the Voyage of the Dawn Treader

This book is the fifth instalment of C. S. Lewis's Narnia saga, and though it follows directly on from the worst (the last one) it is a breath of fresh air when it comes to narrative imagination. Lucy and Edmund (who you may know from prior instalments) along with their odious cousin Eustace are sucked once more into the magical realm, where they find themselves on a pretty questionable sea-voyage under the captainship of Caspian (from prior book) who is on a quest to re-discover the lost lords of Narnia. This book is pretty episodic, with chapters or chunks of chapters having very little bearing on each other but telling interesting little self-contained bits; that said it is an engrossing and entertaining part of the overall Chronicles, and without wanting to give too much of a spoiler - the voluntary, even excited, sacrifice made by Reepicheep toward the end was the most emotional I've gotten reading this whole series so far. So there's that, I suppose.

Prince Caspian

This book is the fourth chronological instalment of C. S. Lewis's Narnia saga, and in my opinion by far the simplest to summarise. Basically the same four kids from book two (see earlier this month in the blog) get whisked back to Narnia, where it turns out that despite having been a very short time for them in England, 1300 years have passed there, and the realm is now in crisis as the usurper Miraz has displaced the true heir to the throne, the eponymous. You know. So obviously Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy have to track him down and help him battle to reclaim rule over Narnia and they do, without much by way of real narrative struggle. I mean, there are obstacles, but written in such a way that even a six-year-old having this read to them could see no real reason to worry as the plot armour of Good Prevailing is so thick. The worst of the series so far.

the Horse and His Boy

This book is the third of C. S. Lewis's Narnia saga, and arguably the weirdest. Though that is very arguable indeed, as all of them are arguably pretty weird. What's weird about this one though is that is has almost zero bearing on the characters or plot of the other six novels in this saga. It follows Shashta, a poor boy from Calormen, who escapes slavery with a talking horse called Bree, eventually meeting up with a girl called Aravis (who also has a talking horse) with whom he tries to escape to Narnia in the far north but along the way they get into all kinds of political scrapes and intrigue. Oh, and Jesus Aslan shows up briefly of course. I really don't know exactly what Lewis was trying to say with this book. It adds virtually nothing to the larger saga, even thematically, as everything that is communicated through subtext is replicated better in other places across this series of seven shortish novels. This one does have a handful of good moments though. Don't take my perplexity at its existence as an excuse to skip it if you're actually reading through the Narnia saga.

the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

This book by C. S. Lewis is the second (by chronological reading order) book in the Chronicles of Narnia series, and easily the most famous from that world. To the point that even in a mere plot-summary post I don't see the point in writing all that much as surely anyone literary enough to be reading a blog about books will be at least tangentially familiar with the plot of what is, arguably, the most famous children's fantasy novel of the 20th century perhaps after The Hobbit, so yes, this will be a short one.

    Siblings evacuated from London during the blitz, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy wind up staying with an eccentric elderly relative. During a game of hide-and-seek one of them (in case you're lucky enough to be unfamiliar I won't say which) discovers a whole other magical world hidden in the back of a wardrobe, but the other siblings don't believe this. Until they all get there, then they do. But there's an evil witch who wants to kill Jesus Aslan. So the children have to make so very mature decisions and lead a war against evil in the realm of Narnia - which, shock and horror, they win, so they get to become monarchs despite only having been in the place for like a few days. I don't know. Don't even get me started on the literary-political implications of the way C. S. Lewis treats monarchy in this series of novels. Anyway, NEXT

the Magician's Nephew

This book is the first novel (not in writing order but in reading order which is the order I read them in and thus am blogging them in) in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series. As I tend to do with all series of books, I will reserve my overall reflections and recommendations until the last post in the series, and here simply resign myself to a spoiler-free-as-can-be plot summary.

    Digory and Polly, two childhood friends, are playing in a garden when uncle Andrew invites them into his attic and tricks them into touching magic rings that transport them into another world. The exact otherness of these worlds are not really specified by the narrative, but they go through several different dimensions of place until they run into a scary lady called Jadis, who then tags along with them, back to England which she tries to take over, until they end up in a new place - Narnia, in the process of its being created ex nihilo by Aslan the Jesus-lion. Jadis has a hissy fit and throws away the lamp-post she'd been using as a weapon; it grows into a whole new lamp-post - then Aslan says hello to Digory and Polly, and uncle Andrew and the cab-driver who for some reason has come with them, Aslan summons the cab-driver's wife from England and makes her and him the new King and Queen of Narnia, and Digory and Polly go back to normal reality with uncle Andrew. It's a weird story, I know. I've left out a few details but nothing that really has any bearing on the rest of the books in the series other than that you should know that Jadis is still annoyed and knocking about Narnia somewhere, and Andrew stole a magical apple that he planted into his garden that might someday grow into a tree large enough that you could, if you wanted, make a wardrobe out of its wood... and one has to wonder whether said wardrobe would maintain some kind of magical linkage to the realm of its origin?

2022 catch-up

So, this past year I read forty-six books, which is far from my best, but better than last year. I'm still not managing to read as many books by women, people of colour or LGBT+ people as I'd like - I'm scuppered by already having bookshelves too full before I can conscionably buy more, even as much as I'd like to in order to offset my own reading biases. In any case, let's get down to an overview of some of what I read in the past year...

• Literally all of Dan Abnett's Inquisitor novels that exist so far - see Eisenhorn 1/2/3/4, Ravenor 1/2/3 and Bequin 1/2
• Dan Abnett's original sci-fi war story - Embedded
• Dan Abnett's original fantasy thriller - Triumff
• Dan Abnett's [un]original dinosaur drama - Extinction Event
• Yeh I've been re-reading a lot of Dan Abnett this year, get over it
• Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series - where I got up to book five and then my heart said "nope" and I put it on hold for the foreseeable future
• Don't worry that's it for Dan Abnett in this year's list
• The first two instalments of the maddest best fantasy trilogy I've ever read - Brian Catling's The Vorrh and The Erstwhile
• An underwhelming biography of the most important man ever to live
• Some reasonably interesting insights into Daniel the prophet's relevance to modernity
• Corrie ten Boom's absolutely bonkers prayer journey
• Four galleries worth of The Far Side, alongside its prehistory
• Che Guevara's manual on Guerrilla Warfare
• A grotesquely bad culture-war-christian manifesto - ech
• George Orwell's positively-intentioned but thoroughly out-of-date guide on spotting political fakespeak
• Sarah Bessey's incredibly edifying Jesus Feminist
• Richard Rohr's magnificent guide on how to join The Divine Dance
• And then Jürgen Moltmann's far more intellectual dive into the Trinity
• A fun graphic way of interpreting biblical data - see here
• Richard Keyes's ruminations on what church should be: Chameleon or Tribe?
• Pope Francis telling Catholics to get their environmental shit together
• Three of Plato's most significant historic texts ever - probably
• That great moment where Ludwig Wittgenstein "solved philosophy" but nobody understood him so every other philosopher had to keep going anyway
• Sheffield's absolute boss-man ex-mayor Magid Magid on The Art of Disruption
• My favourite of the three Roald Dahl novellas I read over Christmas - Matilda

So - that's it from me for this past year, and I'll be sure to keep reading random stuff and updating this blog as often as I can be arsed so there's some record of all the random stuff I'm reading... that's why I'm doing this, right?

Peace & love

Isaac Stovell

Defence of Socrates, Euthyphro & Crito

This collection of texts attributed to Plato are perhaps some of the most significant blobs of words in the history of western philosophy. Honestly - having never actually read anything by Plato before, when working my way through these (which only actually took a couple of days as I found them so gripping) I was seized with a sense of spiritual reverence that I have never felt in reading anything but holy texts. There is a specialness in these ancient dialogues.

   In reverse order then:

• Crito: this is a dialogue with Socrates, having been condemned and now languishing in prison, debating with someone attempting to release him what exactly is the proper relationship between an individual and the state in the moral order.
• Euthyphro: this is a dialogue between Socrates and a young aristocrat about what is the proper obligation of a human being to the gods; where morality comes from, whether we could ever owe it to the gods to do something evil, or if they would be gods were they to demand such a thing.
• Defence of Socrates: in here Socrates, accused of atheism and corrupting the youth of Athens, stands trial amongst his peers, and has to offer a coherent rational defence of his thinking, behaviours, ideas and their impacts on wider society - he knows he will be put to death should this trial not go his way, but he is not concerned with self-defence so much as he is with pursuit of absolute truth.

   I know these summaries are barely scratching the surface. If the Socrates that Plato sketches in these texts is half as wise as the real man they were based on then I must agree he was probably the wisest man in history. Anyway. So that's the book. Exactly who determined that these three should be collated together I do not know - certainly not Socrates, and probably not Plato, but it cannot be denied there is a pure and sheer brilliance of deep overlap between the ideas herein. If you like philosophy and you've not read these, you must. If you don't like philosophy but you wonder why philosophers think you should - you should read these.

Politically Correct Bedtime Stories

This book by James Finn Garner is as you would expect off the tin - cleverly rewritten classic fairy tales to skewer the "political correctness" prevalent at time of publication (in this editions, the mid 1990's, which is fun, isn't it? I was a toddler then, so I was obviously well plugged in to such cultural sensitivities.)

   No, I jest - I got this book in my Christmas stocking from Ma & Pa, so I was obliged to read it - and it was actually pretty funny. Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel - and more; there's a bunch of classic fairy tales who get redrawn in "politically-correct" fashion. It is vaguely amusing, but I'm still not entirely sure why my parents thought I would be that keen about this notion. Isn't the whole point of older stories that they are less "woke"? That's how one observes cultural evolution over literary time, isn't it?

   I don't even know if or what I'm joking about any more.

George's Marvellous Medicine

This book by Roald Dahl is a fucking shitshow, let's be honest. So there's a boy called George who lives a pretty happy life on a farm with his family, all of whom he gets along pretty well with, except his Grandma - who is never actually abusive, she can't really be as she's too disabled to leave her chair - but is sometimes a bit harsh to him. Which drives George, one day, when the rest of his family is out, to bungle together every single random chemical ingredient* he can find in the house, blend it up, and replace his Grandma's medicine with this new concoction. It does not go well. Grandma grows to be like forty feet tall or something. George's dad, when he gets back, isn't concerned for his mother-in-law's wellbeing - he's excited about the prospect of this new medicinal invention for farming methods. George tests the medicine on a chicken and a cow and they both also grow to ridiculous sizes. George's dad gets so excited that he starts trying to throw together a patent whereby he can somehow in the future control a farm of oversized livestock - but George runs out of medicine. And can't remember exactly how he made it in the first place. His dad is upset, but optimistic - and prompts George to try again, which the boy does: only for his new concoction to immediately cause Grandma to shrink so much that she literally cannot be seen by the human eye.

   The end. Dark, right? What, you wanted spoiler warnings? Roald Dahl is basically public domain at this point babe, don't come to a blog specifically about books and complain that a post like this spoiled it for you. Anyway. I would recommend this book as a bedtime story for children between threeish and sevenish, as it's incredibly dark and also funny as fuck.

* I will be frank, the chapter where he's deciding what to put into it is hilarious.

The Lady Who Was Beautiful Inside

This book by Edward Monkton is, similarly as I said of the other, basically a twenty-page greetings card about a woman who discovers the concept of inner beauty. Not poetic really, just a bit flat. Might make a good toilet book if you're the sentimental and non-constipated type.

Matilda

This book by Roald Dahl is so much of a classic that I'm not even going to devote more than a single sentence to a summary of its plot - as I did with the other Dahl classics that I've read it the last few days. If any blog-followers are curious for this recent diversion in content, I am staying at my parents' house for Christmas and they have a Roald Dahl anthology, and I thought it might be funny to revisit some of my childhood stories for blogging purport. Anyway, if you need a fuller explication of the story of this one than I am offering here, go ask Danny Devito.

   Matilda is the neglected child of a neglectful family who takes her love for books to her impoverished teacher, Ms Honey; albeit under the stern gaze of abusive headmistress Mrs Trunchbull - but eventually discovers she has psychic powers, so she fucks everyone over and makes her own life go as well as she pretty much wants.

   Wow, yeh - that was only one sentence. And I thought it was going to become a bit overlong. But yeh, that's the plot. Like most Dahl stories, yes, this is very dark in places - there is violent and emotional abuse, with both Matilda and Ms Honey and a few other characters being the victims; but it's all okay in the end because little miss bookworm can move things with her mind so she gets to manipulate events to the desired outcome. The more I think about Roald Dahl stories as an adult the less I get what message he was really going for, you know?

The Wonderful Man

This book by Edward Monkton is basically a twenty-page greetings card about a nice man. It's nice. It would make a great toilet book, if you have relatively undiscerning taste, and only needed a very brief poo.

The BFG

This book by Roald Dahl is one of the less-dark of most of most of his oeuvre, if I remember rightly, which is odd because it does actually feature (or at least mention) quite a lot of human people being eaten alive.

   Story in a nutshell: an insomniac orphan called Sophie is kidnapped by a giant with big ears and a trumpet, who takes her back to his homeland. Here he introduces himself as the BFG (Big Friendly Giant - even though, he is the least big of all the giants, and the only friendly one of all of them, so none of his nomenclature semantics are particularly helpful overall) and reveals, with much relief to Sophie, that unlike the other giants (who eat humans every night) he is strictly vegetarian - subsisting, it seems, on weird warty cucumber things and a particularly-odd strain of soda that makes you have orgasmic farts with every gulp. Sophie accepts this, and learns to trust the BFG further when he hides her from the other giants - who are in the habit of bullying him. Later on the BFG shows Sophie what he does for a job (why, it is never shown - goodness knows who pays him to do this if anyone); catching dreams in bottles and spitting them through his trumpet into the ears of sleeping humans. Sophie has a brainwave: "if we give the Queen a nightmare about giants coming and eating people, she'll do something about it!" Daft, I know. But this is what happens. This is Roald Dahl man, not... I dunno, Brian Catling. So the BFG takes Sophie to see the Queen of England, they have breakfast (which is a whole chapter, can you believe - not even Tolkien was ever THAT self-indulgent) and she agrees to set the military up to catch the giants next time they come to England to eat people. Surprise, it works, and the giants are captured and thrown into a pit. Basically the end.

   I saw a cartoon of this when I was like six, saw the more recent movie adaptation like four years ago, and I must have read the book (this time included) at least half a dozen times; and I still don't know why it's a popular story. This is pure silly. Your kid might like this. I do not. If I was your kid - I did not.

the Art of Disruption

This book, part autobiographical reflection and part political manifesto, is the first book by Magid Magid, who frequently made global headlines* when he was Sheffield's Lord Mayor a couple of years ago.**

   In it, Magid develops the "ten commandments of Sheffield", a sequence of generally agreeable but radical in intentionality diktats rooted in his ethical thinking (originally put together as a poster for Tramlines, then kind of just started circulating around activist and youth circles of their own volition). These are as follows:

1. Be kind
2. Don't be a prick
3. Do epic shit
4. See the good
5. Don't lose hope
6. Do it differently
7. Always buy your round
8. Don't kiss a Tory
9. Tell your ma you love her
10. You've got this!

   Obviously there is a lot of wiggle-room in the actual applicability of these principles, but as guidelines for personal conduct and attitude I think they're a solid contribution to the discourse on how we should behave in relation to politics and society in the 21st century. Magid's book is not so much an argumentative justification for these commandments, nor speculations as to how they may be enacted - it's more a process of thinking through the values underlying them and looking at how everyone can grasp and engage with such principles in their own life contexts. It's not so much a true manifesto then as it is an inspirational primer to show people how and why they should care about positive liberty and the common good; an affirmation that we can change things. All of this is rooted in Magid's discussion of where/when these values have prompted developments in his own life, which has been a vibrant one to say the least - Sheffield's first Muslim/black Lord Mayor, his experiences growing up as a refugee, his dalliances with international media furores, and his election as a Yorkshire & Humber MEP during the whole Brexit debacle - man's had some interesting grit in his life.

   The prose is not particularly dazzling, but I kind of liked that - it almost hardly feels like reading a book, it's so casual and conversational, and therefore extremely easy to read. I finished it in two or three sittings. You really get a feel of Magid's personality and passion through the course of the ten chapters (one for each commandment obvs) and for this reason alone I would recommend this book - for if everyone in the world had someone like Magid in their life, democratic societies would be immeasurably healthier and happier. I wouldn't call this a must-read, but it's a provocative and heartwarming take on and against the cynical culture of our day, and there are anecdotes and wisdom-bits in there that could genuinely propel the apathetic into active sociopolitical concern. Not that he specifically needs it for that reason but I've decided to give this book to my eldest brother as I think he'll resonate strongly with the ethos at the core of the book, which is no singular monolithic ideology, but rather an open-minded personal quest for truth and justice - and that is what we should hope to expect from all our legislating representatives.***

* Perhaps most notoriously for calling Donald Trump a "wasteman" & subsequently (and hilariously) banning the then-President from Sheffield.

** Not to name-drop or owt but I met the guy a few times. Truly lovely chap.

*** I'm really hoping he gets the Green Party nomination for Sheffield Central in the 2024 general election, as Magid has enormous name-recognition value among the youth - here's me crossing my fingers that despite his last elected role (as MEP) falling apart in the ruins of Brexit he gets a chance to shine in Parliament proper.

Laudato Si'

This book - or rather, papal encyclical (you can read the whole thing from that link) - is the 2015 statement by Pope Francis about the responsibility of all humanity, and especially Catholic Christians, to care for God's creation, particularly in the face of the industrial horrors it is facing in this day and age. I am by no measure a Catholic, but I have quite a lot of respect for Pope Francis, and with the release of this that went up some degree - some degree more now that a few years later I've actually read the thing. Pope-man knows the issues. He knows what's up with the economic supply chains,  the product design cycles, the advertising consumer drive. He is not an ignorant old fart on a gold chair. This is a dude who spent most of his life in a run-down little church in Argentina cleaning graffiti off his parish walls and playing kickabout with local youths. He is not beholden to "the system" simply because he happens to be the head of the Catholic Church - ecclesiology can be politically weird like that, which I love. Francis is quite well cognizant in the key ways that humanity is fucking up our environment and the necessary actions that individuals, corporations, and governments must take to start minimising and then halting those impacts on our embedded ecology. If every Catholic in the world had read this and taken it to heart in a practical and immediate way, it would have been revolutionary. But obviously that hasn't happened. They just don't respect the Pope like they used to in the medieval era. Shame. But still - for this to have been written at all with the authority it was, as a Papal Encyclical - is immensely significant, and I hope it means that there are strong undercurrents of ecologically-revolutionary intent within the Catholic church, and hopefully ecumenically too, as I know there are too in every faith; it is only together as all humanity under One God one One World that we will see our way through the turbulence that is to come from the outputs of our historic wastefulnesses.

    If you're a Catholic who takes the word of the Pope seriously and you've not read this, then get the fuck off your arse and click on the link at the top, it's all online for free. It'll take you maybe an hour or two and it will reshape your brain. If you're a non-Catholic Christian who has less respect for the Pope but maybe doesn't take creation-care too seriously - I would also recommend reading the whole thing. It is not grounded in Catholicism but in Christian and biblical thinking with a pragmatic and compassionate bent for what is best for us and our future descendants in the world. And if you're no kind of Christian but you care about the environment - you might get a kick out of reading it, you probably won't learn any new scientific realities but you'll get a fun insight into what Mr Gold-throne White-hat thinks about the necessity of your activist struggles.

the Trinity and the Kingdom of God

This book is the first of Jürgen Moltmann's contributions to systematic theology. Through it he poses and develops a coherent Trinitarian doctrine of who God is and how we can think of Him* in relation to his "kingdom" - with the specific holistic methodological aim of starting to heal the schisms in the Church (across Protestant and Catholic thinking, as well as older disagreements between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and even pointing at ways in which all Christian denominations have their roots in Judaic tradition and should acknowledge this).

   His arguments are complex and I will not attempt to summarise them here, but for a couple of overview-type considerations from his conclusions. This is proper academic dense theology and has a megaton of thought-provoking meat on its bones; while its translation from the German renders the syntax difficult to penetrate in places the prose is more accessible than it could be** given the subject-matter in all its mystical complexity and the high-mindedness with which the book's pursuit is laid out. Moltmann discusses the character and nature of God as Trinity, the inner life of the Trinitarian God and the distinct personalities of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the concept of perichoresis as the inter-relationship between these persons, the ways in which God can be said to suffer along with Creation as revealed in the passion of Christ, the distinctions between monarchical views of monotheism and the unique concepts of the Trinity, the supremacy and goodness of God in this sense, the essential mystery that underlies our knowledge of any of this, and the Kingdom of God as the historical/eschatological liberation of Creation into fulness in freedom. I'm not well-schooled enough in theology to be able to pick apart all his points, but they are clearly rooted in an incredible depth of biblical familiarity, philosophical dialectic and indebtedness to the diverse myriad Christian thinkers across history who have taken up their pens to attempt speculation and logical inquiry as to the realities that lay behind the issues discussed in this book.

   In short, this is by far the most challenging and thus rewarding book on the theology of the Trinity that I've read. God is wholly transcendent and ineffable, yes, but has also made Himself known through the testament of the Scriptures and the life of Jesus Christ - and thus we can know something essential of who He is; and in reading this book I feel closer than I ever have to a cohesively satisfying understanding of Trinitarian doctrine. Even given the difficulty of this book - you don't need a theology degree to understand it, but you will need an immense degree of receptivity and willingness to think complexly - I would heartily recommend this as a text to any Christian reader who wants a deeper intellectual grasp of the nature of our God, and would even tentatively recommend it to non-Christian readers who see the Trinitarian doctrine as logically incoherent as Moltmann's work in explication renders it just about fathomable. I plan on reading this again with my dad so we can discuss together what it says, means, and implies.

* Or "Them", as I have recently starting thinking of God - for the dual reasons that it A. acknowledges the plurality of personhood in the Trinity without recourse to "tritheism" by legitimising both the plural and singular uses of "they" and B. draws attention to the transcendence of gender by the Trinitarian God, which is something largely unacknowledged by the traditional usage of "He" for a being that was arguably only ever 1/3*** male during His incarnation.

** That said, Moltmann does have that same nasty habit that I detest in philosophical/theological writings where he will on occasion just dump a phrase at you in Latin or Greek without translating it. Even in the endnotes, which are mostly just references but still have a fair bit to contribute on certain secondary points within the text.

*** Moltmann would have had a go at me for referring to Christ the Son as only a third of the Godhead as His state of being is fully God - I'm not dallying with modalism, but you know what I meant.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

This book is both the first publication and enduring masterwork of eminent logical philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; and it took me a very long time to read it, even while making diligent notes. This is a relatively short book about the relationship between language, logic, ideas and truth. And I would like to think that I understood at least most of it. But not wanting to embarrass myself in front of any potentially-superior philosophy-readers who may be perusing this blog, I will sum up my final thoughts on the book thus - yes, it makes perfect sense! "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" - especially once one has climbed up and thrown away the ladder.

Seriously though, this book is mental torture. It makes so much sense that it makes none. And yet it makes all. Wittgenstein famously said upon completing this work that he had solved the essential problems of all philosophy. Bit humble, right. And then he turned his back on that less than two decades later and started playing around with pragmatic linguistic theories, which if anything seems a step down from Solving Everything... but no, reading this book does feel like everything is being slowly solved; the axiomatic arrangement of its arguments, the dense interconnections of its lexicon... I was genuinely sad when I finished reading it that I couldn't see into a new dimension or something. Don't read this book ever - unless you really really REALLY enjoy problematic logical philosophy, and are happy to have your brain mangled for several weeks or months. Or years, if you try to devote serious study time to it instead of just reading it recreationally - in which case, WHY WOULD YOU DO - not even Bertrand Russell completely understood this steaming diamond of nonsense. Don't bother. Read it for its beauty, and if it illuminates very little, take that as the meaning it is - that really, philosophy illuminates very little, given that the sun exists and we all have eyes regardless of what the clever people are thinking today or tomorrow.