of scientific inquiry and achievement. Most of the rest of the chapters in this part concern individual thinkers; Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, after a preable-chapter discussing the wider tendencies toward a growing liberalism Locke gets three chapters detailing his theory of knowledge, his political theory, and his influence; then we have Berkeley, Hume, a slight tangent discussing the cultural challenges and changes wrought by the romantic movement and later a broader consideration of deeper trends in the nineteenth century particularly, then Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Byron, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the utilitarian school (John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and their ilk), Marx, Bergson, James, Dewey - and finally closing out on the most modern trend in western philosophy at the time of this book's writing** being logical analysis.

    I am obviously not going to dissect his presentation of all of this content in detail. What I will say is that he clearly knows what he is talking about to an immensely intimate degree, and even when presenting thinkers with whom he disagrees strongly (a fact he will always let the reader know, often in great detail and with sparklingly dry logically-witty remarks) he is careful to present the general details of what they thought and, most probably, why, insofar as one can surmise this from a historical perspective, with a generous degree of goodwill. Russell never shrinks from decrying what he thinks is wrong but he will never misrepresent it to make his doing so easier - in fact some of the densest writing in this book appears when he is well into the hedges of having to content with particularly messy or convoluted ideas to unwrap just what a thinker originally thought in order to judge how much veracity it likely has. He is also always very good at situating systems of thought in their historical context, so that cultural and political influences as well as the personal circumstances of these ideas' originators can all be taken into account when we are brought to judge the evolving steps in the development of the western modes of thought.

    Russell is a superlative academic and I think anyone would get a huge amount of benefit from reading this book. It will be inordinately eye-opening for anyone who has ever wondered where our ideas have come from and how they have been shaped and reshaped over the millennia-long story of western civilisation. While I do not personally agree with Russell on everything, I cannot refute him as a keen and penetrating thinker with a sharp and soft and strong set of moral sentiments - and what is more, despite the potentially off-putting nature perhaps inherent in a book of such scale and ambition, he is remarkably easy to read, never needlessly academic for its own sake, and delightfully largely free from that habit all-too-common in professional philosophers and theologians to dump random Latin or Greek phrases at you with no translatory footnotes. Overall I think this book is well worth a visit from any reader with a general curiosity - if you're looking for a solid text on the history of western philosophy, this is almost certainly IT - and if you're just a casual reader who'd like to get their teeth stuck into something highly educational and world-broadening, this might take you a while to get all the way through but I guarantee you'll get a great deal out of the experience.



* I'm reading it as I'm in the process of planning an application for a PhD in philosophy and not only has it been a few years since I've been involved in direct academia but I am painfully aware of my own blind spots, and this seems like a good place to start broadly rectifying those. In close tandem with reading through this I've also been watching my way through Arthur Holmes's own history of philosophy course, which is all on YouTube - Holmes deals immediately with fewer key philosophers than Russell does, but goes into far greater detail on each, and in my opinion it's a much more helpful introduction to those thinkers he does cover, as his commentary is more concerned with explaining the intricacies of each rather than, as is Russell's wont, going into somewhat opinionated digressions about why so-and-so is wrong. The comparison of these two also highlights a couple of interesting lacunas - while Holmes gives almost zero air-time to the pre-Socratics, which Russell has an entire part of the book dedicated to, Russell mentions Kierkegaard (inarguably an immensely important figure for modern philosophy) exactly zero times, and while Holmes has a full two hour-long lectures on A. N. Whitehead (whom one would expect Russell to talk about at least a bit given that Whitehead was his professor when he was just starting out in philosophy, and they wrote the Principia Mathematica together) Russell barely mentions his mentor.

** The manuscript was originally composed over the course of World War Two, which makes the occasional passing remarks about Hitler and Stalin all the more striking.

Friday, 22 September 2023

Self-Constitution

This book, which I have already read since the beginning of this blog hence the link above and the shortness of this entry, is, as I stated before, easily in the top few philosophy books I've read to date. I stand by everything I said about it last time, and have nothing in particular of reflective note to add, but I will say, going through a period of my life at the moment where I have been struggling with being an effective agent in both doing and/or not doing the things that I know to be best for me, the calm, rational train of thought Korsgaard carries throughout here was a real blessing to help me reassert some semblance of control over my habits. As I said before I'd recommend this book to anyone looking to know themselves better and become a better person, regardless of how familiar you are with philosophy - though her arguments are intensely academic in nature the way she writes should be largely accessible to anyone with an above-American vocabulary.

Saturday, 9 September 2023

the Politics of Newspeak

This book, or rather an appendix to the novel 1984 by George Orwell (not one in any edition I've ever seen - available as a free .pdf on the link above) is a pretty apt corollary to his essay Politics and the English Language, as it details his application of his political thinking as regards language to the fictionalized totalitarian mode of English, or IngSoc, that is used in aforementioned novel. He walks us through a rough overview of the vocabulary amputations that are made to English in order to achieve the mental effectiveness of Big Brother's totalitarian regime, explaining as he goes the thinking between the removal of certain words and the curtailing of others' meanings to the absolute minimum. The overall effect of which, by distorting language, is to reduce the capacity for abstract thought among a population to only modes which are conducive to the continuance of the regime. It's a powerful and insightful reflection on both the power of language to shape thought and the power of politics to shape language - and IngSoc is a perfect example, if admittedly fictional, of this taken to deliberate extremes. Following the discussions of vocabulary and grammars permitted or disallowed there is a fairly extensive dictionary of IngSoc terms used in 1984 with explanations as to their meanings under Big Brother - with their actual meanings to us living under liberal democracy arguable. Overall this is a really interesting take on how to fictionalise language, as Orwell here isn't making up a new interpretation of dialect or inventing a new language, but butchering an existing one for political purposes. Anyone interested in how politics and linguistics intersect would get a kick out of reading this, and it will certainly add a new layer of intrigue to the novel it derives from.

Tuesday, 5 September 2023

the Dragon in the Library

This book by Louie Stowell is the first in a series of three novels following a ten-year old tomboy called Kit Spencer who gets peer-pressured into going to the library with her friends Josh and Alita, only to stumble upon magical secrets (of the variety that you can probably guess from the title) and commence training with head librarian Faith, who is also a wizard. Beyond that I won't spoil the plot, other than that the Evil Businessman Bad Guy is a very entertainingly Dahlesque villain. The prose is sharp and accessible, the story is well-paced and exciting, the arcane lore is actually quite well-explained and internally consistent, and the illustrations by Davide Ortu are pretty delightful and add a lot of character.

   Overall this is a cracking little children's novel - I bought it as a fifth-birthday present for my niece and pre-read it to make sure it was appropriate, but I reckon this would go down a bomb with any imaginative kids between the ages of five and nine or so. Would recommend.