Showing posts with label not about books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label not about books. Show all posts

Thursday, 1 January 2026

2025 recap

So this year I read sixty-three books, a marked boost from the previous couple of years. But what is it I actually read? That is what this post is for. So:

   Anyway, that's me done for 2025. I'd also like to announce here that now I'm completely finished with my backlog (the "to-read" pile) and so now can read whatever I want! So expect a much more focusedly eclectic listing in next year's recap.

   Anyway,

   Peace & love

   Isaac Stovell

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Wednesday, 1 January 2025

A FULL DECADE OF THIS BULLSHITE!

So - yeah, as it turns out, I've been running this blog for ten years now. Every single book I've read, be that a weighty tome my excitement has run down with each page I turn, or a picture-book that my niece demands I read to her, I have been here cataloguing & commenting, to whatever extent I feel it deserves. I hope my efforts have been fruitful in helping readers find books they're interested in & especially if those are from unexpected angles.

   To celebrate my first full decade of The Tsundoku Tortoise, I did toy with the idea of doing a "best of" kinda roundup from all my previous past-year-summaries, but let's be honest, those summaries tend to already include almost all the books I read in that given year, and performing such a roundup would be such an unwieldy task that I might just quit doing this blog rather than have to fulfil it.

   So I'm doing something else.

   It probably comes as no surprise to followers of this blog that I generally have more than one book on the go at a time. Thus, here, I will describe for you, in no particular order, the bookmarks upon which I most rely.

  • "the Emma bookmark" - a slapdash collage doodle thing that I co-created via post with my friend Emma Scott when we were 15ish
  • "the Bristowe bookmark" - a handwritten postcard sent to me from my dear friend Charlotte Bristowe after I purchased some of her artwork
  • "the [alphabet unrecognised] bookmark" - a fabric bookmark template upon which I inflicted several lines of writing in languages that existed in cultures I hadn't finished making up when I was about 14
  • "the prayer mat" - self-explanatory, it looks like a bookmark-shaped Islamic prayer mat
  • "the primary school memoir" - a gorgeously hand-stitched bookmark featuring numerous insects & flowers amid the words ISAAC'S BUGMARK - all creatures great and small; given to me by my teacher when I was in year one, as I was in hospital for some time, and obviously my teacher was an absolute sweetie with too much free time
  • "the Too Much Money note" - a superficially-somewhat-convincing-looking banknote for £1,000,000 with King Charles on it, this being delivered through my letterbox within the week that he was crowned, and on the reverse side reveals itself to be a very poorly disguised Christian evangelistic tract
  • "the WAY Too Much Money note" - a legitimate $10,000,000,000,000 (and yes, I know, ten trillion, that's what it is) bill from Zimbabwe when they were having their hyperinflation crisis. I got it on eBay for 10p

   I hope this was informative.

   Here's to another ten years of writing reflections on my reading into the void!

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2024 catch-up

So this last year I read forty-six books, which is one less than last year. Keeping it average! It also marks a decade since I started this blog, but I'll do another post about that in an hour or two. Let's get into the recap:

Yeh, that's been my year of reading this last year gone. Here's to a whole new decade of reading whatever I want & saying whatever I want about doing so to a non-existent audience.

Peace & love

Isaac Stovell

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Saturday, 1 January 2022

2021 overview

This past year I read thirty-nine books - my weakest year since 2016, for which I have no real excuses. Especially since quite a lot of what I was reading this year was essentially re-reading of stuff I've read before. Anyway, let's get into a breakdown of some of the good (and otherwise) shit I got my way through.

That's it from me for now - watch this space to see what I manage to read in 2022. Hopefully more stuff, especially more from a diversity of authors, particularly ones I've not read before.

Peace & love

Isaac Stovell

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Friday, 1 January 2021

2020 overview

Another year gone - another 95 books read (one of which I wrote myself, so whether I "read" it is a point of debate, because I certainly have, but not in order and more just while it was going along), which is by far my record, beating 2017 (which was my dissertation year and everything) by over twenty - and thus, another yearly recap post (see here for last year's). Admittedly a significant number of those read this past year were very short children's books, but I've got a solid number of challenging books under my belt too. Covid aside this has been a much less dramatic year for me than the last few have, so I don't have too much autobiographical plonkage to spew at you here, so I'll refrain from giving any and just get straight to the meat of the post.

   As for my intentions to try to read less by white males and more by women, people of colour and the queer community (don't @ me for missing out your favourite minority, I can't list everyone), I think I'm doing better than I have in previous years, but the sad fact remains that most of the books I own are by white dudes, and I'm not going to not read them just because of that sad fact. In any case, the effort continues.

   That's it from me folks - happy New Year and may 2021 bring you many blessings.

   Peace & love

   Isaac Stovell

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Wednesday, 1 January 2020

2019 overview

Another year - another few dozen thousands words poured into posts that nobody but me is ever likely to read; and since my last year's recap - there's been a lot of change. I'm going to link here to the posts in which I've further explicated the stories related in this whistlestop summary, but those posts will also be linked for actual book-related recap purposes later on down this post. So, the super-quick summary - I was told by a colleague that I was, apparently, a prophet, which seemed to map onto things God was also trying to tell me; I went through an absolute horrorshow in relation to mental health and my home church which resulted in me leaving my church - and also getting fired; so though still part of the Mission Community I'm no longer involved with Church Army's research work, and after a brief & messy recovery stint at my family home, as of the end of 2019 going onwards to a hopefully brighter new decade, I'm working as a chef, which is actually great for my mental health, weirdly, as I don't think many in the profession find that to be the case, but I've always been a bit odd. It gives me plenty of spare time & headspace for writing and reading, so there's that.
   Anyway - in 2019 overall I read sixty-three books, which is still quite a way below my 2017 personal best, especially when you also consider the fact that a good dozen at least were children's books, which I had to read, for reasons. Whatever. Here's some bullet points, as per the usual for these recaps:
In terms of the reading more stuff written by people who aren't just white males, I think I'm doing a lot better this year - though still need to keep pushing, as I've done a survey of my personal library and it's not even remotely representative of even Anglophone writers, let alone the whole world repository of human wisdom. We can all dream. But can we really dream?
   That's it from me for now - I'll be keeping up the blog efforts on into the foreseeable future, so expect the first book dump of 2020 to land here immanently.
   Happy new year folks
   Peace & love
   Isaac Stovell
   
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Tuesday, 1 January 2019

2018 overview

Wow! I finally bloody got there - it's July 2020, but because I'm a time traveller, insofar as the majority of posts from the past two years have been written much later than the date which they're formally listed on [a long story, I had a backlog which got out of my hands], but can now say I'm pretty much caught up with this blog enough to give you my muchly overdue recap for last year's reading. So, while last year's containment of the reading for my Master's dissertation means 2017 very much remains my Personal Best in terms of sheer quantity of books read, this past year I read forty-nine, which is still pretty good - oh, and I wrote a book too, which might count for something? I know nobody reads this blog out of interest for me and my actual life, but it's a routine feature of these annual recaps so if you don't give a shit skip to the bullet points below. Still very much blessed to be working with the Research Team of Church Army - and I feel like I'm learning so much here, just by osmosis. The office's Anglican atmosphere has been an immensely different gear-shift to the evangelical atmosphere I've grown up in - I'm being challenged by God in a hundred tiny ways every week just unlearning and relearning what normal, or actual, Christianity is or can be. I've gone from part-time to full-time here, and this has been a significant change to try to adapt to as it's by far the most intensive routine I've ever had - but I'm loving it here, having joined the Mission Community back in November even; and as the rest of this post will evidence God has been drawing me deeper into knowledge of & love for Jesus in ways that have taken me by surprise for how new, yet natural, they are.
   Anyway, enough waffle. Now for some reflections on the books that hit home hardest this past year - in a range of ways, as per the usual format for these recap posts:
  • Obviously I haven't read nearly as many books about Kurdistan as I did last year, but I will mention this excellent comic - Kobane Calling.
  • Best children's book - The Snail and the Whale, by a mile. Though I did also enjoy I Can Fly.
  • Best graphic biographical work - the Persepolis sequel [as I read the first part last year]
  • A much-needed book for Millennials - OFF: after reading this I began experimenting with digital detoxing and honestly feel a lot better for it. Similarly Matt Haig's Notes on a Nervous Planet is an excellent little book about mental health which I think will benefit anyone, but many of its core concerns are big issues for my generation.
  • Best popular science book - The Physics of Star Trek.
  • Funniest book punch-per-page - We Go to the Gallery.
  • Bleakest novel - Camus's The Outsider.
  • The series of books for which I seem to have inexplicably written a 4299-word essay in the post for the final one of and as such you should be thoroughly warned before reading it - the post that is, not the book, which is Mostly Harmless.
  • A book I was quite scathing of in my post but as the year has progressed I have found its insights actually rather meaningful: A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind.
  • Most interesting contextualized poetry: Poetry, Conspiracy & Radicalism in Sheffield.
  • Best overall poetry collection: &.
  • Funniest poetry collection: Donald Trump's own beautiful wordcrafts.
  • Not really sure what to categorize this one as but I really liked it and want to lump it in with this list - Confabulations.
  • Best philosophy book - Self-Constitution.
  • Best biography - Paul Johnson's Socrates.
  • Most unexpectedly thought-provoking - A Philosophy of Walking.
  • Most [actually, expectedly] life-affirming - Vagabonding.
  • Least personally-theologically-adventurous - You Can Change & Total Church - the former being one I've read before, and though somehow I'd never read the latter in its entirety, it pretty much forms an unspoken [okay, and actually rather often spoken] doctrinal foundation to the pragmatic operations of my church, and so even when reading it for the first time it felt Very Familiar.
  • Most personally-theologically-adventurous [at the time, anyway - I got further out as the year progressed]: Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son.
  • As alluded to in the above section though - my working in the research team of an Anglican charity has broadened my theological horizons in ways that have been quite difficult to neatly quantify. It started with Seven Sacred Spaces, which got me really thinking about stuff in fresh ways: I was already reading Pollution and the Death of Man alongside The Prophetic Imagination at the time, and several things in my subconscious collided somewhat. Desperate to slow down my own journey to find reflective space for everything I was discovering about my own Christianity - The Rest of God was a great help, as was revisiting Screwtape with a totally fresh cognizance of my own participation in spiritual warfare [difficult to work somewhere called Church Army and not get a feel for that, or at least some rough inklings]; as was the ongoing work around Messy Churches, for which I did a fair bit of wider self-directed reading outside of office hours because I was finding the whole theological angles therein so life-giving where I was. By spring I found myself taking hugely wholesome lessons in my own faith from places I never would have thought to look - such as Jacques Ellul; or from places I'd long been thinking of looking but had never got round to - like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By summer I was well underway with a completely unexpected series of prolonged wrestles with questions about what the church is or should do next - contemplative devotional classics like Markings and The Imitation of Christ were great stepping stones here - then I went to New Wine, and met someone who claimed to have a prophetic ministry; I tell the story in this post. Something clicked, or was unleashed within me, and I found myself now empowered to seriously questioningly begin to unlearningly and receptively listen to the spiritual contexts I was in; Holy Listening and How to be a Bad Christian were of key aides in this period - and then October came round, and Extinction Rebellion were a new thing, and Rowan Williams, who is the Chair of Church Army, put out a statement in support of it - and everything else that had happened having happened I basically took this as a direct order and so got arrested on Lambeth Bridge. Whatever else is going on in my head and heart and bookshelf - God has handed me, wholesale, the pragmatic toolkits for thinking and being in ways faithful to this - I don't even know, journey? strange sojourn? - you know. Needless to say, by the end of this crazy single year I'd travelled far enough from where I'd been at the start of 2018 to read A Closer Look at New Age Spirituality - and only partly out of itching curious desires to be able to debunk it for being 'bad christianity.'

Yeah, maybe that was a bit more freeform than last year's recap. But the content of and context for my reading journey is ever-changing, and so this blog must change with it - or become a dull relic of routine, without meaningfulness in its intrinsic tracing of my own mad sub/conscious travels across the written word. I'm still finding it very much a useful personal exercise, so regardless for its total lack of readership it will continue - and as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the backlog is now pretty much handled, so I'm really hoping all the posts from summer 2020 onwards are going to be written at least within a day or two of the actual book's being read - as you wouldn't believe how much of a faff it's been to dig back through my own memory across a very strange couple of years anyway to gather enough reflections on the list of several dozen books I'd not yet properly transcribed my thoughts on... maybe you would.
   My intentions of reading substantively more works by non-white non-male authors fell a bit by the wayside, I'm ashamed to say - I'd like to lay the chief blame for this failure on the fact that I've mostly been reading stuff I already had, or that was in the Wilson Carlile Centre library, but that's a poor excuse and I know it. It remains an intention onwards into 2019.
   Anyway - happy new year.
   Peace & love
   Isaac Stovell
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Monday, 1 January 2018

2017 overview

So, every new year on this blog I do a recap post for the year just past - and man, what a year 2017 has been. The world continues noisily going mad, I've finally finished university having submitted my Masters dissertation in September, and I'm lucky enough to have gone from studenthood straight into a part-time job with the Church Army, alongside which I continue to write - poetry here and there, but mostly grinding away in an effort to produce a workable draft of the first in my planned series of novels, The Improbable Interplanetary Revolutions of Naomi Moss; but you don't care about my life, dear internet stranger who for whatever unfathomable reasons may be reading this weird little blog of spewed idiosyncratic reflections on various wodges of paper and ink - you care, like me, about books, and so if you're reading this recap post I can only imagine it is to glean some insights into my final reflections on the material my brain has eaten and digested (and in places excreted) across the last twelve months. And wow! In 2017 we saw a new record set for this blog, with 69 books finished - a full 23 more than the previous best.
   To what can we attribute this enormous disparity?
   Well, to an extent it's because I've read quite a lot of really short books, which I'm still obligated to write individual posts for, but which I won't be mentioning most of here. To a larger degree, it's because I spent most of summer dedicatedly reading masses of material about Kurdistan for my dissertation - which is easily the most enjoyable research project I'd ever undertaken.
  • Most interesting specific field in non-fiction: Kurdistan
   Also, since November last year I've been trying to develop as a poet, and so have been reading lots of poetry: these books tend to be a lot shorter than typical others, but are far more often worthy of wide recommendation, so:
   Eh, there's quite a lot of books I'm going to link into this, so rather than keep trying to preface each mention with a properly couching bit of prose I'm just gonna dump them all in no particular order. C'est la vie.
   I'm still very much enjoying writing this blog and finding value in it as personal project, so buckle in for a buttload more books in 2018. There's been a pre-selected pile of items which I'd been planning to read alongside the start of my writing project, which I've now started working my way through, so there are some very interesting posts coming along hopefully. I'm still trying to tip the balance more toward reading books from female and minority background writers, as I'm painfully aware that most of the stuff I read (and most of the stuff most people read, given the nature of privilege in publishing industries and the tides of literary and academic history) is by white men, not at all to say that these aren't generally good books, but if one of the core points of reading widely is to broaden your empathic horizons then it is woefully shortsighted to read without taking such factors of context into account and seeking to correct for them in what one chooses to imbibe.
   Anyway.
   Whoever you are, dear reader, I wish you all the best, and thank you for visiting this blog whether you are a regular or first-time-stumble-across-googler: happy new year.
   Peace & love
   Isaac Stovell
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Sunday, 5 January 2014

why & so

By means of beginning, I want to explain why I've started this blog and what I hope will come of it. But first a rough introduction: I am Isaac John Stovell, twenty years old, living and studying in Sheffield [England], and I expect that many more details will be shared and explained in future posts. I don't want to write a blog about my life because (aside from marginally higher degrees of pretentiousness and eloquence) it would be almost indistinguishable from most other humdrum lives. However, other than random events occurring in my everyday life (which I already tweet and facebookpost about if they're interesting enough) or my reactions to current events (which likewise), the only consistent reliable source of interesting things for me to say is my reactions to my reading material.
   So this blog is going to be about books that I've read; which hopefully will be enough to supply a regular stream of posts. I've read a lot since early childhood, but don't give myself enough opportunity to properly digest and derive meaning from books - which is a shame, because books contain a lot of digestible derivable meaning. So I'm forcing myself to (the date of publication is no coincidence - this is part of my New Year's Resolutions and it's easily the most fun part, give me a bibliophile's blog over jogging and sleeping patterns any day) think about the books I've read, by writing a reflective post about each one as soon as I've had a chance to think over it once I've completed it. These aren't intended as mere reviews of whether or not I liked the book and why; I want to properly get my nails into themes, concepts, meanings, characters, genres, dramas, philosophical implications. I'll try to be as reasonably opinionated as possible, for I am a man of strong opinions and strong reasons for holding them. I'll also commit to posting links for obtainment or discovery of each book that I discuss in case I somehow sway your interest.
   Hopefully through writing this blog I will become more in tune with my thoughts and the thoughts that I imbibe through my bookshelf. Hopefully also through reading this blog (if there are any readers; I'm not bothered if there aren't as this is more of a therapeutic personal thought-process, but if people want to read what I've written about what I read, fair enough) you will become provoked into reading a particular book and thinking about something that may enchant, enrage, enamour or otherwise enlighten you.
   So, rules to keep me blogging nicely:
1. Every book I finish from January 2014 onwards, I will write a post about it, as soon as possible after finishing it.
   1.1 Every book, that is, which I read recreationally. Therefore discounting the large array of books I have to read for wider course research and understanding (I'm currently partway through a degree in economics and philosophy); also excluding my regular Bible readings (if one day I should decide to sit down and read through the whole of it, I'll do a post, sure, but habitual devotional readings aren't quite the same as recreational reading).
2. Posts should ideally be somewhat interesting and try to critically engage with the book at least more than a bit. My responses may be excuse-laden but I'll try.
3. Posts should contain as few non-book pop-culture references as possible.
4. Posts should contain full author/title information and links to Goodreads or Amazon or wherever in case readers want to read the books I've read.
5. No spoilers, if posting about fiction. This will be the most difficult rule, but I'll limit myself to books' introductory and thematic elements instead of ruining the endings.
6. Should these standards fail to be kept, any reader who cares enough is encouraged to contact and rebuke me.
   Hope you enjoy reading any of my posts and any of the books they're about.
      Cheers for now,
         Isaac Stovell
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