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.

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.

the Ill-Made Knight

This book is the third in T.H. White's The Once and Future King series. Again, Arthur and Merlyn are hardly featured - instead we follow perhaps the third-most famous character from the mythos - that being the inimitable Sir Lancelot, as he attains knighthood, gains renown, wins a ton of tournaments and jousts, partakes in the Round Table (which is by now well-established) and its quixotic quest to find the Holy Grail, and falls, ill-fatedly, in love with Queen Guinevere. Despite being the longest instalment in the series perhaps the least of overall plot import happens in this one - it's a lot of fun nonethless.

the Witch in the Wood

This book is the second of T.H. White's The Once and Future King series. Arthur and Merlyn are barely in this one - instead, we largely follow two ongoing largely comic threads: in one, the errant King Pellinore continues to search for the Questing Beast; in the other, Arthur's nephews (Agravaine, Gawaine, Gaheris and Gareth) jostle for status as they await adulthood. Meanwhile, in the background, the King is working on plans to establish some means of promoting chivalry and righteousness throughout the land, by way of an egalitarian ideal embodied in the Round Table. to which he starts calling chivalrous and righteous knights to promote his ethic. The eponymous "witch in the wood" is Morgan le Fay, who shows up briefly - also, right at the end, Arthur's half-sister Morgause seduces him by way of nefarious magics to conceive with him an incest-baby who will grow up to the be prophetically-ominous/tragic Mordred.

the Sword in the Stone

This book is the first in T.H. White's The Once and Future King series - a modern retelling of the Arthurian mythos loosely based on Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. I'm planning to blitz through all five books in the next week or so because I'm actually working on a series of novels involving King Arthur and this looks like great inspiration-fodder. As usual for a series, I will be restricting these posts to brief outlines of story for each post up until the final book where I will then finally offer some deeper reflections on the series as a whole.

   Anyway - in this book we are introduced to a kid nicknamed "the Wart", who is growing up in a medieval castle, undergoing rigorous diverse education in matters intellectual and military, and is bottom of his social pecking order. Then the Wart meets a mad-seeming old man called Merlyn, who rips himself away from his hermit-life to become Wart's tutor - only these new kinds of lessons are education of a completely different style to what might have been expected. Merlyn's lessons comprise partly of lectures in the need for and difficulties of getting people to live morally, and partly of turning Wart into various animals* to see how they experience life. After a few years of this, we learn that the realm is in political turmoil due to the lack of a clear successor for king, but there is a rumour abroad that whoever can pull a mysterious sword out of a stone will be divinely bestowed with such rights. Anyone who knows the story can guess who manages to pull it out - and thus, Wart's derogatory nickname is left in the dust, and a young King Arthur starts to assume his life's work.

* Including a fish, a hawk, an owl, an ant, a goose, and a beaver - the implication is that there were probably many more such lessons that didn't get covered in the book itself. The ant and goose chapters are particularly genius feats of natural imagination.

Miracles

This book by C.S. Lewis is a pull-no-punches logical apologetic about, as the title suggests, miracles. Often claimed by the non-religious as the most egregiously unbelievable aspect of religion, miracles are a philosophical sticking-point for many explorers of faiths that involve them. However - as Lewis argues - this is a misapprehension, applying assumptions of natural science to phenomena that are essentially supernatural. This is the crux of his argument throughout the book, the discontinuity between nature and "supernature", which having defined he goes on to explore and prod the logical interrelations between these two levels of reality for how knowable, probable, and believable they are. I won't do a full chapter-by-chapter breakdown for this book - simply conclude by saying that here is a book that is dazzlingly well-argued and difficult to refute without relying on unproveable assumptions that have nothing to do with science and everything to do with metaphysical faith. A great enlightening read for Christians who want to robustify their intellectual flexibility, and surely a challenging thought-provoker for those readers of no religion.

Tales of Earthsea

This book by Ursula K. Le Guin is the fifth in the Earthsea series, so it technically comes before The Other Wind, but I've already read and blogged that one, so this post culminates the series and therefore I'll be making my reflections here.

   This book comprises five short stories and an essay - I will deal with each in turn.

• First up we have The Finder, in which a young sorcerer called Medra (also known as Otter or Tern at points in his life) grows in power and wisdom and ends up founding the wizard school on Roke. This longish short story is a brilliant view into the dim hazy past of the world Le Guin has created, and lends a potent depth to the reader's understanding of the interrelations between magic and wisdom necessary to be a good wizard.
• Next is Darkrose and Diamond, in which a young sorcerer called Diamond falls in love with a young witch called Rose, and forgoes life as a wizard to pursue this romance. This is a delicate, lovely little story.
• Then we move onto The Bones of the Earth, in which a young Ogion (the sorcerer who initially trained Ged in the first book) teams up with his tutor in the hope of preventing a catastrophic earthquake. Strong themes of trust and humility.
• Next we have On the High Marsh, in which we are treated to a glimpse of Ged at the height of his career as Archmage - only he isn't doing grand world-saving stuff, he's on a remote island curing cattle. Again, strong themes of humility, as well as kindness, and power.
• Finally, Dragonfly - in which Irian (who you may remember from the sixth book) visits the school of wizards on Roke to provocatively question the masters of magic why such learning is forbidden to women and girls. This story provides a perfect stepping stone into the final book in the series.

   Finally, the essay at the end of the book goes into elucidatory detail about the peoples, languages, history and magic system of Earthsea - for me it didn't really add a huge amount of insight into the books, as I've read all six so closely together and so had much of the lore in my medium-term memory pretty well already, but for people reading the books more spaced out it would be a really helpful appendix. Not to mention it simply shows a masterclass in thoughtful worldbuilding, much like Tolkien's appendices.

   All five stories in the book are moving, thought-provoking, immersive, deceptively simple, and immaculately well-written. If you have read any of the other Earthsea books and enjoyed them this is an addition you can't leave out - in fact, just read the whole series. Speaking of the six as a whole, I think anyone who appreciates good fantasy will absolutely love them - I do in actual fact think these books seriously rival The Lord of the Rings as my favourite fantasy literature now, though it's hard to compare as the writing styles are so different and thematically and in scope the works are trying to achieve very different things. Good job I don't have to pick favourites on this blog.

   I said I'd be making reflections on the series as a whole - the fact is I don't have much to say. I just loved the experience of reading these superb stories, and know I will definitely be revisiting them for a re-read in the future, probably many times. The characters are well-drawn enough to be believable and lovable or hateable as the plot intends and each realised with psychological complexities of their own; the themes are deep to the point of profundity and are perfectly entwined and expressed through character and plot; the world is obviously immensely well-developed and lived-in; and the overall story arc across these six books is hugely satisfying while never feeling like an ultimate solution - the story ends on a note of potential and promise rather than a statically final resolution. If J.R.R. Tolkien can make you dream wistfully of being a hobbit, Ursula K. Le Guin will show you dizzying visions of being a dragon.

Perpetual Peace

This book (available from that link as a .pdf online for free) is a 1794* essay by Immanuel Kant on the possibility of ending war between sovereign nations. He basically argues that we need to seek to establish an international federation of co-dependent nations under a singular representative state. Pretty modern ideas for the 18th-century, but then, this is Kant we're talking about. His arguments are largely pragmatic and don't veer too much into philosophy** and should be generally digestible by a majority of readers. As stated repeatedly throughout the text, this is NOT a manifesto - I don't think Kant believed that any single state of policy would be able to even kickstart the move towards a perfectly peaceable world - but by holding out these plausibilities as ideals, he makes a very convincing case that establishing such a world is not beyond possibility even within a cynical grasp of reality, and so the main thrust of this test stands on its own two feet. Recommended reading for anyone whom this theme strikes curiosity into, but if you somehow happen to be a person of international political influence who reads this blog, I specifically implore you to read this and think of how Kantian your rationality as regards your work is.

* And the translation, by one M. Campbell Smith, was published in 1903 - so even the Very Lengthy (as in, longer than the translated text it was the introduction to) Introduction recounting the history of ideas around the core topic of this essay came too early to be able to speak of anything regarding such institutions as NATO, the EU or UN even, which might have quite substantively reshaped Smith's introductory commentary on the ideas herein.

** Except for the pair of appendices, where he first considers the disagreements between proper moral ethics and political reality, and then secondly looks at the singular overlap point between proper moral ethics and political reality - that being the idea of a public right.

the Problem of Pain

This book by C.S. Lewis is a short but punchy apologetic for that ever-irksome question to the Christian - you know the one I mean, the theodicy, that is: "if God is perfectly good and totally powerful, why is there suffering?" His method of argument here is not theological in any meaningful sense; in fact he draws on existing Christian thought very little throughout, relying instead on rigorous resolute logical application and dissection of the concepts themselves as the appear at face value. This makes his points dazzlingly original, divorced as they are from the aggregated accumulation of two millennia of Christian philosophizing, and thoroughly compelling, as his arguments stand on their own two feet without dependence on a reader's acceptance or rejection of any particular orthodoxy (not to say that the theological implications of this book aren't in line with orthodox theology, but that simply isn't the line of argument taken).

   The first two chapters deal, in turn, with divine omnipotence and divine goodness; as stated there is very little here that could be described as serious or systematic theology, but Lewis's grasp of the logical implications around these concepts is on full display as he makes the case that neither of these presumed facts about God necessarily demand or even imply the total absence of suffering in said God's creation. In the following two chapters he discusses human wickedness (as a logically necessary possibility in a created order in which we assume human freedom, and as the source of much suffering) and the fallen nature of humankind (this is probably the most theological chapter of the book as it relies on The Fall as an existing theological framework - however, much to my surprise, this chapter also devotes considerable attention to the question of humanity's evolutionary history, and what a pre-Fall prehistoric homo sapiens may have been like in its relation to itself, God, and nature more widely). Then there is a pair of chapters about human pain (which largely consists of pretty basic logical inductions from the previous chapters) and the pain of animals (which I wasn't expecting much from given my critique of its related essay in this collection, but I take back my assumptions from that post that this probably wouldn't be a very strong chapter as I have to admit Lewis does actually have a nuanced and well-developed model of animal nature). This leads us up to a concluding pair of chapters in which we consider the eternal dimensions that lend either meaninglessness or meaningfulness to whatever degree of experienced pain the human life serves up - that is, Heaven and Hell. The Hell chapter walked territory that was very familiar to the concepts of Christianity that I've grown up with (much moreso than the universalism angled towards in Moltmann's theological system, even if I prefer that now) with a few key fresh insights - most especially, the notion that Hell is not imposed but chosen: its doors, Lewis states flatly, are locked from the inside. The Heaven chapter is reasonably speculative, as it is bound to have to be, but the picture he paints of eternal communion between God and His redeemed human creatures is devastatingly beautiful: the glorification of the Holy Trinity and the fulness of expressed and embodied freedom of people are one and the same thing, every unique individual who has ever lived and been brought into God's Kingdom finding their deepest and most everlasting joy in expressing their personal relationship to God in a way that only they could ever precisely manage, thus involving to the ultimate realness the diversity and unity of personhood. Finally there is an appendix wherein we are given a brief scientific overview of what physical and mental pain is understood to be; this adds virtually nothing to the arguments Lewis has been making, but it's nice to have for the possible reader who has, like the pre-enlightened Buddha, never experienced meaningful suffering.

   Overall this is an eminently readable and powerful intellectual-yet-accessible book about one of the thorniest issues in all of religion. Christian readers will find their faith sharpened and their apologetic capacities given a major leg-up; and non-Christians who rely on the issue of suffering to bolster their own rejection of the faith should find in here, if not absolutely guaranteed-to-be-convincing points, at least much challenging food for thought that should give even the most ardent atheist some humbling pause.

[one final thing I will say, that has nothing to do with the text of this book in itself - if you're going to read this, I would strongly recommend trying to find a physical version, as the Kindle version that I read it through (and that is linked above) is quite poorly formatted, with certain sections where there seem to be chunks missing, and them being missing means there could only have been a few words or perhaps whole pages that I didn't get included in the edition I read; it still held together as a book, but it would have been nice, having bought a book, to get the whole text]

the Other Wind

This book is the sixth and last in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series (and yes, I know, I've skipped the fifth one, Tales of Earthsea, but I don't have it yet - it's ordered and will be lumped up on here once I've read it, but my reflections on the series as a whole will be reserved for that one). In this instalment we follow Alder, a young sorcerer of mending from the island of Taon, who keeps having dreams in which his dead wife reaches out to him from the realms of those who have passed over the wall on the hill which separates the living from the not. He is drawn to Gont to question the ex-Archmage Ged about this, but Ged, now powerless but still wise, shunts Alder off to the capital island Havnor to consult with Tenar and Tehanu, who are over there to visit the recently installed king Lebannen (aka Arren from the third one). Tenar and Tehanu, as well as a number of other wizards from Roke who happened to be on Havnor at the time, and in short order also a dragon who can take the form of a woman called Irian, all find Alder's plight deeply troubling, the experienced mages taking it as a sign of a worsening in the balance that Ged had tried so hard fifteen years earlier to heal. Taking along with them a princess from the Kargad Lands who has been sent as a gifted bride to Lebannen, all concerned persons make their way to Roke, to hold council between humans and dragons in the Immanent Grove, a magical forest that forms the spiritual and arguably literal centre of all Earthsea, in the hope that they may find in their shared wisdom some way of restoring rest and reincarnation to the dead that the living may rest and live in hope and ease. I hope that it goes without saying that this perfunctory plot summary of mine by no means spoils the story, as the magic is in the fabric of the telling. But reflections further than that will have to wait for my post about the fifth book which I've accidentally skipped. So stick around.

Tehanu

This book is the fourth Earthsea novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, and I honestly was not prepared for how much of a sharp turn this one took. The first three had all been fairly standard-fare fantasy adventure mystery stories; this is more of a domestic drama, set entirely on Ged's home island Gont. We follow Tenar (who since escaping Atuan now goes by her original name), now a middle-aged woman, and Therru, a young girl who has survived horrific childhood abuse, as the pair simply try to live life on the land. Ged arrives home on the back of a dragon named Kalessin about a quarter of the way through, and this complicates matters for Tenar and her care of Therru, but Ged is stripped of his magic and simply wishes to hide and recuperate. I hope it doesn't sound like a complaint but very little of import happens in the majority of this novel; it is simply the story of Tenar struggling to raise a complex and hurt child in a land that she knows well but is ultimately foreign to her. Then it all kicks off in the last ten pages, but I won't spoil that - except to drop the tantalising hint that Therru comes to learn her true name in epic fashion.