Fox's Socks

This book, by Julia Donaldon & illustrated by Axel Scheffler (the duo of Gruffalo fame), is a perfectly framed lift-the-flap book for children under five or so. It follows a fox who is searching various locations in his home for his socks, discovering various other items of clothing beneath the flaps on the way. The pictures are delightful, the language is simple & the rhyme scheme satisfying; a great one for reading with the grandkids.*

* Which is presumably why my parents have it, I don't imagine they're reading this themselves recreationally. Yes, I'm still at my family home for the holiday season - I have my own stack of books to read, but this took me a minute or two to breeze through so it doesn't really count as a meaningful diversion from my own list. It is, interestingly, a very appropriate book for me to have clocked in as the first read of the new year - my mother's surname is Fox** and I recieved a surprisingly large number of socks*** for Christmas, so maybe that combination of factors subconsciously oriented me toward this book.

** As such, the house is strewn with artworks, mugs, a stuffed doorstop, etc, that feature or resemble foxes - capped off with a real roadkill fox head as you go up the stairs.

*** About half of the socks that I currently own have holes in the heel or toe, which I personally don't mind, but my parents seem to perceive this as a sad state of affairs.

10 Second Sermons

This book by comedian Milton Jones is a collection of (as the title implies) very short reflections on various dimensions of Christian life and faith. Most are at least chuckle-worthy and more than a few are laugh-out-loud funny; despite being so entertaining it is also quite consistently thought-provoking, offering sharp sideways insight into Christianity that can be quite disarming. I'd heartily recommend this book as a gift to a Christian friend who you know likes to laugh and think at the same time.

the Hypnotiser

This book is a collection of very amusing poetry by the inimitable Michael Rosen (and illustrated by Andrew Tiffen, whose style is charmingly reminiscent of Quentin Blake).

   It belongs to my dad so I've taken the opportunity to binge-reread it while I'm staying with my family over the holidays - it's the first time I've reread it in well over a decade but I must have read this book twenty times growing up.* The poems are all free verse and incredibly readable, making this a great book for children who are just starting to explore poetry. Their content varies from short absurd skits to reflections on a theme or object (the two-parter about tomatoes I really identify with), to longer more anecdotal pieces (alongside the one about Richard at school who could hypnotise people, hence the title of the book, probably my favourite of these ones is the story about his brother taking him to London Airport on his birthday when he needed a wee) that draw on Rosen's experiences of both childhood and parenthood. His brother Brian and his step-daughter Laura both emerge from this collection as distinct, consistent and entertaining characters in their own right.

   Although I think it's out of print these days this is still a brilliant collection of comedic children's poetry and if you find a copy in a charity shop or on eBay ever you should absolutely snaffle it up - read it yourself first and then give it to a kid who will almost certainly get a kick out of it.

* It's probably a strong contender for the book owned by my family that has been reread the most times. Certainly the state of the physical object will suggest such, as its spine has almost entirely fallen apart and more than half the pages have resultingly come loose. You have to be careful reading it that they don't all slip out all over the place.

Enjoying God

This book is another straight-up easy-to-read edifying banger from Tim Chester, who has made a habit of writing that kind of book. I've just binged it in more or less one sitting, which is particularly impressive at it's Christmas Day so to find such an uninterrupted run of free time is frankly shocking* - I'm staying back at my family's house for the holidays and this book was on the shelves of the absent lodger whose room (which is technically my old room anyway) I am temporarily occupying, so I decided to borrow** it as it's been a while since I read a theology book by myself.

   The book is organised in an extremely straightforward and helpful way. The first couple of chapters are largely introductory, initially opening a broad discussion of what we mean when we say or feel that we want more of God, before conducting a brief examination of what we mean when we say or feel that we're experiencing joy. Then the meat of the book is arranged into nine chapters, three for each Person of the Trinity, walking attentively through ways in which God breaks into our lives in the everyday and thus can be enjoyably related to therein. We enjoy the Father's generosity in every pleasure, His formation in every hardship, His welcome in every prayer; we enjoy Christ's grace in every failure, his presence in every pain, his touch in every supper; we enjoy the Holy Spirit's life in every temptation, her hope in every groan, her voice in every word. Following this, before a perfunctory concluding chapter, are a final pair discussing how we can enjoy God's love through one another and enjoy God's freedom through daily repentance and faith.

   As is his wont in his depth of distilled wisdom and insight, Chester has stuffed every one of these chapters chock-full of dense complex theological ideas - communicated helpfully in language that a twelve-year old could engage with without difficulty. I always recommend Tim Chester's books and this is no different - if your walk with God has started to feel a bit too austere, too ordinary, too rote, this book could be a great resource to kickstart your heart a bit in the direction of attentively and gratefully enjoying God for who He is more. Highly recommended reading for all Christians but especially if you're going through a bit of a slump.

* To be fair Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was on in the background.

** Cheers Bethan - though you'll likely never know.

Tao Te Ching

This book is the ancient text attributed to the probably-legendary Lao Tzu, and forms the foundation of Taoist philosophy. Check out the link at the start of this post for my main thoughts on it from the last time I read it - something that I now plan on re-doing every year, as there is much to be mined from this beautiful, elusive, deeply mysterious little book.

Imprint

This book is Kathryn Millington's debut poetry pamphlet. Kathryn is a recent newcomer to the spoken word night I host, and my mum happened to be in attendance at the first event Kathryn performed at, and really liked her work - so I've bought Kathryn's pamphlet as an early Christmas present for my mum. I've just read the whole thing through to get a better feel of it but I'm sure my mum will enjoy the collection considerably. All the poems contained herein deal with the oft-neglected grief and trauma of involuntary childlessness; loss and longing positively drip off every stanza. This Is Disenfranchised Grief is probably the central poem of the pamphlet, walking heartrendingly through the detachment and homelessness of feeling for these women. Short but powerful, this is a very strong poetry collection - highly recommended for those who either share or want to better empathise with the condition with which these poems deal.

101 Zen Tales

This book is, as it says on the tin, one hundred and one short stories circling and elucidating the mysterious Buddhist doctrine of Zen, edited by Nyogen Senzaki (at least I'm assuming Senzaki was primarily the editor but could feasibly have taken part in translating or rewording the stories themselves). As nobody familiar with Zen will be surprised by, these tales are all pithy and paradoxical, counter-intuitive, almost anarchic little parables about the nature of reality, wisdom, enlightenment, religion, and so on, each short provocation an opportunity to ever-increasingly turn one's back on what is known or predictable or even respectable, and to instead embrace the simplicity and emptiness of the Zen way. I'd highly recommend this as a resource more for anyone who wants to sincerely engage with Zen as a spiritual way of life rather than for anyone who wants to properly understand it as a religious philosophy (something that most Zen masters would likely look down upon as a pursuit anyway) - it will make you confused as much as it will make you laugh, and along the way it may help you shed the trappings of constrictive but unconstructive rationality, and walk ever further down one of the many paths of enlightenment.

the Lord of the Rings: book four

This book is the second part of the second book in J. R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I am still very enjoyably reworking my way through by means of TolkienTrash's weekly chapter streams.

Mr. Bliss

This book is a J. R. R. Tolkien work that I before receiving a copy for my birthday* from my eldest brother I had had no idea existed. He wrote it as entertainment for his children when they were young - each page of the book is a scan of his own original handwriting** plus basic but entertaining illustrations by Tolkien himself. The story itself is incredibly simple - Mr. Bliss buys a car and gets into a series of minor inconveniences which strung together pass as a legitimate if somewhat mundane adventure. It's not particularly inventive or clever but I imagine it would work as a bedtime read for children between three and six. That's where I'll leave my recommendation - this book is probably only worth reading if you are of, or are reading to someone of, that age; though that said anyone with an interest in Tolkien will get some degree of tickle out of the sheer quaintness of this little book, the story*** as much as the pictures.

* I turned thirty-two yesterday. Cash and gifts to be sent to my PO box.

** Which is a lot neater than you may expect if you've ever heard Tolkien speak in recordings (man was a mumbler).

*** I wanted to mention this but didn't leave any gaps for an appropriate segue in the main body of this post - Mr. Bliss has a pet girabbit. You know, part giraffe part rabbit. Other than anthropomorphised bears this is the only fantastical element to be found in the book.

the Subtle Knife

This book is the second instalment of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. As I said in my previous post, as I always do for serieses I will be reserving my fuller thoughts on the whole for the final post & here will simply give a rough, spoiler-free sketch of the story's gist.

   Will Parry, a teenage boy from our world, whose chief concern in life is caring for his mentally-ill mother, accidentally kills a man who has broken into the house. Naturally, he leaves his mum with his piano teacher to keep her safe while he runs away - then, almost immediately, he finds a magical window into another world. This other world, called Cittágazze, is a crumbling coastal city, deserted by everyone but children. While exploring, the first other person Will encounters is a girl slightly younger than him who introduces herself as Lyra Silvertongue (aye, the very same heroine from the first book - she was renamed by Iorek Byrnison), who tells him that great things are afoot. Together they start travelling back and forth between Will's universe & Cittágazze as Lyra searches for her father for clues as to where her path leads & Will in turn seeks his own father, an explorer who went missing on a mission in the far north when Will was a baby. Their hunt soon leads them into contact with a pair of notable adults - the seemingly helpful museum-enthusiast Sir Charles Latrom & the bewildered dark-matter research scientist Dr Mary Malone; mysteries begin to resolve somewhat into focus & conspiracies continue to plod inexorably along, and soon the duo find themselves seeking the eponymous subtle knife, an item of immense cosmic power that people from many worlds would kill to possess. I will discuss it along with the alethiometer (and Dust! I haven't mentioned Dust in either post yet, oops) in the post about the final book in the trilogy, coming soon.

Northern Lights

This book is a children's fantasy novel by Philip Pullman, standing as the first book in his His Dark Materials trilogy, which I've never read before & intend to finish over the next week or so. As is my wont with serieses, I'll reserve my commentary and reflections on characters, overall plot, themes, etc until the post about the last book and here concern myself only with providing a quick spoiler-free sketch of the story so far.

   The novel opens in Jordan College, Oxford, albeit not in our universe but in an alternate reality where all humans are perpetually accompanied by their daemons - animal-form embodiments of their humans' souls. We are introduced to Lyra Belacqua & her daemon Pantalaimon, as her uncle Lord Asriel returns to Jordan from an expedition in the far north. It becomes clear that conspiracy is afoot, and after an unexpected gain (the Master of Jordan gives Lyra one of the only existing alethiometers; a curious arcane instrument which I will discuss in more depth in my final post about the trilogy) followed by an unexpected loss (Lyra's best friend Roger goes missing; she presumes he has been taken by a nefarious mysterious group nicknamed "the Gobblers"), Lyra is sent away from Jordan to live as the assistant to a glamourous & powerful woman named Mrs Coulter. However - just as she's starting to adjust to the high-class lifestyle, Lyra notices that the tendrils of conspiracy don't even leave her safe here - so she runs away, ending up in the company of the gyptians (a community of people largely comparable to gypsies in our universe, only with barges instead of caravans), who she urges to go north to track down the Gobblers & rescue Roger (along with the many other children, some of them gyptians, who have been taken). The icy wastes of the far North then play background to a rollercoaster of captures & escapes, near misses & fatal mistakes - we meet Iorek Byrnison, an armoured bear, and Lee Scoresby, a Texan aeronaut, and Lyra & the gyptians do their best to muddle through the deepening dangers of the conspiracy they're uncovering, including whatever roles in it Lord Asriel & Mrs Coulter seem to be playing.

   I read this in two big sittings. Pullman writes extremely well & I found this a highly compelling page-turner - as an adult! Had I been exposed more fully to these books when I was of their target audience age (say, ten to thirteenish maybe) I'm confident they would have displaced The Franchise That Must Not Be Named as my go-to rereads. Strongly recommended. Stand by for posts about books two & three.

War in the Museum

This short story by Robert Rath follows everyone's favourite pair of rival bickering necrons, Trazyn the Infinite and Orikan the Diviner (of The Infinite and the Divine novel fame). Trazyn, whose quasi-eternal life's effort is to construct and fill a series of planet-sized museums with stasis-trapped specimens of cultural and historical value, may have bitten off more than he can chew with his new acquisition of a tyranid splinter fleet, complete with its hive tyrant. Once his attempt to rehydrate the damaged tyrant is nearing completion, psychic tweaks between the supposedly-locked tyranid horde start manifesting, and in no short order they're all awake and rampaging through the museum. Trazyn must commandeer the aide of a Mechanicus magos and a pair of Sisters of Battle to help him defend himself while he makes for the control room to try to save his precious displays - only then Orikan turns out to be there already, causing mischief.

   This is a fun little story, but you'll get a lot more out of it if you've already read the novel I linked in parentheses above. Undead soulless metal killing machines they may be, but Trazyn and Orikan consistently prove they're far from boring.

On Liberty

This book is a long essay by John Stuart Mill about the moral, social, political and psychological elements of liberty. It wasn't a particularly tricky read but I would struggle to summarise his ideas beyond: liberty is good for both the individual and their society; liberty of the individual in terms of their capacity to hold their own opinions free of coercion and to do what they will insofar as this harms no others is of profound value to the stability and ethical virtue of a society and these rights should be protected politically. He obviously says more than this but it all boils down to over-verbose circlings rhetorically of this core notion. Despite being written in the Victorian era the vigour of his argumentation feels astoundingly contemporary - indeed Mill as a philosopher of liberty still has much still to hope for in the 21st century, when such basic political assumptions as are enshrined in this text are losing that enshrinement when it comes to our basic political institutions. This isn't a particularly practical book, but neither is it an abstract series of obtuse or irrelevant speculations - Mill doesn't tell us where liberty comes from or how it is best used, he simply makes the case, in great detail and using very long sentences, for its being a personal and communal value and practice of profound importance to human flourishing. 

the Lord of the Rings: book three

This book is the third part of J. R. R. Tolkien's timeless classic The Lord of the Rings series. As with previous more recent posts about these books, these are ones I've read before, so please dig into my blog history through category tags or the dated archive to see my fuller thoughts and/or summaries on the themes/plots of this story - I experienced this again through the ongoing mission of YouTuber Tolkien Trash to read the whole trilogy to her audience a chapter a week, a task which I have to say she is performing excellently.

Galatians Study

This book (available for free online from that link) is a Bible study by Tim Keller working through Paul's letter to the Galatian church. I've been working through it with my dad over the last few months, and would highly recommend it as a small-group study resource. The Galatian epistle is a potent little depth-charge of a book anyway, but Keller's insightful commentary and selection of passages from other theologians (especially John Stott and Martin Luther) who have written about the letter make this study extremely edifying and fruitful for thinking through Christian discipleship in powerfully provocative and helpful ways.

Heresy

This book by Catherine Nixey declares in its subtitle to be a critical survey of "Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God" - so I naturally presumed it would be a pull-no-punches walkthrough of other claimants to Israel's Messiahship and the means by which these wannabes were variably venerated, ignored, followed, killed, arguably successful, forgotten or deliberately buried, etc. and to what extent this groupage of persons' lives undermine the uniqueness or legitimacy of the Christian claim.

   However - though it still pulls no punches, this book does virtually nothing to destabilise the historical or theological tenets of Christianity, and instead, in a manner wholly unsurprising* resorts to exploring the moral and sociopolitical muddiness of Christianity in its earliest centuries. As with the birth of any new religion, those earliest centuries of Christianity, between the floodgate-opening of Pentecost and the diversity-drawbridge-raising of the Council of Nicaea, saw an immense flourishing of diverse and often contradictory flavours of Christian life and doctrine.** This is great for growth but not so good for coherence. With the writings of the Church Fathers in the first centuries CE forming a loose but authoritative foundation for theology, alongside the formation of the New Testament canon, Christianity as a unified body of people and thought began to shave off its rougher, weirder, more questionable or esoteric edges; and once Christianity was established as the official religion of the Roman Empire any remaining hints of those edges were quietly airbrushed out of history by deliberate ignorance or overt suppression (burning of books, excommunication or in rarer cases execution of heretics, etc) and the proto-Catholic Church was born in full shape. Certain chapters of this book are incredibly interesting - I for one had no idea that there was so much early Christian literature about the magical powers of Mary's vagina, or that part of the reason extra-biblical historical sources about Jesus are so scant is that most of the documents that mention him mention him not as a robust historical figure but as a magician of rumoured great power (and thus such sources aren't taken seriously by historians) - but I feel a little undersold on the promised premise. This book did literally nothing to shake or even slightly perturb my faith; it has no clear arguments or evidence against the historical claims and theological doctrines of Christianity. Instead it sits back and points at the authoritarianism of the faith in its earliest centuries, with the faithful expected to buy into full dogmatic conformity with Only The Right Kind of Apostle and allow everything else to be gently forgotten or violently destroyed and never spoken of again: it is not a critique of Christian faith or the person of Jesus, it is a critique of the historical and sociopolitical relationship between truth and power, and as such says nothing remotely damaging to the believer who is broadly smart enough to be able to tell the difference between saying "the Church in the past did dodgy stuff!" and "the Church is wrong about serious things!"

   Worth a read I suppose if you're interested in the historical and sociopolitical influences on the development of religion, but if you're a Christian considering reading this looking to be challenged you won't be, and if you're an atheist considering reading this to bolster your arsenal of tools to undermine Christian faith - unless all the Christians you know are remarkably spiritually immature and bad at critical thinking, this probably will be a disappointing resource.

* To people who have read about it in any significant detail, or who follow YouTube channels like Let's Talk Religion or Religion for Breakfast.

** As I noted in my post about Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, interestingly the rate of denominational proliferation since the onset of the Protestant Reformation is pushing up the internal diversity of Christianity to levels that may be starting to come close to those of the earliest centuries before the Cohesion Enforcement - certainly there are groups of people who consider themselves Christian that a mainstream Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant wouldn't consider Christian, but the Church being divided as it is to what authority do we turn to decide who "counts"? Is it time for another ecumenical council?

the Glass Hotel

This book is Emily St. John Mandel's fifth novel - the first of hers that I've read, but I was pleasantly rewarded with being introduced to her as a new talented author who kept me entertained throughout. She is a precise and unshowy writer, her prose not particularly poetic but well-suited to detailing events and feelings with nuance, mystery and character.

   In the story, we follow a number of different threads across numerous locations, skipping around between the years 1994 and 2018 (apart from one chapter set in 2029, but that's only three pages and doesn't add much to the plot). Paul Smith is an addict struggling to make it as a composer. Vincent is his half-sister working as bartender in Canada's remote Hotel Caiette. Jonathan Alkaitis, a New York financier, owns the hotel. Leon Prevant is an executive of the Neptune-Avramidis shipping company. In spring of 2005, a hooded figure writes in acid marker the message "why don't you swallow broken glass" on the glass wall of the Hotel Caiette; in December 2008, a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme run by Jonathan implodes; and in 2018, Vincent, now working as a cook onboard a Neptune-Avramidis ship, disappears off the coast of Mauritania. These people and events are all woven together in a nebulous but gripping tale of moral compromise, thwarted hope, the impacts of crossed paths, and how one never quite escapes the bits and pieces of their past.

   This is the first non-sci-fi/fantasy novel I've read in a while, and it was a great reminder that a good story well-told doesn't need all the bells and whistles of genre to make it so. I'd recommend this to pretty much any enjoyer of fiction.