That Hideous Strength

This book* is the final instalment in C.S. Lewis's Space trilogy (see here for the first & second ones) - and whooo boy, is it a stonker. It's very different from the first two - being longer than both of them put together, much darker in tone & content, with several dozen characters rather than the less-than-ten of the prior instalments, and whereas books one & two developed their sci-fi themes by entailing the visiting of other planets & conversing with alien species in this one we are restricted to three or four small rural English towns; it also somewhat straddles the line between sci-fi & fantasy as the machinations of the eldila manifest much more strongly. As is my wont with series, this being the third book of the trilogy, I will endeavour to give a quick [spoiler-free] summary of the plot before diving into some broader reflections on the characters, themes, etc. of the series as a whole.

   So - the story. We follow a young married couple, Mark & Jane Studdock. Mark is a fellow of sociology at Bracton College, in the small [fictional] university town of Edgestow; Jane is currently working through a doctorate on John Donne [the 17th-century metaphysical poet]. Bracton is currently facing a dilemma over its dealings with the NICE [the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments; nice acronym, Lewis] who want to purchase land off it for reasons unclear. Mark is, by and by, brought by his associate Feverstone [slight spoiler alert - this is Devine from the first book] into direct contact and possibly employment by the NICE: though the more time Mark spends in that world the more questions he has about its moral intent. Jane, meanwhile, has started having clairvoyant dreams: after seeking help for this she is brought into contact with a ragtag collective of people following some indiscernible purpose under the stewardship of a man called the Director [spoiler alert - this is Dr Ransom from the first two books]. Tensions are high, the stakes keep getting raised, questions go unanswered, the pride of science & bureaucracy rear their monstrous heads, and the mounting conspiracy rolls us with a tremendous crescendo throughout the course of the plot. Oh yeh, and Merlin's knocking about somewhere, and both NICE and Ransom's collective want to get him on their side.

   Lewis did in fact intend this novel as an imaginative exploration of the ideas he presented in his essays The Abolition of Man, but I think they come through far more clearly & powerfully here than they did in his non-fiction. The themes of man's struggle with/against nature [including, in the final event, human nature] in the light of cold reason & the essentiality of moral truth, given the chaos that questioning it too skeptically can induce, are both explored here with prosaic perfection. Other remarks I will make about this novel specifically are that Mr. Bultitude is the greatest fictional bear I have ever encountered, "the Head" is truly horrifying as a quasi-impotent villain, Lewis's Merlin is the most original Merlin I have seen in book or on screen, the Inklings** get a couple of generous hat-tips (eg. Tolkien's Numénor is referenced several times as "the true original West" [albeit spelled "Numinor" by Lewis] & Barfield gets a mention without even changing his name), and chapter fourteen ends with the best description of a mystical experience I have ever read outside of actual mystics' own works.

   But what of the series as a whole? I have to say, despite this third one being such a dramatic superficial departure from the first two, the thematic coherence presented across all three is remarkably tight, and builds organically in a truly epic manner. The ideas of innocence, Fallenness, experience, redemption, etc. are explored with poetic precision - one could easily write a PhD digging into the metaphysical & theological dimensions of this trilogy's world. Lewis here is at his best, most inventive writing self; whether the floral beauty of the descriptive passages in Perelandra, the alien strangeness of the races on Malacandra, the unutterable transcendence of the eldila & especially the Oyarsas, the turns of deft phrasing that convey complex feelings exactly, the purposed depth of the dialogue - this trilogy might be the best thing Lewis ever wrote, because not only does it make a heap of philosophically & religiously chewy points, but it also works as a coherent compelling story in its own right. Mark & Jane, as Weston, as Devine, as the several-dozen other characters in the third one [especially Mrs. Ironwood & "the Fairy" Hardcastle] are rich & believable; and at the beating heart of the cast Dr. Ransom undergoes a prodigious character arc over the course of the trilogy, from unassuming academic to a sage who converses with archangels, but he never loses the sense of being a somewhat relatable everyman for the audience to cling to as the worlds are unveiled. There are also curious ruminations on the nature of gender particularly in the second and third books, but I won't start unpicking that here.

   I absolutely loved reading this trilogy. Lewis is as well known for his incredibly insightful & edifying Christian apologetics but is most famous for The Chronicles of Narnia - but call it writing better for adults [rude] this trilogy is in my opinion far superior in its potency of theme & display of imagination & even prose style. I would highly recommend these books to anyone who enjoys a good sci-fi and/or fantasy adventure that's as thought-provoking as it is unpredictable: and while to be sure there are overt Christian messages littered throughout, these are not polemical or evangelical in form & are so well-integrated into the overall fabric of the story that even Philip Pullman would have to admit it's not unreasonable to have them in there.

* Certainly not to be confused with this terrible book of the same title.

** The Inklings were an informal club of creative Oxford academics of whom Lewis was a core member, alongside J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and others. They used to meet weekly at The Eagle and Child [nice pub if you're ever in Oxford and fancy a pint where great minds have been] to discuss their works and ideas.

Perelandra

This book by C.S. Lewis is the second in his Space trilogy (see here for the first - as always with my posts about series I am here going to give a spoiler-free[ish] summary of the plot, reserving my reflections on the characters & themes for the post about the last one).

   We open with the narrator, Lewis (an obvious author self-insert if ever I saw one) recounting his recent visit to his friend Dr. Elwin Ransom, the protagonist. Ransom is mysteriously abducted & then returned & then recounts his travels to Lewis, which is from where we get the prose narrative of the majority of the book. Ransom had been taken to Perelandra (i.e. Venus) by the eldila, where, after a few chapters of frankly gorgeous scenic descriptive passages, he finally meets another humanoid - the 'Green Lady' as she is called. Ransom & the Green Lady have a shared language thanks to Ransom's time on Malacandra [Mars] but little shared in terms of communicable concepts, given the essential innocence of the Lady's world. In no short order though, Professor Weston (as in the antagonist of the first book) lands on Perelandra in his space-ship, and soon learns of the single divine command given to the Lady and the only other sentient inhabitant of this world, whom she calls 'the King', that they are never to spend a night on fixed land.* Weston, whom Ransom almost immediately perceives as to be under devilish control,** spends several chapters whispering poison to the Lady to doubt & thus eventually transcend this command of Maleldil, combated rhetorically (and eventually physically) by Ransom. I don't want to spoil the ending so I will leave off here, about halfway through the book, but let me assure you that when we finally meet 'the King' and realise the metaphysical & eschatological implications of a world having narrowly escaped its 'Fall' (to use a classical Christian term) the sublimity of the descriptive passages reaches new undreamt-of heights. Truly a great book with much on the nature of innocence, obedience, and sin to provoke deep thought.

   The third book in the trilogy is almost twice as long as this one, but I'm enjoying them so much that I might finish it sooner that expected. In any case, watch this space for my overall ruminations on the trilogy.

* As Perelandra is basically an ocean planet, with the vast majority of its 'land' being free-floating vegetative islands, with the exception of a tiny minority of 'fixed' land that is rooted to the spot amid the roiling oceans.

** The devil, or "The Bent One" as known in trans-solar language, is in these books a real metaphysical entity determined to sway sentient beings away from the will of Maleldil, a.k.a. God. I have to say that Lewis's descriptive depictions of evil as it is in this book is just as horrifying & unsettling as his more beauteous description of the Perelandran landscapes are edifying & inspiring. Why couldn't he have brought this style of prose to Narnia? As imaginative as it may well be, I can't help but affirm that Lewis is letting his imagination find much greater fruit here in his sci-fi for adults than he ever did in his fantasy for children. Which is a shame.

Out of the Silent Planet

This book is the first instalment of C.S. Lewis's Space trilogy. As is my wont when dealing with series, in this post I will only give a rough [spoiler-free] sketch of the story & reserve my broader reflections on characters/themes/etc for the post about the final book.

   We are introduced to Dr. Ransom, a Cambridge philologist on a walking holiday. Quite by chance he bumps into an old schoolmate whom he cordially dislikes, named Devine, and his associate, an eminent physicist named Weston. The pair invite Ransom back for a drink, and - lo! - he finds himself drugged. Ransom wakes up on a spaceship headed for the planet Malacandra [spoiler alert - it's Mars] where his captors intend to sell him as a sacrifice to the planet's locals in exchange for precious objects. Upon arrival however, Ransom manages to escape their clutches, and soon finds himself embroiled in a rambling, largely aimless adventure during which he is introduced one-by-one to the three sentient races peopling Malacandra - the seal-like poets, hrossa; the spindly-humanoid thinkers, sorns; and the frog-like masons, pfifltriggi. Each of these alien races are deliciously well-sketched in both physiology & culture, displaying an imagination far beyond the folklore-lucky-dip population of Narnia, to make a harsh but fair comparison with Lewis's other forays into imaginative fiction. Ransom spends long enough with these locals to get to grips with their language, but when Devine & Weston shoot dead the hross whom he had best befriended, he is prompted to go on a solitary quest in pursuit of the eldila, spiritual-ish beings who are revered on Malacandra, and who the locals think it is important Ransom explain himself to. We find out why in the final few chapters, in which the conflicting philosophies of Malacandra & the silent planet Thulcandra [i.e. Earth] are brought into colourful dialogue.

   I really enjoyed this book* - it has a lot of really interesting anthropological & ethical reflections littered casually throughout, and is told in lively immersive prose; I look forward to reading the next two books soon.

* Arguably not as much as I apparently did the first time I tried to read it, though that was back in the summer of 2020 while I was midway through a psychotic break - as is evidenced by the insanely dense underlinings & annotations on the first five or so pages [as well as pages 42-3 for some reason] of my copy of this book.

Mr. Bliss

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

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

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

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

the Dispossessed

This book is a sci-fi utopia from the endlessly inventive mind of Ursula K. Le Guin. It's widely regarded as her best, and though personally I still prefer the Earthsea cycle, I can easily see why.

   So - the book itself. We follow Shevek, a physicist on the verge of developing a new theory of time that could revolutionize relations between distant worlds. He is from Anarres, an anarchistic planet, though through the book we skip between flashbacks here to the present on Urras, a capitalistic (although in the book they use the term "propertarian") planet from which the Anarresti had emigrated some couple of centuries prior. Shevek is hell-bent on developing & disseminating his theory of time, but bureaucratic blockages block his efforts on both Annares & Urras. I will yield from giving spoilers, so here ends my summary.

   Overall this is a fantastic work - a very enjoyable, page-turning sci-fi that asks many curious questions about the nature of freedom, power, solidarity, and livelihood. Very highly recommended.

the Left Hand of Darkness

This book is quite probably Ursula K. Le Guin's most famous work (outside of Earthsea, of course), and rightly considered a modern sci-fi classic. I have a huge amount I could say about this novel but I think it speaks for itself so well that I will not give it the disservice of an attempt at a full reflection in a mere blogpost & instead simply urge you to read it; whether you're a fan of sci-fi or not - this is just a masterfully told, powerful, complex story. To give you the very broadest of broad strokes outlines - we follow Genly Ai, the envoy from the Ekumen* to the wintry planet Gethen, where he gets caught up in the turbulence of its local politics & has to contend with coming to an understanding of the natives' alternative mode of sex.** That's all I'm saying. Read this novel.

* An alliance, for want of a better term, of 83 human[ish]-populated planets, which it's Ai's job to try to persuade Gethen's authorities to affiliate themselves with.

** Incredibly imaginative worldbuilding here: the Gethenian people are all genderfluid bisexuals, effectively - i.e. they spend 80% of their lives living as sexless androgynes, then in their monthly cycles of libidinous urges they become either male or female for a few days. (Sections of the novel read like extracts from a Judith Butler thought experiment.) This is important to the story (what other novel can boast a line like "the king was pregnant"? tell me) but never has to rely on infodumps, instead being organically seeded & developed throughout. You can tell Le Guin was raised by an anthropologist in how believably she is able to depict such an alien (and yet human) society, so well thought-through it comes across.

the Amber Spyglass

This book is the third (see here for the first and here for the second books) and final instalment of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I didn't mention in earlier posts but although this is my first time reading these* I did watch the recent BBC adaptation of them (which is very good but not as good as the books, as is so often the case), so I already had a broad grasp of the story, characters, and themes; but I wanted to revisit it from the horse's mouth, as it were.

   So - the story. As with previous instalments I shall only sketch out the first third or so to avoid spoiling it. Lyra has been captured by Mrs Coulter, who is keeping her in a drug-induced sleep while she [Mrs Coulter that is] plots her next move to keep her daughter safe from the clutches of the Church: meanwhile, Lyra is being visited in her dreams by her dead friend from the first book, Roger, who seems to be calling out from the land of the dead. Will is universe-hopping with the subtle knife, looking for Lyra, soon crossing paths & teaming up with Iorek Byrnison, who has resumed his duties as king of the armoured bears after his last mission with Lee Scoresby went awry. Mary Malone found a window in her universe to another world populated by intelligent wheeled creatures called mulefa, who teach her a great many new strange things. And thundering on in the background to all this is a mounting war for dominance of the heavens - the Church on the defensive, and Lord Asriel with all the allies he can muster on the offensive. Needless to say, Will & Lyra soon reunite, and aware of the grand currents of destiny swirling around them, they resolve to find a way to go to the land of the dead - to do something, they know not what, but that will have monumental impact on the battles brewing in the world around them.

   I hugely enjoyed this whole trilogy. Lyra & Will are complex, likeable & relatable as protagonists; the moral frameworks of antagonistic forces & the conflicts they're engaged in are delightfully grey & thought-provoking; Pullman is a straightforward, not at all verbose or lofty, writer of immense skill in conveying feelings from urgency to safety & everything inbetween; and finally I would say that the originality of the fantasy elements in these stories is perhaps the strongest of all the kids' fantasy series I've read for this blog. The alethiometer & the subtle knife are unique conceptual inventions, far from being mere MacGuffins these are well-thought-through objects with comprehensible powers that drive the plot forward in innovative ways. And Dust! I won't actually give you any info on Dust here, in case you want to read the trilogy for yourself, as exploring & resolving the mysteries around it as a phenomenon is central to the backbone of the books, but I will say again that it is a marvellously original & fecund idea in fantastical worldbuilding.

   This whole trilogy I would highly recommend for readers between six & fourteen maybe (don't @ me if you decide this is an inappropriate age bracket, when I was a child I read whatever the heck I wanted & it did no lasting damage) for maximal enjoyment but these are such well-crafted stories that I'm sure adult readers will get a lot out of them too. I did.

* To my shame - I would have loved them as a child. But then, I never read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child either, and would have loved them; and I suspect Pullman being a kind of anti-Lewis the dialectic between the two series in my imagination had I read both would have led me to some interesting theological questions as a youth.

the Subtle Knife

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

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

Northern Lights

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

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

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

War in the Museum

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

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

On Liberty

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

the Lord of the Rings: book three

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

Galatians Study

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

Heresy

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

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

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

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

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

the Glass Hotel

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

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

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

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 investigate 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.