Carbon Black Cicada

This book (available as a free download from that link) by David Brookes is a remarkably diverse and powerful collection of short stories. He was an extremely talented writer, with a knack for delicate phrases that lend surgical accuracy to his descriptions of situations and feelings, and a keen eye for human nature in all its variety, from the odd and unique to the universal and predictable.

   I will give a potted summary of each story in the book. We open with Sugar Cube, in which a father & daughter acclimatise to life in a new, strange, remote place. Next we have the titular Carbon Black Cicada - a snapshot biography of an aging sailor told through his tattoos. Head Under Water sees a man trying to set the world record for holding one's breath while wrestling with unrequited love, In Hellas is an exploration of the little frictions between a newlywed couple after the wife suffers an injury, and Vanilla is a close dissection of a guy's protective jealousy over his girlfriend's "friend". In Follow the Sun Underground a wealthy Mexican emigré returns home to quarrel with nature and spirituality, in Identifier a fisherman reminisces about his friend Jack after his trawler dredges up Jack's corpse from the Channel seafloor, and A Good Match is Hard to Find gives an account of a weird experience in the tricky modern dating scene. A Dictionary of Our Time in the Wild, probably my favourite piece from the whole book, is an alphabetical collection of memories of a spiky but deeply meaningful relationship with a nature lover. The Destination Before Next sees a film location scout investigates an Istanbul dockyard, then in Silverfish we remember the story told by a boy's sister about her three-day disappearance when they were seven. Precious Targets tells the story of a wildlife officer who gets roped into security detail for a rare orchid discovered in a park, in Pass, Pass an insomniac struggles to fully engage with a normal social life, and In Your Arms is an anecdote in which a diver off the Cornish coast gets detained by an octopus. Finally in The Only Lasting Beauty we are treated to reflections on the lessons about love taught by a deceased alcoholic mother.

   I don't read many short stories, but I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, and I reckon anyone with a healthy appreciation of humanly sensitive and invigoratingly originally-voiced fiction will too. You may also be interested to check out David's poetry, which is also of a superlative quality.

the Present Age

This book (available for free online from that link) by Søren Kierkegaard is a short but hella punchy treatise about the political and psychogical malaise that European modernism has left us in. The passion & activity of antiquity is gone, replaced by a blandly "democratic"* equilibrium roiling about in the seas of reflective intersubjectivity - the boons of education and understanding and the free press have left us all deeply well-informed, yet the sheer glut herein has left us existentially paralyzed when it comes to actually putting those informed understandings into action. He writes, "every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move." Rebellion in such a culture is essentially unthinkable. Readers familiar with old Søren won't be surprised to hear that he concludes that the only way for individuality and society to healthily balance each other out in any meaningful sense is the rediscovery of true religion. This is by far and away the most accessible Kierkegaard text I've read to date - it's not technical philosophy and should be easily readable by anyone with an above-your-average-American vocabulary. A final thought - though written in the seemingly alien atmosphere of mid-19th-century Copenhagen, this prophetic text speaks to the cultural, political and psychological snafus of 2025's dim/bright crazy/inevitable future presents with sparklingly uncanny accuracy & profundity. And did I mention it's very short and is online for free? Go read it.

* Kierkegaard's polemic here has left me considerably more favourable in my view of C. S. Lewis's takes on democratic equality, which as I've said left a lot to be desired when I read them in their own context.

Lays of Lost Thoughts

This book (available from that link as an online .pdf for free) by my late friend David Brookes is a phenomenal collection of poetry consisting of material written between 2016 and 2025. Before I talk about the book itself I want to talk briefly about David. He was a semi-regular attender of the spoken word night I host; I didn't know him as well as I would have liked but I liked him a lot. Softly spoken & articulate, considerate & generous, wise beyond his years & extremely easy to talk to however small or deep you wanted to go - he was a great guy and a much-valued part of our little community. So it was with great shock and sadness that I heard last month that he had taken his own life. I am publishing this post exactly a month after his memorial service. Heartbreakingly, mere days before he left us, he uploaded all of his work to his website as free .pdfs; alongside this poetry collection is a collection of short stories (which I aim to read very soon) and a monumentally ambitious five-part epic imagineering a lost mythology of the British Isles, complete with gods, monsters, heroes, and the like (which I will read at some point and which I thoroughly regret never having had the chance to talk to him about when he was alive, as it looks utterly fascinating); I urge you to check all of this out as David was a profoundly gifted writer.

   Which brings me to the book. All of the poems herein are free verse, and this collection is a dazzling testament to the power and profundity of that medium; contained within is also a breathtakingly marvellous breadth of expression. The poems range in theme from love & loss to the natural & cosmic to history & memory and more - I really struggled to select ones to mention specifically in this post as I could very easily highlight every poem in the book, but I've tried to limit myself to about 30-40% to leave a bit more wiggle-room for surprise when you go and read it yourself, which you absolutely should. In the opening few poems we get the bleary wanderlust of Where Were We followed by the tentative longing of Spools of Wool and the sheer wistful beauty of Listening to Your Recorded Presentation on Mortuary Practices in Medieval Byzantine Anatolia (which I read at our spoken word night in tribute to him after we'd heard the news). Then we get the simmering heartwrenching jealousy of There is a Burning Cold I Feel and passionate physicality of Yours Are Not the Cold Touches, the tender parasociality of The What That Happened to Brendan Fraser and even tenderer (if possible) silence of We Are Good at Looking at Each Other. After these, the blunt cynic realism of Paterson, and a delicious contrast between the indignant quietness of Look at You and the chaotic lovingness of The Riot of You. Then the demure nostalgia of Mosborough Moor and the detached pain of To the Marble in My Mouth, the familiar care of I Can't Help Her, the grimy determination of Scour, hopeful gratitude of Rievaulx, and remembered adventure of Wild Swimming. Catching up to current events, Invasion is a sensitive expression of solidarity with Ukraine, following which is the ponderous brilliance of Jabberwocky Prayer (one of my favourites). Flea Bomb almost leaves you personally itchy - you definitely feel the residual guilt, while Gold White has a gorgeous blending of love and nature imagery, and then Playlist (a found poem constructed out of collaged song lyrics) displays a deft selective precision. The final section of the book is called Songs of Extinction, each poem dedicated to a species of animal that has gone extinct within living memory - so treated are the desert bandicoot, the gloomy tube-nosed bat, the laughing owl and western black rhinoceros. Tragically, the final poem in this section and indeed the whole book is titled Self-Portrait as Animal (extinct by choice), and functions as something of a poet's farewell letter to a world that has given all it can to make life worth continuing. Serious content warning to readers who get to the end of the book for that one as though it is a beautifully written piece it is also a heartbreakingly honest portrayal of anguish and annihilation.

   This is a difficult post to write, but I think it's probably the most important post I've ever written on this blog for the simple fact that David deliberately bequeathed his work unto the wider world before his departure, and it would be a tragedy if his memory were not kept burning as brightly as possible by sharing and enjoying and being inspired by the brilliance of that work. So please, if you have even the slightest fondness for poetry (and his style is as wide as it is deep - precise yet pliable, erudite yet never indulgently elusive); go download this book and read it at your leisure. And lest it not be said, be kind to one another. You never know the intensity of pain someone might be plastering a stable face over. I've been torturing myself with the thought that had I been just a bit friendlier or more intentional or encouraging I might have tipped the balance and David would still be living and laughing and breathing and writing. But I know from his memorial service that there were many people far closer to him than I who were far better positioned to be that kind of support and it still wasn't ultimately enough to assuage everything that pushed him to where he ended up. That said, we all walk our own roads and bear our own burdens, but company is always nice and is more often than not helpful in the struggle. So share, and listen, and love. Nobody makes the world a better place simply by leaving it.

the Lord of the Rings: book two

This book by J.R.R. Tolkien is one I've read for this blog in the last few years, hence the link going back to that post - I'm re-experiencing the series in audio form read a chapter a week by the delightful Tolkien Trash, which I'm still very much enjoying. Check out her channel for some of the best Tolkien-related content YouTube has to offer.

the Structure of Scientific Revolutions

This book by Thomas Kuhn is probably the most significant work in the philosophy of science to come out of the twentieth century. In it, Kuhn skips around the history of scientific endeavour to sketch a theory of how progress in these fields happens. Science of a particular era subsists in what he calls a paradigm, a collectively-agreed-upon web of assumptions, problems and techniques that define the scope and limits of the field at that time. It is only when a particular paradigm begins to encounter anomalies that it is unequipped to explain, and thus enters a period of crisis, that hitherto unthought-of methods and speculations emerge, and thus a scientific revolution (think Copernicus overturning the Ptolemaic astronomical system, or Einstein going so far beyond Newton that the previously accepted physics became a redundant rump) takes place - the paradigm shifts, and new modes of understanding become possible, new questions become salient, and new experiments become required to continue advancing the frontiers of knowledge. I was pleasantly surprised by how readable this book was - I'm interested in science but don't read much of it as I find myself either feeling alienated by the abundance of jargon or patronized by the author's obvious overcompensations in avoiding jargon, but Kuhn avoids both extremes and explores this whole nest of topics in an accessible and enlightening way. Absolutely highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the history and philosophy of science.

Titanicus

This book is a Warhammer 40,000 novel by Dan Abnett - yes, I know, another one. He's my fave, what can I say. Only this one doesn't revolve around the plucky Imperial Guard or morally-questionable Inquisitors; this one is about the Titan Legions themselves. The god-machines - walking cathedrals of destruction.* I'd been aware of this novel when it came out seventeen years ago, but simply wasn't that excited about it - I mean, Titans are so ridiculously big and overpowered that how can you have any serious stakes in a story about them? Turns out I was wrong. The way you have serious stakes in a story about Titans is by A) making the enemy have even more Titans than the good guys and B) throwing in a healthy spattering of ground-level ordinary troopers and even a civilian or two so you can skip between perspectives and view the ridiculously big overpowered explosions from behind void shields 150 metres in the air or from a terrifying Normal Person's-Eye View - and Dan does both of these brilliantly. There are at least five or six separate plot threads going off within this book, and while only overlapping intermittently, they all wind up contributing somewhat to the overall resolution, and all get wrapped up largely satisfactorily. While for me this is nowhere near the re-read value of Gaunt's Ghosts, it was still a thumping good read; and it's always fun to see the Adeptus Mechanicus up close, they're so weird as a faction that I find them disturbing and fascinating and hilarious and tragic all at once, and Dan captures new angles of them in exciting and surprisingly relatable ways.

* The simplest way to explain them to non-40k initiates is to ask "have you seen Pacific Rim? well yeh, basically that, but moreso, and fighting entire armies instead of the odd kaiju or two."

the Booktime Book of Fantastic First Poems

This book, edited by June Crebbin and illustrated by Emily Bolam and Nick Sharratt, is a collection of poetry aimed at getting children to read and enjoy it. I read it having seen it lying out at my parents' house after my niece and nephew had been to visit, and rather enjoyed it. All the poems, which are split between the two categories of "animals" and "nonsense", are understandably very short; and the book features inclusions from many well-regarded children's poets - John Agard, Eleanor Farjeon, Michael Rosen, Ted Hughes and Rose Fyleman all get at least one thrown in, although a fair few of the poems included here are anonymous. Overall a decent little book to introduce children probably aged 3ish to 7ish to poetry.

Point Me at the Stars

This book is the second collection by Noel Williams; like his first collection I was given a copy of this by my friend Ian (whose own book you should also check out). This is a much shorter collection, but the themes are far more consistent - these are poems about distance and closeness, isolation and ambition. Heron-dream speaks of that which is tantalisingly out of reach and Appreciating physics applies this same feeling to belief; the later poem Reality check brings to mind knowable comforts in the midst of desperation; and the final in the collection Nocturne with lake and astronomer seems to be considering the loneliness of perception. A concise and powerful little book of poetry - would recommend.

Out of Breath

This book is Noel Williams's debut poetry collection. I was given a copy by my friend Ian, whose wife was a friend of Williams before his recent death. This is a diverse and powerful collection, and I really enjoyed reading it. The opening poem, Snow on the edge, is positively pregnant with expectation; leading into the quietness of On the verge of the M40 and the stillness-yet-adventurousness of The island, the morose fatalism of Daphne, the summery atmosphere of Sunburn and the paranoia of Safe house, the wistfulness of Refraction, the defeated undefeatabilitiness of Heartbeat, the impressive quasi-haiku sequence that is A rose of broken stone, then a pair of sequences that take on a sombre anti-war tone in Till Death and Kim Phuc, and finally the indefatigable hope of the closing title poem. The sheer breadth of emotionality in these poems is startling, yet they all have a similar human warmth to them that breathes through the deft control of their language. A collection well worth reading.

For the Hypothetical Aliens

This book* is a poetry pamphlet by Ian Badcoe, a friend of mine from the spoken word events I host. As the title suggests, this collection straddles the hazy line between science fact and science fiction, as such being intended as a statement of human identity to any alien races we may whenever encounter out in the cold, wide galaxy. I really enjoyed this little book - from the loneliness of the opening poem A note on broken hearts to the following considerations about the Drake equation, then the concise empathic statement of Personal space probe and the hyper-optimistic magic of She knows whereof she speaks, a litany of pop-cultural examples of how humanity comments on itself via imagined alternative races, and finally ending with a banging mic-drop moment in The shapes of things to come. Badcoe's poetic style is dry and precise, lending itself perfectly to the material's themes; I hope that should we ever encounter aliens for real, someone will have the wherewithal to lend them a copy of this early in the communication process so that they have a bit more context for where we're coming from and what they may meaningfully expect of us.

* Unfortunately it's not available from anywhere online, so if you want a copy I recommend getting in touch with Ian himself and asking if he has any copies left to sell. I'm sure he'll oblige if so.

Logic

This book by Wilfrid Hodges is an introduction to the field of elementary logic. I bought a copy of this way back in 2012 after my interview at Oxford university, having found out that this was the standard textbook for first year logic in the philosophy strand of PPE that I had applied for - then I didn't get in, so I never got round to reading it.* Until now. Formal logic straddles that bizarre border between philosophical and mathematical kinds of thinking, but despite maths being far from my best subject I found Hodges's distillation of the core principles, methods, and tools at play to be well-paced, accessible, and engaging.

   We start off with the very basics - sentences as expressions of beliefs, how we determine whether one of these is true or not, ambiguities and borderline cases entailed herein, how these simple constituents of thought can be built up into more complex forms, and how one can test these for logical consistency and validity. Moving onto the next level up, we are introduced to logical analysis and its truth-functors, the process of converting sentences into tableaux, and the formal language of propositional calculus. Then we work through designators, identity, relations, and quantifiers, all the while relating all of this back to everything we've learnt so far. The penultimate section puts it all together in predicate logic, before finally ending on a section that considers the problems that logicians are still wrestling with (as despite having been an established field of philosophy/mathematics since at least Aristotle, most of the major advancements have been made only in the last three or four centuries and there are still areas displaying niggling room for improvements to be made) and where these may, or may not logically be able to, go in the future.

   Aside from being an extremely user-friendly introductory text, never assuming you to be familiar with a term or concept or technique not already covered by Hodges himself, this book really cements itself as of academic value by its inclusion in every section of several exercises relating to what you've just read. I tried to do most** of these throughout my reading, and was pleasantly surprised to note that I got on the whole (unsurprisingly with the margins slipping the closer to the end of the book I got) about 60-65% of my answers (all the correct answers are included in a very lengthy appendix) correct - which in university terms is a 2:1 so I'm pretty chuffed about that.

   Formal logic is not a field that being good at means you're going to be right all the time. That's not what logic is or does. Formal logic is a field that being good at does, however, mean that you're going to be secure in the validity and consistency of your own truth claims in the context of their premises as your beliefs. Logic is not an answer - not does it supply these; it is a tool for working out whether any given answer is commensurate with the questions being asked. Halfway through a complex debate it's hardly reasonable to hold up a finger to request a pause in the discourse while you break down every sentence uttered thus far in the established context into a predicate tableaux to make sure that both sides are debating logically. But the more familiar you get with the linguistic and Obvious elements at play in logical analysis the easier it will be for you to spot and avoid invalid or inconsistent sets of claims. Truth is Obvious when it is so, but why then does argumentation exist? Let beliefs be what they subjectively will be, and let logic never supersede itself to determine those but only govern its own realm - that is, of thinking well. And this book will help you get better at that.

* I went on to study philosophy and economics for my undergraduate in Sheffield, then a Masters in politics - so I got to do PPE after all, screw you Oxford... that said, I still wish I'd read this sooner after acquiring this, as it may well have helped me boost my grades anyway.

** Anything that could be answered by pencil scribbling in the margins of the book itself I devoted my full effort to - but a fair few of the exercises demanded a reader to construct truth tables or sentence tableaux or what have you, which are not the kind of things you can fit in the margins of an A5 textbook, and though I did attempt some of these properly, I didn't always have both scrap paper to hand AND the mental wherewithal to bother, so in these cases I simply read the correct answer in the appendix and then re-read the exercise and worked through it in my head until I was confident I understood why the answer was what it was.

Artemis Fowl

This book is a novel for younger readers by Eoin Colfer - the first in a very long-running series that I have no intention of reading the rest of, as I have too much else to read. That said it is a very fun book. Without wanting to spoil the story, a potted summary would be: twelve-year-old Artemis Fowl, our eponymous criminal mastermind, may have bitten off more than even he can chew after he successfully kidnaps a fairy. If I'd been aware of this series when I was within its target audience range (of probably sevenish to fourteenish) I would have absolutely devoured it - as an adult reader it still has a lot going for it, Colfer is a witty and deftly skilled writer, the characters are well-sketched and interesting, the worldbuilding is colourful and original, and the plot ticks along at a very consistently exciting pace. Highly recommended for children who like a bit more of a wry, punchy tone to their fantasy.

And Another Thing...

This book by Eoin Colfer is the sixth instalment of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams - who was rumoured to be working on a sixth instalment when he died, so it never got finished, so a couple of decades after the fact they roped in Mr Colfer - and honestly, he's done a far better job at it than I expected. Adams's imagination and comedic style are utterly inimitable, but Colfer makes a damn good effort and the result is a book that is very clearly not written by Douglas but still feels like a worthwhile addition to the trilogy-in-five-parts's story*.

   All** our favourite characters are back - Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian, Zaphod Beeblebrox - plus Random***, who was more of a plot device in her previous appearances, takes on a much heftier role; and Thor and Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, both of whom had been bit-part jokey characters in the main series, become significant players in their own right. If you remember how the fifth one ended it should be no surprise that this one opens with a convoluted deus ex machina that conveniently (or should I say "improbably") saves everyone from another meaninglessly impersonal death, and romps aplenty ensue. I won't give away any more of the plot than that because I've already covered the first five books in such granular detail and I want the contents of this one to be a surprise if you're curious enough about how well Eoin wears Douglas's shoes**** to read it even as a hardcore fan of the original series.

   I wanted to be able to say I hated this book and that it was a betrayal of the series and its author's memory, but that simply isn't the case. This is emulation at if not its zenith then fairly high up its mountainside; and even if it's been so long since you've read the original trilogy-in-five-parts that you'd struggle to relate part six to it in any coherent way, this is a rollickingly fun read.

* Six parts now, I guess. Follow that link if you want to read a 5000ish word essay about my reflections on the core thematic ruminations implicit in the original five. I'm very proud of that post.

** Except Marvin of course, he died in an earlier book. Quit whining.

*** Arthur and Trillian's daughter in case you need a reminder.

**** A solid 8.3 out of ten. He does go a bit overboard with the Guide Notes interjections, which often feel like more of an "I had an idea that's slightly Douglas Adamsish so I have to include it" than a fully-legitimate "this is something the Guide would talk about that illuminates the current plot points unfolding, or is at the very least extremely funny". I think in terms of nailing the core essence of the main characters I'd give Colfer a much more solid 9.7 but in terms of capturing the whimsy and wit of Adams in his prime it's a somewhat shabbier 6.2 - though that said the plot of this book is actually completely comprehensible, both in terms of what it builds on from the first five and the new elements introduced by Eoin, which is, it pains me to say, more than can always be said of Douglas's own contributions to the series, which were superb obviously but did admittedly occasionally sacrifice story congruence for "mere" absurdist humour.

the Lord of the Rings: book one

This book (which I've read before recently, hence that link simply going to my earlier post about it) I've been re-experiencing in audio form, thanks to YouTuber Tolkien Trash, who is committed to the admirable & entertaining work of reading out the whole trilogy a chapter a week on live-stream. You can check out her back-catalogue here if you want to listen along with me and her other followers. She has a soothing yet stimulating voice for reading & the occasional asides to the chat (or just because she's laughing about something in the text) add a funny level of intimate performativity to the streams.

the Island of the Immortals

This short story (available from that link online) by Ursula K. Le Guin goes hard. In it, a traveller visits an island where, it is claimed, there are immortal people living after thousands of years of uninterrupted life. Only immortality might not be all it's cracked up to be - simply not dying doesn't guarantee anything about bodily integrity or quality of life. I won't spoil it - just go and read the thing, it's pretty short, and is a startling and disturbing angle on the theme.

the Book of Merlyn

This book is the final instalment of T.H. White's The Once and Future King series - it was published much later than the rest, because, you know, World War Two provided a bit of an interruption to smoothness on the deadline front. As you remember we last left Arthur mulling over the failure of his life's efforts in his tent outside the siege of Mordred's castle; we re-enter the scene exactly where we left off, and *surprise* - the unknown person entering is in fact his old tutor Merlyn, back from a conspicuous long absence with Nimue, and keenly reintroducing himself to Arthur's life to prod the old King back into liveliness and hopefulness with a continuation of his adolescent education. So, on the eve of battle, Arthur follows Merlyn away to an underground room where many of the animals he met when he was turned into their kind are present to offer wisdom, fellowship, encouragement and insight. The passages from the first book in which Arthur is turned into an ant and a goose* are included in this book too, because of editorial changes made during the complicated publication timeline, but here these parts are couched in a much more philosophical and less comic context. Merlyn is very deliberately trying to educate Arthur in the nature of political power, freedom, conformity, authority and whatnot. As such, much of this book consists of rambling speculative dialogue about the nature of these concepts, how well they can be realised in human society, whether there can ever truly be a "cure" for war and violence, etc. It's a very thought-provoking sequence in which Arthur's experience and Merlyn's wise insight play into each other perfectly. (Not sure where else to mention this but it's niggling at me - in this book White fully breaks the fourth wall at a couple of points, obviously via Merlyn, which I found very entertainingly in-character.) Finally, Arthur accepts his fate and his legacy, and returns to the battlefield, where he later offers Mordred a truce in exchange for half his kingdom. The book closes with a series of loose sketches about the ultimate fates of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot.

   So, that's The Once and Future King! Five books in one! Plus the five-in-one volume that I've been linking these posts to includes an afterword by Sylvia Townsend Warner about the fraught publication history of this series by way of explanation as to why this final book was so late that it was actually posthumous to the author. But anyway, here we go with some reflections.

   On the whole, I really enjoyed this series. I've never myself read Malory's Morte d'Arthur so I can't speak to how well this series expresses the style (I'd be surprised) or themes (perhaps I wouldn't) of the work which inspired it, but the general vibe of medieval romance is captured to wondrous heights in these novels while still being believable and inventive - I think anyone with any fondness for the Arthurian mythos** will find a lot to recognise as well as a lot to be pleasantly surprised by in them. While magic only really plays a substantive role in the first book when Arthur is being transformed into animals (and also a little bit in the second book, because of Morgan le Fay and the Questing Beast - as well as in this, the final book for the same reasons as the first) I have classified all five as fantasy novels because the Arthurian mythos kind of has that as part of its cultural identity - this is far from historical fiction. Which - on that note, one thing that did irk me throughout was the errant nature of the past setting; if Arthur was a real historical figure, he lived in the sixth century CE, whereas these stories are set vaguely between the twelfth and fourteenth. I can forgive that though as Arthur in the mythic form is an essentially timeless character and it was during that pre-Renaissance time period that romances of his life and knights etc were doing the round of England and France the most thoroughly. What added to this temporal irk was the numerous anachronisms of both Merlyn and the omniscient narration - I know with Merlyn this is explained by his "living through history backwards" (a quirk that I really kind of dislike, as it just doesn't make narrative sense, and only exists so that the wizard can quickly reference later historical events rather than having to concisely describe sets of circumstances) and with narration it's explained by the fact that this was, of course, written in the 20th century with access to a whole heap of knowledge and realities that were future-alien to the characters in the story, but in both cases these did take me out of the immersion somewhat. Having said that, I really like the writing style - White slips idiosyncratically between medieval knightly court-speak and dialect-heavy realistic speech in his dialogue, while the third-person narration is consistently direct, sure of itself, and largely sympathetic. If there is one final closing gripe I'd have with these books, it's that Arthur and Merlyn aren't in them enough, especially the second and third instalments. But Lancelot and the other knights (and King Pellinore - what a brilliant character) are thoroughly enjoyable in their own right, so I won't decry this too much. Overall a great series.

   I know I mentioned in my first post that I was reading this series as inspiration-fodder for a series of novels about Arthur and Merlin that I'm working on myself - and to be honest I didn't get a huge amount out of them for that end. I certainly got a few sharp realisations of things that I definitely did or didn't want to happen to Arthur, and ways of being that I definitely did or didn't want Merlin to embody, but overall I think the setting and trajectory of my own Arthurian stories is different enough to White's that I can just be grateful for having read and loved an intriguing original take on the mythos without having to kowtow to it much in my own work.

* Albeit in this re-inclusion the goose chapters go on a bit further - there's even a tragicomic subplot in which Arthur falls in love with a female goose, only to be yanked back to humanity by Merlyn just as this is realised.

** I will freely admit that before reading these my only exposure to it was through the old film Excalibur, the BBC series Merlin, the Netflix series about Nimue called Cursed, and the early 2000's cartoon King Arthur's Disasters. Not necessarily in that order either chronologically or in terms of impact.

the Candle in the Wind

This book is the fourth in T.H. White's The Once and Future King series. And boy, here is where the drama really kicks off. Knights of the Round Table Agravaine and Mordred are stewing in their bitter grudges against Lancelot and Arthur respectively, and hatch a plot to bring down the reputations of these two most chivalrous of men by exposing Lancelot's love affair with Guinevere - they kind of vaguely succeed, and the kingdom is thrown into civil war as knights of the realm as well as other regional rulers from around the country piecemeal take sides. Arthur is utterly dismayed as his ideals of righteousness and chivalry are trampled upon and shown to be worthless in the face of genuine unrest, and the Round Table falls apart. The novel ends with the King alone in his tent outside the siege of Mordred's fort, wallowing in regretful what-iffery, until right at the end he is stirred by an unknown figure entering his tent - he assumes, Mordred, come to kill him. But we have to wait for the next book to find out.