Logic: A Graphic Introduction

This book, part of The Guardian's series of free little graphic introductions to complex ideas or isms (this one by Dan Cryan, Sharron Shatil and Bill Mayblin), was surprisingly good. I salvaged it from the room of my brother who recently moved out and read it because I had nothing better to do and it's quite short and logic is quite a fascinating thing really. As a philosophy student, logic is something that I'm not unfamiliar with, but it's still an alien field that I could likely explore for months without being able to provide much insight beyond mere understanding - this is a field of study only meaningfully advanced once or twice a century by the keenest dedicated minds. The book, written in laymans' English replete with vaguely amusing illustrations demonstrating points, ideas and thinkers, gives an excellent introductory overview of logic: its roots in argumental structures, moving onto its relations to algebraic thought, the foundations of mathematics, ways of thinking about science and computing, how it deals with problems such as paradoxes and proofs, and how concepts such as truth and possibility fit in. In terms of critical content there wasn't much to grapple with here (hence why this post is only one paragraph), but it did make me zone out a few times in sheer overwhelmed wonder as to how some of the deeper "discoveries" could have been made - in logic there is nothing to observe, test for, experiment on or respond to, just pure thought structures analysed in abstraction to see how watertight they are; which doesn't sound like an easy task. Still, thinking about thinking and how similar it is to arithmetic or code or electronic systems or whatever, is quite interesting. As far as graphic introductory overviews go, this is pretty good, but for people genuinely interested in logic, there are sure to be easily accessible books out there that are way better at providing an academic entry to understanding.

Areopagus

This book, arguably more of a booklet, is a great little work by evangelist Roger Carswell. It's only about fifty pages long and very speedy-easy to read, being as it is designed for mass dissemination by christian students to their friends who they want to give more thought about the gospel. I had a stack of a dozen of them from somewhere, quickly read through it to get the gist, and hopefully will disperse them throughout the next year.

   Anyway, it's centred around Paul's missional speech at the Areopagus in Athens (see actual passage): basically he's alone in the city for a few days, and notices idols strewn about to multitudinous gods - which provokes him to start speaking to everyone there about the one true God and the grace shown by him in the person of Jesus. Ancient Greece was, of course, a fantastic place for bandying about philosophies at the time; critical intellectual debate was a pretty common public pastime, but when Paul's message of the gospel is heard, it's strikingly different to any other current ideas in Athens - and people engage. They invite him to the Areopagus, formerly a court but turned into a public debating arena, where new ideas are presented for critical reception. Here Paul lays out starkly the gospel, emphasising especially Jesus' exclusivity in truth and salvation. Carswell discusses the passage to show how Paul's message speaks deeply to a key focus in modern evangelism; worldview pluralism. Just as Athens' streets were lined with many gods, some even without name, representing many differing conflicting interpretations of truth and rightness; so too in postmodernism-laden 21st-century England are people's worldviews various beyond apparent necessity. However, unlike then, public critical debate of the ideas and values one lives by is not a social norm: many people hold worldviews out of convenience rather than intellectual assent; it's not that they think they know best how to live, but that they like living how they are doing and so would prefer not to bother thinking too much about the reasons, values and motives underlying it. Which makes evangelism bloody difficult, speaking from experience (hello christian philosophy students everywhere).

   So, as to this book, it's not one to buy to read yourself (unless you're an interested non-christian, in which case, maybe do and get stuck into critical thought). It was designed to be bought en-masse by christians and given to friends, and for that purpose it's good I think, though not just by itself. As a starter to probe ideas, fine, but accompany it with slatherings of prayer, and if your friend is genuinely digging their intellect into gospel, then suggest to them Tim Keller's The Reason For God or similar excellent titles to smooth out apologetic issues, or even critically going through scripture together. Anyway, this is meant to be about Roger's book, not general how-to-do-evangelism spewage from a definite amateur, sorry - but yes, as a buy-twenty-to-prayerfully-give-away kind of little book, it's a good one.

I Am A Cat

This book, Sōseki Natsume's classic of Japanese literature and hilarious philosophical ramble, is narrated by, yet almost nothing to do with, a cat. I bought it last year in Oxfam literally for the sole reason that the title made me chortle, and read it while on travels in Europe for the last two weeks. It was much more appropriate as a holiday-book than the other which I took along.
   Anyway. The eponymous furry hero has no name, and the novel, having originally been published as a series of ten magazine installments, has little in the way of plot or development. But no matter, as this work is more of a collection of lengthy quirky snapshots than it is an actual story, and at being what it is, it's fantastically entertaining.

   Narrating a rather long novel from a cat's point of view in a way intelligible to human readers would get very boring very soon if it were just a rationalised account of that cat's activity (though his short-lived love-interest with neighbouring Tortoiseshell, his attempts to catch a rat, and his consorts with disreputable cat Rickshaw Blacky alone provide for this aspect of the book), and so craftily Natsume spun together a cast of lovably weird characters who habituate the cat's owner's home, each providing anecdotes, jokes, tales and arguments aplenty. There's Mr Sneaze, who unlovingly and absent-mindedly owns the cat itself; he's a crackpot lazy grump teacher with stomach problems and academic pretensions about western literature. Mrs Sneaze, his condescending critic of a wife, the three young Sneaze children, and the threatening housekeeper O-san all pose further irritations and/or amusements to the cat. Then Sneaze's friends and acquaintances who regularly visit the house are indispensable as aids to the flow of random conversation: the slimy businessman Suzuki; the zen-obsessive thinker Singleman; the happy-go-lucky poet Beauchamp Blowlamp; the sarcastic maybe-lovestruck-but-probably-just-utterly-blasé science student Coldmoon; and of course the unforgettably irreverent fount of blunt interjections and verbose pointless wisecracks, Waverhouse.

   The majority of the book sees the cat sitting in on the conversation of various selections of these other characters, and quietly lending its supercilious feline judgement on them as they speak. Topics range from the cause of selfishness in modern humans to the size of the nose of Mrs Goldfield to prolonged confusion over whom her daughter is actually meant to be getting engaged to; there are lengthy diatribes against snake soup, schoolchildren, baldness, Waverhouse's trolling habits, and Coldmoon's inability to finish an anecdote about the time he wanted to buy a violin. Though wordy and long, all of these are hilarious, and display a deep penetrating insight into changing social philosophies at the time. Natsume was well-learned in ancient Chinese, Japanese and Western philosophy and literature, and at the time of his writing this Japanese culture was embarking on an upheaval of values as it became more open to the alien west, and many of the doubts and concerns and issues swirling the cultural mindset of early 19th century Japan are encapsulated and discussed (light-heartedly but deep-mindedly) by the characters who sit in Sneaze's study within earshot of the wise narrator Cat; and yet it never loses its levity until the end (I won't say why, because the end is sad).

   The tendency of the book to be more about the humans' conversation and attitudes rather than the cat made me think about the interesting link between narration in fiction and explanation in non-fiction. A lot of the time, the cat is just providing an open window onto the page for a splash of social commentary (though sometimes these are delightfully cut short by the cat getting bored and wandering outside). To what extent can a book do that before it ceases to be a novel and becomes a self-responsive dialogue of thought? Obviously a book can express values, but how far can it openly discuss them in character speech before they take the place of underlying prose and become what the book's about? Natsume avoided such a ptifall by lending the conversations over to the cat's inattentiveness or judgemental responses, or simply by the sardonic boredom of Coldmoon, Sneaze or Waverhouse. A minor but interesting point. 

   A final hat-tip to the translators, Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, is definitely in order too: English and Japanese are very different languages each with great depths of nuance in formality and tone, but they seem to have been transposed perfectly. Metaphors, similes, idioms and even puns have been carried across into English in a way that reads naturally and makes sense and still carries the humour, and though I can't read the original Japanese to double-check, obviously this must've taken a huge amount of cross-linguo-cultural skill, so, cheers.

   Anyway, this is a great book. Truly a work of a great comical and philosophical mind, and absolutely worth a read if you like funny interesting classics. Or cats.

You Are Not A Gadget

This book, a manifesto from veritable guru Jaron Lanier, was one of the most thought-provoking and relevant things I've read in years. I acquired it out of sheer curiosity a few months ago and read it during the quiet lapses while I've been travelling across western Europe for the last two weeks.
   Content-wise, there's not much I'll say about it because there would be far too much to say beyond a rough overview of the topic and points. Jaron Lanier has been one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley for decades, primarily researching into virtual reality and human relationships with digital systems, and as such he has a huge amount of very worthwhile things to say about those relationships. Basically, in the last decade or so, the trends of technology and the internet have started taking that relationship down a road that he's uncomfortable with, and this book is his cry to call attention before it's too late for us to steer our increasingly-internet-dependent societies in a better direction.
   The problems he sees are many and varied and extraordinarily well-articulated, and if you're interested in the internet and its effect on people and potential dangers or hopes for change then I can only point you to his book and exhort you to read it. Seriously, he knows his stuff and presses some challenging but difficult to contend conclusions. At the core of Jaron's argument is that digital systems innovated this century, especially in spheres such as social networks, crowd cooperatives, and cloud-sourcing media, dehumanise their users and devalue their content. This is largely to do with confusions about what constitutes personhood and identity; the difference between an individual and a profile or between information and knowledge; the problem of anonymity in usership lending no obligations to respectful behaviour; the problem of monopolisation in distributors of creative services; and many others.
   Like I said, the book touches on dozens of deep intriguing problems centred around our ties to the digital world - I'm barely scratching the surface. Each topic is very in-depth and poses further questions to the reader, and since this blog is supposedly about my thoughts in reaction to a book rather than just a plain book review, I may as well go over some of my main thoughts, though in keeping with what I've been saying I'll try to focus on my responses instead of summarising his arguments that I responded to. The chapter on creative media struck me; it's currently very difficult for independent entertainment producers to make money through their work. Outside of a handful of unrepresentatively lucky examples, mainstream success requires huge corporate backing investment, cloud streaming services give a pittance to the artists, physical sales are tough as digital availability is so easy (either pirated or by download from giant firms big enough to subsidise them), and even being paid for "real" things like live performances is hard to come by without an strong artist profile, which one can't really get without being able to succeed in visibility, which given the other factors, a lot can't. My response? I've stopped downloading music (my iPod's full enough anyway that I can survive off newly-bought CD's or the occasional gig), and started feeling guilty about certain dependencies. Ah well. What else did I have an interesting reaction to? Seemed like at least once every two pages I pulled a face in confused mindblown suspicion as I wrestled with obscure phrases ("Bachelardian neoteny" was my favourite of these) or compellingly weird points (he argues towards the end, in a spur of slightly-irrelevant genius, that if octupuses had childhoods they'd be the dominant species, which was delightful I thought), but most of the book is so far wound into a particular topic that unscrewing one's train of thought from what it was at time of reading without having to reread is proving difficult. It didn't help that we were travelling through Europe while I was reading this, so there were distractions aplenty - in fact the day I finished it, we went to a giant beergarden in Munich and made friends with a Texan socialist over several litres of German lager so tasty that the prospect of leaving for France the next day made us teary. Anyway, I digress.
   This is a great book. Be warned: though his writing style is comfortable enough, once he's introduced a particular term for a concept up for discussion he will casually reuse it and mash it together with existing or priorly-invented terms to aid the flow of his argument and somewhat confuse the less involved reader. It's quite intellectually strenuous, many of his chapters delving not only into relatively advanced computer science but also psychology and philosophy of mind. A bit of a challenge to read, and challenging ideas-wise too, but if mankind's relationship with the increasingly-independent internet interests you, look no further.

Unreached

This book, another from the helpful and prolific Tim Chester, is an excellent compilation of practical insights into planting and growing church communities in deprived working-class parts of the United Kingdom. I got the book in response to a UCCF mission trip to Grimsby last year, where several of us students stayed with a local church in the East Marsh area and helped run missional outreach events, youth clubs and community development programmes in the midst of what is a thoroughly impoverished town. We've revisited Grimsby as a team a few times since, and the most recent visit prompted me to consider possibilities for my future involvement with church plants, given the immense need of deprived areas. So to a book I turned, seeking not direction but guidance.

   The book's a product of Reaching the Unreached, a working group of christians involved in mission to Britain's poor, with anecdotes and advice distilled into a rough guide on how to do church in working-class communities. It skips the "why" other than a short but hard-hittingly truthful indictment of current church culture being predominantly, arguably damagingly, middle-class. So then we go straight into the "how" of engaging with and properly integrating with different class cultures in deprived areas, and finding within them new workable methods of gospel witness, in word and in deed, for both evangelism and discipleship. There's a consistent emphasis on social action's importance in terms of showing Christlike love by meeting needs, but more fundamental is the emphasis on the gospel message of humanity's need for repentance and salvation by the grace of Jesus Christ. I summarise here, of course - the book goes into many applications of how these messages can be put across effectively therein - but I would do no justice in attempting to list key points or topics, hence my vagueness in discussing the content. The book's theological aspects are well-grounded, the pointers on working-class mission are from reliable long-term experienced workers, the cultural examinations are empirical and reasonable. The only gripe I might have with it is that the model of "working-class culture" related to is somewhat stereotyped; but generalisations of subjects are helpful to make if you're giving generalised advice, and besides it comes with plenty of caveats as to use individual judgement in dealing with specific groups, areas, minorities, persons, etc.

   Basically the advice is trustworthy and good, and if you're seriously considering getting (or already are) involved with church activity in working-class or deprived areas, this would be a great source of both encouragement and aided understanding. And if you're not (non-christian readers, you're off the hook for this bit), why not? There's huge need in Britain's poorer parts, and if God would give his Son to die for a sinner like you or me, what right would we have to deny the Word from other humans in an attempt for us to cling onto several middle-class comforts? Thinking about this has struck me harder than the book itself - the book's more of just a guide than a direction, as I said. The direction is a calling to do what's right, and bringing betterment to areas which are materially deprived and worse, spiritually dry, seems like an important choice.

The Great Gatsby

This book is one that barely needs an introduction. F. Scott Fitzgerald's greatest novel, arguably modern America's defining novel, the cornerstone of 20th century literature, and surprisingly short enough to read in a single uneventful day when you're halfway through moving house and all your books are in boxes and so you borrow one from your brother's shelf. I had read it before too, in a week's-worth of bus journeys back in my sixth-form days, so this was a good re-reading. Well yeh, I've finished moving, and now have a pleasant summer of reading, travel, sun and squalour ahead of me. Anyway, sorry old sport, to Gatsby.

   The novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, an honest polite uninteresting fellow who's trying to self-educate his way into a successful career in finance. He moves into up-and-coming residential area West Egg, nearby to his acquaintances Tom (from college) and Daisy (by distant relation) Buchanan. Nick has led a sheltered youth and is taken rather aback when Tom introduces him to the wild side of New York's roaring 1920's nightlife, but even more taken aback when the opulent house next-door to his own seems to throw enormous parties every single night of the long summer. There is food and drink dished out to luxurious excess, hundreds of half-famous glamourous guests clad in richest garments, live jazz and swing bands, a pool, a beach, the enormous house and grounds to explore (it has a library full of "real books!"), and a lonesome host who bears the full cost and only mingles lightly before slinking off to stare mournfully across the bay. This host is Jay Gatsby, a man of incredible wealth and ostentation, with dozens of friends in high places, a rather shady past making him the subject of various rumours, and a singular obsession with a woman from his past, who turns out to be SPOILER ALERT Daisy. Gatsby, charming and obscenely materially well-off as he is, coerces Nick into arranging a meeting between him (Nick's new neighbour) and Daisy (Nick's new neighbour's lover-of-five-years-previously) to see if the obsession is mutual. This sets in motion predictable conflicts between Gatsby and Daisy and Daisy's husband Tom and to a lesser extent Tom's mistress Myrtle and Myrtle's husband Wilson - and Nick Carraway and his somehow-acquired golf-champion ladyfriend Jordan Baker watch and panic and feel increasingly awkward on the sidelines. Spoiler-free events ensue which destroy several lives.

   Fitzgerald's work has at its core a critique of the American Dream and the superficial carelessness that had become of it. It's a perfectly refined indictment of the ironies of social and material greed; a dissection of the purest sheerest heights of love and wealth and diagnosing a deep-seated discontentment even within those. (If you don't mind a couple extra spoilers, John Green says some excellent things about it here.) These observations are not only made poignant by events in the novel, but are fragments of wisdom that we cannot hear too often, as in the contemporary West our actual attitudes have changed little since the days of the exciting lavish 1920's. We still hold central to our intentions and behaviours the possibility and desirability of gaining not only as much as we want, but exactly what we want - be that in terms of material goods, social prestige, comfortable lifestyles, knowledge, pleasurable experiences, power, even relationships. And this is dangerous. No matter how much of the world we accrue we can never control it completely; regardless of our status we will not become promoted to godship over the world to any extent. This was Gatsby's mistake, to a dramatic extreme, but we make this mistake persistently in our behaviours and worldviews. In the novel, everyone's partying all the time, throwing around immense amounts of money, rubbing shoulders with many other people embroiled in the depths of leisure, and nobody's happy! There are a handful of rare moments where circumstance bring someone to briefly enjoy themselves, but there is not a contented character to be found in the book. Let us not make the same mistakes against which Fitzgerald warns. As a christian, I know of one particularly assured source of contentment, but surely non-believers too can see the tragedy of living as Gatsby does. Live life not as you want but as you can, finding contentment in your present rather than a future to strive toward or a past to regain - progress is good when it comes along but don't skew everything off-kilter for a shot at it. Anyhow, old sport, I'll cut off there before I turn this book-blog-post into a full-blown pseudo-wisdom-self-help-thing.

   It's a superb work, and its damning metaphors ringing into our culture definitely make it one of those "yes do read it" type of books. If you've not read it, do so, thoughtfully. If you have, consider doing so again, more thoughtfully. At all costs shun the film - take awesome literary insight above Leonardo di Caprio any day (no offence to you, Leo - you will get your Oscar some day).

True Friendship

This book, by Vaughan Roberts, was a quick oh-that-looks-interesting impulse buy and was read in the spare hour or so throughout a day of revision (yeh, still exam season, hence the lack of much reading, also hence why I'm posting this two weeks late after post-exam decisions to blow off all productivity). It's excellent - very wise, very applicable, very short. It was also really cheap so I bought five copies and gave the other four to close Christian friends.
   The actual book is so clear, concise, truthful and applicable that there's not much about it that I can discuss as I found it so easy to agree with. It basically looks at what ideal friendship is for a Christian's life, and how we should attain, sustain and direct it in our relationships with others. True friendship, argues Roberts, are crucial, close, careful, candid, constant and Christ-centred. He works up from the idea that social interactions are vital to human wellbeing, showing how this has been distorted in modern society with the loss of community due to work-centred lifestyles and a shift to technology as a mediator of relationships. We need to reclaim genuine friendships - not only for human wellbeing but because that's the context in which God is properly served and glorified. The Trinity is a perfect community of three; Jesus' disciples became true friends in learning to serve and sacrifice for one another; as did the apostles. The Bible is littered with great examples of friendships done right - where the key binder of the two persons is a commitment to their interests, helping them if needed, speaking honestly and lovingly to them, and ultimately encouraging them in the gospel and pointing them back to God daily.
   Great little book, chock full of very biblically-informed reminders of how we're to relate to one another as Christians in true friendship.

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

This book, one of the last few of years' top international bestsellers from Swedish author Jonas Jonasson, was a disappointment. I read the first couple of chapters in a bookshop in Oxford when the English translation first came out, thinking any novel with a title like that must be amusing and intriguing, and it seemed it, so two years later I picked up a second-hand copy and finished it, coming to realise more and more throughout that it wasn't that great of a novel. I committed nonetheless.

   Anyway, plot. This follows two streams, both the adventures of our eponymous apathetic seemingly-sociopathic man named Allan Karlsson. In the present day, it is his hundredth birthday, and dreading the patronising celebrations that will be foisted upon him by the staff at the old peoples' home, he climbs out the window and strolls off - promptly embarking upon a haphazard adventure involving a suitcase full of £5,000,000 cash, inept criminal gangs, a lonely police inspector, a completely unnecessary elephant, and several bland characters who tag along for no real reason. Also we uncover Allan's past, which there is a lot of given his centenarian status. In true Forrest Gump style, he had a rough youth before stumbling through a series of improbable scenarios of the sort that would make a history student wince. He helps invent the atom bomb, spies for both the USA and the USSR, helps several revolutionary causes and assassination attempts and hinders several others, running into Franco, Stalin, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, de Gaulle, Churchill, Kim Il-Sung and a young Kim Jong-Il, Mao and a spattering of other 20th century international figures along the way (including Albert Einstein's fictional idiotic half-brother). Despite vehemently eschewing all political opinion and striving for nothing more than vodka and small talk (there is a lot of very overt and boring announcement of both), Allan manages to massively influence the course of events across the globe in his long quiet lifetime. It's extremely silly. To some degree the silliness of it didn't bother me much, because the story is a classic farce; the events are meant to be ridiculous, and they are, and the romp carries itself quite well in the end. This is not a book that one comes to anticipating a serious, challenging, or remotely feasible plot, and if you know what to expect then the story's relatively amusing - but I still didn't really like the book overall, for three main reasons.

   Firstly, because Allan Karlsson is an awful human. He refuses ever to even think about "politics" (his catch-all term for things involving people not currently getting drunk with him) and therefore has no idea of the implications of things he's doing, and in search of vodka, small talk, and not being shouted at, he manipulates situations and sparks ideas that influence horrendous events. He befriends dozens of people throughout his adventures and at least half of them die and he doesn't give a toss. This would all be excusable if the author had made him an interesting character out of it, but he hasn't. Allan could be a grand nonchalant "screw it why not" type of anti-hero, but because he is (as all the characters are) so badly fleshed out, our protagonist just comes out flat and uninteresting - but I'll stop there lest I stray into my third point's territory too soon.

   Secondly, there are several underlying attitudes in the book which simply ooze annoying ignorance. I already mentioned Allan's political apathy, but that's insidious throughout - events, topics and ideas of immense importance are dashed aside as if by a child who doesn't want to read 1984 for a Y8 English project because it's boring and complicated. Alongside this is a deep cynicism of humanity, which I'm fine with, but it is completely misplaced. The third-person narrative stoops far too often to expose the motives of the characters, and does so terribly, because even in serious situations, policemen and politicians and spies and military commanders are all given over to motives that are selfish (duh) but completely foolish and petty. If you're going to write in cynically omniscient third-person about various character motivations, at least bother to think of some believable ones. Also, there are persistent streaks of misogyny and xenophobia throughout the book. Xenophobia because non-northwestern-European cultures are described tactlessly, almost mockingly, and where actual xenophobic statements do arise it's hard to decipher if they reflect a character or the author, because they certainly contribute nothing to the advancement of the scenes they're uttered in. Misogyny because there are literally only two female characters who play any significant supporting role whatsoever: one of them is the comic relief imbecile (sidenote, she has an Asian name which she is later made to change to "something easier to remember"); and the other is the love interest for another supporting character (she literally doesn't do anything else except own a bus, an elephant, and swear a lot to fulfill the butch lady caricature - ooh, and she isn't even given a name beyond "The Beauty" until about 50 pages after we've encountered her).

   Thirdly and finally, it's just really badly written. Part of me wants to blame it on maybe-it's-just-a-bad-translation and it's-probably-funnier-in-Swedish but no, the badness goes deeper than mere language. As I said, the characters are incredibly boring and have no personalities beyond their circumstance, the plot is heavy-handedly contrived (which it's meant to be, but it feels it), and it simply isn't funny. There were moments when I laughed reading it, but more at the sheer ridiculousness of the story as I can't recall a single actually witty sentence in the novel - it's a farce but it isn't a comedy, and it definitely isn't worth reading. Unless you happen to like badly-written vaguely-bigoted attempts at historical-crime-comedy capers - if you do then go for it, this book was written for you! Jonas Jonasson must've had someone in mind, after all.

Edit [August 2014]: a film of this book has come out recently. It's probably better. This is one of the very rare examples where the film is probably better than the book; the best thing about it is the farcical-romp nature of the plot, which I expect can be captured more fully onscreen without any of the horrendous prose narration prickling one's enjoyment of it.

You Can Pray

This book from Tim Chester (one of the founders and elders of The Crowded House church community in Sheffield which I've been part of for about half my life), was the first I've finished in ages - for which I apologise if anyone avidly follows this blog (whoever you are find something else to do). I went hitchhiking round Europe for charity and didn't get as much reading done during the adventure as I thought I would. Anyway, as far as books on christian life go, this does what it says on the tin - makes a clear and compelling exhortation for us to use prayer as a more habitual part of our lives.

   It does this in three sections - firstly, explaining the theology behind prayer to show us how significant and appealing it is, because God the Father loves to hear his children call upon him, Jesus the Son presents our prayers before him as he intercedes for us in grace, and the Holy Spirit works in us to reform our hearts (and thus our prayers) to please and glorify God by reflecting his will. This gives a brilliant picture of prayer as our current earthly means of making use of our relationship with the Trinity by talking to God, and given how good God is that makes it something truly special - we can literally present our daily thanks, requests, fears, concerns and repentances to the creator of the universe! What a privilege!

   The third part of the book builds on this by showing us how we should approach and use prayer given what it is: with a mixture of awed reverence and a familiar closeness; God is our God and our Father. In prayer our first thoughts should be of him, and our prayers should reflect this - by knowing why we're praying for what we're praying for. A child treating God as a genie praying for a bike evidently doesn't have the rightness of approach, but a diligent churchgoer may pray something wholesome-sounding simply because they feel it's a "holier" thing to pray, and that's not quite right either. Making prayer God-centred means examining our motivations for each prayer and ensuring that we can argue those requests through to something that exults God, by faith in his promises and his Word, by glorifying him and hoping for the spread of his glory, by rejoicing in his mercy and thankfully imploring him to extend it. Any good prayer should be able to be worked into one of these moulds - Tim helpfully walks through modern applications of the Lord's Prayer (the guideline to ideal prayer given by none other than Mr Messiah Jesus) to demonstrate how we can bring forth petitions for the advance of God's kingdom and for our needs while still trustingly prioritising the glorious sovereignty of our Father.

   The second part of the book tackles a much more reluctant issue: times when we don't pray. Maybe other things are more enjoyable, or seem more urgent, or we've prayed unanswered prayer too many times. Here we're shown from the arguments of the rest of the book how ludicrous such complaints are, but above just theological nudges to get our prayer life going again Tim offers a few strong practical pushes too. Chiefly among these is praying is groups (note how it's rare to look forward to a prayer meeting but even rarer to regret going to one, such is the encouragement of corporate worship in prayer) and praying over the Bible. Prayer is only one side of our relationship with God - us doing the talking, and we're much more unreliable than him, so it makes sense to not only talk but to listen, to spend time in his Word meditating over the gospel truth and how it speaks into every aspect of our lives. If we feel far from God, it's not because he's holding us at arms' length - it's because we've broken off the conversation with our heavenly Father. Bible reading and prayer as regular intertwined activities are essential to a healthy relationship with God.

   So as always with Tim's books, this is extremely easy to read, rigorously grounded in biblical truth, with theology made accessible by examples applying it to normal life. Definitely worth a read if you're keen to know the glory of God more in your prayers. However if you're considering reading this as a kick-up-the-backside to spurt you into praying more (I was), don't bother - read the Bible instead and just pray; have the confidence that God is good and glorious and true and just pray. For rejuvenating our appreciation of our heavenly citizenship, no book can possible be a substitute for God's word itself, hearing it, thinking on it, and responding to it in worshipful prayer.

The Worldly Philosphers

This book, Robert Heilbroner's classic overview of major thinkers in the history of economics, is truly excellent. I've been using it to base a series of informal discussions on, for a student society I help run that aims to push for critical analysis and pluralism in the university economics curriculum - we were doing a three-part talk on how economics has grown and evolved as a subject, and this book was a good place to start in terms of giving a general outline.

   I've already spent a good twenty hours or so over the past month condensing this book into three thirty-minute-long chunks of digestible information, and there's so much depth of explanation I could now go to in terms of the book's content that it'd end up being far too long of a post for me to be able to be bothered to write, so I'll only give a very brief (well, as brief as it'll go without being dull or vacuous) overview.
   Heilbroner gives us the story of what economics is, told from those who thrust it forwards into intellectual frontiers as-then unexplored: from the recesses of pre-modern history where, despite millennia of scarcity, trade and debt, it had yet to develop as a field of study; through its gradual coalescence into a vision of society as capitalism took hold of 18th century Europe, until Adam Smith first undertook to draw from the ideas of many thinkers of his day a complete theory of how nations' wealth worked, grew, fell, failed, expanded. Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo and their not-so-cheerful theories of inevitable poverty-based automatic population controls and viciously competitive profit-erosion followed, and the classical school of economic thought began to take shape. This entire system of thinking was recorded in a comprehensive survey by J.S. Mill, around the time where mid-to-late-19th century Europe was growing restless from the continual misery inflicted upon the working masses by processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and generally just capitalism[isation]. In moral response to the broadening inequalities and exploitations, utopians sprang up, most as eccentric in character as bizarre in theory (Saint-Simon and Fourier sound like great fun); but on the serious side a pair of bitingly-logical analytic socialists named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels here developed ideas that would expose the fundamental internal inconsistencies of capitalism; ideas that would start revolutions and shape the next 130 years. However great the social impact of the radical leftist thinkers however, academic economics had taken a very different turn - economists like Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall, Francis Edgeworth and Stanley Jevons had begun reforming the subject into mathematical-based abstractions and models, and inevitable detachment from the more basic questions of underlying assumptions and political implications. This was the beginning of the birth of the neoclassical school of thought (which now dominates all economics studies, hence the recent national push for pluralism). Other than Thorstein Veblen (whose bottomless cynicism exposed the brutally-selfish heart of all society, primarily economics, which he also emphasised the post-industrial-revolution dependence of on technological development) and Joseph Schumpeter (who showed the limits of economics against an object of study that is, frankly, unpredictable), the book nears its end on John Maynard Keynes; the giant of 20th century thinking who, with impeccable clarity and rationality, showed governments the best way of breaking out of a slump - by compensating for depressed investment and stimulating consumption with a kick-starting burst of public-sector spending. His ideas declined in fashionability throughout the 20th century though, and while a few of the less-debatable aspects have been incorporated into post-Keynesian neoclassical economics, his grand vision of society is no longer prevalent within the academic ring of those professing to be economists. The book ends on a provocative note about the conflict between where the subject has gone now (well into thinking of itself, thoroughly problematically, as a science) and where these key figures in its evolution saw it as going; if economics continues to be dominated by maths and models instead of insightful observation of actual economies, then "worldly philosophy" is dead. Again, hence that whole campaign thing.
   I'd recommend anyone read this book; especially if you're interested in economics or politics or history or philosophy or sociology or whatever, and compulsory if you're a student of economics. Heilbroner's done an amazing job of conveying the core theories of the big thinkers simply without diluting them, and the grand narrative of how the "dismal science" has grown up is interspersed with delightfully colourful mini-biographies of those who helped push it forwards (these are extremely enjoyable; Robert Owen and J.M. Keynes in particular just had awesome lives), and a topic that has the potential of considerable stultification becomes lively, fascinating, and a joy to read about.

The Human Animal

This book, from zoologist Desmond Morris, was recommended to me in August of last year in some frankly bizarre circumstances. Long story short, I was talked to by an insanely sane stranger on a bus, he told me I should read this book, and in stumbling across it in a bookshop's bargain bin last week and reading the whole of it in three days I have kept my promise; and I am thoroughly glad that I did.

   It's an immensely eye-opening book, trying as it does to compose a rough examination of humanity from the perspective of zoology - and by dissecting human behaviour and lifestyle into animal explanations, some extraordinary insights into the nature, history, character, behaviour and needs of man are revealed.

   The book was written alongside Desmond Morris's 6-part BBC documentary series on the same topic (yeh, they had TV in 1994) and so the book's 6 chapters focus on the central themes of each episode of that. There are far too many fascinating observations and "oh wow so that's why X is X"-provocations in each section for me to be able to give any sort of overview that does justice to the sheer interestingness of the vast panorama of humanity that is exposed, but here's a vague guide as to the chapters' themes:

1. Body language - how basic gestures and movements are rooted in tribal-social origins of humans, and despite enormous various in ethnic culture and spoken language, these communicative foundations are generally much the same across the world.
2. Evolutionary origins - how humans grew distinct from other apes, and through the winning combination of bipedal stance, dexterous hands, and advanced intelligence, we were able to dominate the hunting-grounds and flourish.
3. Urbanisation - how as thriving human communities grew, we became more distanced from the wilderness that had birthed our species, and as societies coalesced into larger organisations such as towns and cities, while allowing for progress to accelerate this also forced territorial aspects of our animal nature into conflict.
4. Reproduction - how (left free from constraints of social convention) human sexual pairings all follow a remarkably similar pattern, and how physical and psychological developments in intimate relationships have given human sex a higher and less brutish place in our species' way of life (a certain degree of detachment advised if reading this chapter - the biological descriptions are as fundamental to understanding the topic as they are graphic).
5. Childcare - how human births and babies differ developmentally to other animals, being far more vulnerable and thus dependent on parental affection, which are ensured by strong emotional bonding; essential for proper mental and physical wellbeing in our life cycle.
6. Recreation - how the cognitive surplus of humans leaves us with a glut of spare time; being able to satisfy our basic survival needs easily, we can divert our vast intellect into other pursuits that benefit or entertain the community - from this springs science, art, literature, music, technology, philosophy and basically all culture: the root of which is our ability to think in abstraction, to see something as something else and create meaning from it, fueled by our insatiable curiosity to understand life.

   This book is a veritable treasure-trove of glimpses into why humans are as they are, with many uncoverings of evolutionary psychology and biology that throw up radical prompts to rethink much of the philosophical-as-religious way we perceive humanity today. One of my main itches reading it was how we should respond to the news that we are animals, or how we should act knowing that our evolution has already determined particularities into our bodies and minds. Part of me wants to carefully draw out all the links between what Morris's explanations of human development implies is good alongside similar implications from liberal christian ethics and anthropology and sociology and in doing so weave a consistent impenetrable scientific-philosophical picture of how humanity should be. But part of me knows that this would have feeble legs to stand on - what has evolved is simply what survives best. Having ascended by evolutionary means to a plateau from which we can rationally assess the world we're in, the arguments we rely upon to justify aspects of our lives are seldom grounded only in our animal natures, and I'm not sure whether they should be either. It's a headscratcher, to be sure.

   Nonetheless, this is a fascinating read, and for anyone interested in the origins of human biology, psychology, sociology and anthropology, plus all the philosophical quandaries unearthed by this exposition, I would (as that eccentric guy on the 52 did to me) wholeheartedly recommend you read this book.

The Damned Utd

This book, a fictionally-embellished-sort-of-biographical thing that is probably best to call a novel by David Peace, was surprisingly compelling. I encountered it in Oxfam at the end of November and took three months to read the first third or so, and upon resuming got so gripped that I finished it during a long bus journey. Anyway: the novel is based on the infamous 1970's football manager Brian Clough's forty-four day stint as manager of Leeds United.* As someone with an interest in football that only marginally counts as existent and generally not liking biographical works much, I wasn't expecting to enjoy it. How wrong I was.

   The novel follows two narrative threads, flickering between Clough's present managing Leeds to a snippetted walkthrough of his past (from his premature retirement as a player due to injury, into his managing career alongside Peter Taylor through Hartlepools, Derby County, Brighton and up to Leeds). Arranged in 44 chapters for each of his days at Leeds, these backstory parts are recurrent throughout and quite hard to get used to. Also hard to get used to is the writing style itself - David Peace has cultivated an extremely distinctive voice for Brian's interior narration (the present is 1st person, the past is 2nd, all Clough-centric) that is both down-to-earth and entrenchedly arrogant. Particular phrases and memories and images recur and repeat; people and places are almost always referred to by exact full name; past and present dialogues and experiences echo and intermingle in the head of the narrating Clough. The style perfectly fits the mindset of someone paranoid about their competitors, obsessed by their successes, haunted by their failures, and entirely sure of their own way of achieving their ends.

   And this is the kind of character Clough is painted as, impeccably and engrossingly so. The 2006 novel was published two years after its central character's real-life death and was not met kindly by his surviving friends and family, who protested the portrayal of him, and probably rightly so. But if it had been toned down it would have been just another biography [see *], and yet David Peace takes the facts of Clough's management career (which actually do seem well-researched) and chooses to give them the artistic slant that turns them into literature. Brian is certainly exaggerated as an anti-hero, his words and deeds and relationships certainly tinged with a particular sourness and viciousness that they probably lacked in reality, but as far as it takes the novel this is well worth it. The character study central to the novel is not so much Brian Clough himself but a black-and-white caricature of him, which clashes so spectacularly with visions of victory and defeat that it itself carries the novel, and only a character with as much tormented depth as the Clough painted herein ever could.

   That's why the novel is so compelling, even for those with little or no interest in football. In fact disregard football altogether - if you come to this book loving the sport you might be annoyed at how subservient of a place it takes to the central threads of the narrative. Be aware that football is obsession that has driven the compulsions, the hopes and despairs, of this novel's protagonist - and he is what it's about. If you don't mind a lot of swearing and a repetitive style of prose which is quite hard to settle into, then this book is definitely one to read. An excellent exploration of a darkened character.

* yes, based. Many of the complaints I've seen in reviews and general reactions to the novel have been that it's full of added details and speculations and characterful flourishes that distort the facts, but David Peace makes it very clear that his work is a novel, "another fiction, based on another fact" - not to be taken as pure history. The additions are what weld it into a powerful epic rather than being a dry overview of an egoistic Northumbrian's management career, which it otherwise would be.

William Shakespeare's Star Wars

This book, it should probably be said immediately, isn't an actual work of the Bard, but a product of fantastic enthusiasm for both Shakespearean theatre and George Lucas' classic trilogy on part of Ian Doescher, who deserves an enormous amount of credit despite the entire thing being a mishmash of plagiarised content and style. Before I start talking about it though I want to thank my dear housemate Chris Hedges for leaving this book on the coffee table, and apologise to him for my temporary theft of it. You can have it back now.

   The book - what is there to say? For any fan of Shakespeare (I am) or fan of Star Wars (I also am), it's truly marvellous, a playful amalgamation of the sublime scripted style of the one and the powerful punchy plot of the other. Doescher has done an amazing job of converting the entire of Episode IV: A New Hope into iambic pentameter, complete with archaic wordage* and all the classic to-be-expected tropes of someone spoofing Shakespeare (straightforward phrases turned amusingly into poetic spurts of "verily", "forsooth" and so on).

   Moreover he goes the extra mile to inject theatrical colour and character into this already excellent story: while the plot remains exactly the same, with Luke and Han and C3PO and R2D2 and Leia and Obi-Wan and Chewbacca and Vader et al, he foresaw that the book's primary (or probably only) readers would be people familiar with both Shakespeare and Star Wars anyway. Taking advantage of this, the play (it's written as a playscript so yes I can call it that) is littered with half-quotes from Shakespeare's plays, and full of references both forwards and backwards within the Star Wars saga; perhaps the best added element though are the occasional [aside] monologues, that allow by dint of stage direction the characters to voice their thoughts and feelings in things that are implied but never said in the films (because monologues aren't dialogues so weren't in the film). These often give surprisingly poignant insights into the mindsets and intentions of the characters, especially those of Darth Vader, R2D2 and Han Solo. Well, R2D2's are just funny, but the others definitely show a lot of depth through these parts.

   The illustrations are definitely worth a mention too. The characters are easily recognisable but styled in as close to 16th century dress as their costumes can go - rendering Stormtroopers in suits of armour, Grand Moff Tarkin in a full lace ruff, and Jabba the Hutt with a feathered Jacobean cap. I can't say a great deal about them because by convention of clichéd wisdom it takes 1000 words to describe a single picture sufficiently, and I can't be bothered to write that much. They're hilarious though.

   I think probably the most enjoyable part of it was how easily it worked. Yes, Star Wars has a great story, and yes, Shakespearean English is an immediately recognisable form of writing, but to bring the two together and mesh them well enough that even the overlaps can be filled in believably and the whole read with casual bursts of mirth is an achievement indeed. If you like Shakespeare and Star Wars even a bit, you'll share my appreciation for this brilliantly quirky combination of the two.

* speaking of wordage, it must be remembered that many of the characters in the films don't even speak English at all - and where they do not, Doescher has transcribed their vocal output. Every consonant-dense garbled utterance in the Tattooine language of Jabba and Greedo, every harsh vowel-burp of the Jawas, every beep, meep, whistle, squeak, whee and whoo of R2D2; these are all written down and nonsensically fun to read.

Ulysses

This book, James Joyce's seminal masterwork of obscurely innovative writing, has a literary reputation preceding it like almost no other book. It's notorious for being just downright difficult to read, and so having been informed as such by my A-Level English Language teacher (who as this blog goes on it will become obvious had a huge influence on my reading habits) I found it in a second-hand bookshop and started reading it out of sheer determination. That was two years ago (I read many books simultaneously and the longer harder ones get finished very slowly as a consequence), but having barely read anything in January due to exams I decided to tackle the remaining-unread 300ish pages in another burst of effort and so finished it just in time for the next term to recommence tomorrow. The book's general gist[s] is[are]:

• Leopold Bloom, a jewish advertisement editor, goes about the events of his day on 16th June 1904, encountering and interacting with many friends and acquaintances, primarily his wife, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, the son of an old friend. Within the book's twenty-four hour span these three characters go about their varyingly mundane days in Dublin, doing things from attending funerals to regretting affairs to surprisedly discovering a forgotten potato in one's pocket. BUT IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE BECAUSE
• It's also a parody/homage of Homer's Odyssey* (hence the title), with each succession of events vaguely mirroring a chapter of the Greek epic, albeit in necessarily less dramatic scope; for example, where Odysseus and his crew are captured and attacked by the Cyclops, Bloom and his friends are accosted by a drunk nationalist who throws a biscuit-tin at our not-eponymous-hero. BUT IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE EITHER BECAUSE
• Joyce was a pioneer of prose, experimenting with writing techniques throughout the book which I will not embarrass my lack of literature-jargon by failing to explain; and so the language with which the story unfolds is almost endlessly diversely immersively unpredictably obtusely brilliantly creative. The prose dips and flickers almost without warning between dialogues, descriptions, perceptions, memories, thoughts, current occurrences and odd half-metaphorical fantasies. The three main characters' heads are entered to a remarkably personal extent, with their streams of consciousness often played out in grand strings of idiosyncratic wordage. Chapters even vary between the genre and form of their written style - one interspersed with sensationalist newspaper headlines describing updating situations, one composed entirely from questions and answers of varying length, one written as a script replete with amusing stage directions, one written as a single fifty-page-long sentence without any punctuation at all. This is what people are talking about when complaining of how hard to read it is BECAUSE IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE.

   So the book, despite a fairly simple story and a fairly comprehensible set of mythic parallels, becomes nigh on impenetrable because of how it is written. Of course it helps not at all that on top of this the text is also littered with references to contemporary Irish culture, often in minute detail of politics or communities, plus spattered untranslated phrases in Latin, Italian, Irish and a handful of other languages, plus many a word that is simply either misspelt or made up. Much of these latter difficulties could be avoided with an annotated version (which I didn't have) but that adds on a good 240 pages of reading and probably doesn't add 240-pages-worth of enjoyment, so allow yourself to not understand certain things. I think in short it's fair to say that there was a pretty large proportion of the book that was lost on me, and could probably be lost on anyone except those highly-skilled in literary deconstruction and with a lot of spare time for analysis.

   Don't let that put you off in the slightest. This is renowned as one of the most difficult books but it is also absolutely superb: the rewards are so much greater for the increased mental strain of reading it. If they weren't, the first person to have read it would have considered it meaningless gibberish and tossed it aside and it wouldn't be the monstrously famous 20th-century novel that it is. Reading it is often like wading through glue, yes, but only because you're collecting pots of gold scattered about the surface of the glue-pond (please pardon that ridiculous sentence). The sheer liquid delight of the writing style's inventiveness as the words seem to play with themselves, the life-affirming splendour of some of the descriptions of feelings and people, the irrepressible grin or chortle as some benign or opaque phrase turns its own meaning into something entirely different - once you get the knack of not being put off by the text, you can stumble through it and see its fleeting beauty. This post is naturally meandering somewhat because there is so much to potentially say about this book and yet I wouldn't know where to start, so apologies. I'm just trying to outline how great it was to read.

   On the back of my edition, there's a quote by Samuel Beckett about the novel: "His words are not the polite contortions of twentieth century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way onto the page, and glow and blaze and flame and disappear". I cannot put it better; reading the book makes you feel as though you are reading minds, and of course this is hard to comprehend, to retain, to dissect; but it is full of insights and snippets of pure originality and excellence. Molly and Stephen and especially Leopold Bloom do not feel like characters in a novel - they feel like real existing humans with minds and bodies and communities; like we're allowed to peer into their innermost lives through James Joyce's meticulously** crafted prose-tinted glasses.

   It is a cliché to say so but this is a work of genius (it wouldn't be a cliché if people hadn't thought it were true frequently enough to make it one). There aren't many books I would wholeheartedly recommend that anyone who enjoys reading should attempt before they die, but this is certainly among them.

* I did start off trying to read Ulysses and the Odyssey in parallel, chapter to chapter, but of course the one was an epic journey with monsters and adventures in plain prose and the other was a day in Dublin with acquaintances and errands in the unplainest prose I've ever encountered - and for some reason I got bored of the first one and finished the second one first.

** the book had a thoroughly arduous journey from inception to proper publication, due to various factors including: Joyce's povety-stricken conditions; his developing eye-disease; inept copytypists; disinterested publishers; government censorship; and World War One. The pains of a genius' labours are great to birth such a great work as this. Fortunately the original text survives to today in a variety of affordable readable mass-market paperbacks.

The Good God

This book, by Michael Reeves, was another from the UCCF bookstall but which had sat neglected for some months. I took to reading it over the past week because of revision - it's exam season so I've not had much time to read and this book is quite short - but the genuine timeliness of its content to my week deepened its considerable impact, for reasons I'll explain further shortly.

   It's about God, basically; who he is in his unified tri-personal character of Father, Son and Spirit, and why this is a good thing for a great many reasons. The book points us to look at our own conceptions of "God", which generally fall far short of what we would consider perfect. We think all too often of a lonely omnipotent puppeteer who created a populated universe to serve him, imposing laws and judgments upon it when its denizens fail to meet his arbitrary standards - one God in one person, a sort of Omnibeing. If you have been put off faith because your conception of God was sort of like this I would encourage you to read this book and reconsider who you think he is, and then reread the Bible to meet the God described here in context and see how much more sense it makes. I'd also recommend this book enormously to Christians - it's a delightful reminder of who our God is and how good he is in the Father, Son and Spirit, and how we can approach him in those persons and delight in them. The book is quite short and in quite simple prose but very theologically dense - it's remarkable how so much complexity and meaning is packed into accessible sentences, and because of this it's very easy to read and a deeply encouraging and warming little book.

   The God described in The Good God is so much more agreeable, beautiful, and frankly plausible than the Omnibeing; the God of biblical theology as one Lord in three persons. It is the Trinity that forms the centre of his essential character, defining who he is and how he can relate to things; because he is in eternal loving community (of Father, Spirit and Son) it is intrinsic to his nature to be overflowing with self-giving love. This speaks immense volumes into almost every avenue of doctrine (of which I will have to skip several and the rest glaze over somewhat, the book is so tightly written that it's really hard to summarise chapters effectively), such as:

• Creation - an Omnibeing would have spent eternity alone and so have no need for a created world other than pure self-indulgence. God in Trinity however has spent eternity loving one another in such abundance that it seems natural that such a god would seek to create a world populated by beings made "in our own image", that the creatures (i.e. humans) could enjoy similar states of self-giving love in community in a world that had been created by the Father to be good in every conceivable way.
• Free Will - even if an Omnibeing had created people, their purpose would be more to the fulfilment of any whims of their maker, leaving them little more than automata. Creatures of the Trinitarian God are granted their own part of real existence with which to think and act independently, otherwise the "love" they are being shown in meaningless and they cannot respond meaningfully to it. To join their loving creator in genuine fellowship they need to be able to choose, though why one would choose to direct life by one's own terms rather than the perfect terms of the perfect Father who created them is another question.
• Sin, Judgment, Grace & Salvation - even if an Omnibeing had created people with genuine freedom of choice and they had rejected its rulership and moral decrees (which frankly is reasonable, such a God would be effectively just a grumpy dictator with substantive metaphysical DIY know-how) then it would have little reason to show mercy or forgiveness to its subjects and may as well start again from scratch. God in Trinity though takes the exact opposite tack; sin is the type of actions that occur when not God but ourselves are the object of our primary love, and this is not the way we were made to be. We were made in God's image of outpouring selfless love, and this is shown in Jesus' summary of the law as loving God and loving others wholeheartedly. Even if we fail to retain this character of perfect altruism however, it is intrinsic to God's nature, and so he will go to any lengths to keep his loved created ones near to him even when they have turned away - even if his willingness to forgive them requires someone else to take the blame and the only person spotless enough to do so being his Son himself in human form as Jesus. Only a God with eternal experience of loving relationships could have the potential for mercy and grace, and by this through the substitution of the Son we are saved and welcomed back into the eternal perfect community with the Trinity for which we were made.

So yeh, the fact that God is the Father, Son and Spirit in one is a fundamental and gloriously good truth. It was refreshing to me especially this week, as I said earlier, because I've been fairly snowed under by revision for philosophy exams. The latter (and harder) of the two exams concerns the Rationalist school (particularly Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant - they're all extremely clever and their ideas sound both scarily possibleish and utterly mental) and their ideas regarding epistemology and metaphysics, of which the philosophical concept "God" plays a huge role in determining truth, necessary existence and such. I don't want to go into details; this is my recreational book-blog, not excess revision - anyway, it's thoroughly interesting but quite dry, especially when one is used to considering God as the character expressed in this book rather than the abstract concept wangled about by various odd systems of armchair-reasoning. To leave behind ontological arguments and possible worlds and trademarks for a spell and reengage with a God whom I know not as concept but as loving personal Trinity was like a hot bath for the soul. He is more than just a necessary being or an infinite substance, he is a good Father who made me and knows me, has saved and adopted me through his Son and continually blesses me through his Spirit: he is my Lord and my God.

   Quite aside from how much I needed and enjoyed this book though, I would suggest anyone read it; even if you've never fondled a religious belief in your life it will provoke some interesting ideas about the kind of God you do or don't believe in, and if you are a Christian then it's a pretty sweet (uplifting? nice? any broad positive adjective) read.

Three Men in a Boat

This book, a shortish comedic novel of 1889 by Jerome K. Jerome, is just funny. I picked it up just after Freshers' Week as bag-book to read in libraries when bored of reading course material. Anyway - in the book, narrator J. and his friends George and Harris are all comfortably-middle-class young men (of strangely almost indistinguishable personality) who find themselves with little excitement with which to fill their days, and so they do what comfortably-middle-class young men of Victorian England did for diversion - and go boating. The three of them and J.'s incorrigible fox-terrier Montmorency (what a fantastic name for a dog) thus pack, with much slapstick difficulty, arrange a boat, with much slapstick difficulty, and proceed to row up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford, with slapstick difficulties ensuing all over the place. Beleaguered by rain, steamboats, struggles with locks and tents and towropes, George's appalling banjo-habits, Harris's propensity for mangling comic songs, mendacious fishermen, Montmorency's urges to generally destroy things, and above all their own amusingly-sketched ineptitude, their brief travel proves infuriating but refreshing, and a hilarious delight to read.

   Generously interspersed through their haphazardly-described boat trip are dozens of rambling anecdotes, tied to the main plot with very little effort or need as they are in themselves so buoyant with potential mirth. Irrelevant as they are it is these that give the book its flavour - a levity, a wit, that doesn't read like planned comedy scenes but more like you are in the boat with the three men, bored of watching the river and so talking endlessly, and running on into odd little "that reminds me of that time when" stories and "always seems to happen that" reflections. And needless to say, they are extremely funny (do not make my mistake of reading this book on the bus, or in a silent study area, or anywhere else where unexpected snorts of laughter might earn a disapproving glance). The 19th century language deepens the humour; verbose and civilised, the dry wit of the passages is very conversational indeed, and so the text reads as easily as it provokes a chuckle (i.e. very).

   Perhaps my favourite thing about the book though was the fact that it wasn't originally meant to be a funny novel. In the introduction I learned that Jerome set out to write more of a historical guidebook up the Thames - something that does clearly show through in the longish passages describing a local area's geographical features or what the Romans or some monks or Oliver Cromwell might have done in a particular passing town. To lighten the prose of this readable tour, the author added in several anecdotes about his past boating ventures through the places described, and eventually found that the supplementary funny material elbowed aside the non-fiction musings. So the book turned into a story about J. and Harris and George and Montmorency travelling this historically-and-geographically-interesting landscape, but having inconsequential squabbles and failures and remembrances along their way.
   The very fact that this happened to his story along the way surely speaks something vaguely grand about the purpose of fiction, non-fiction, and books - I'm not sure what. It it good though that however interesting a real topic, it will be enjoyed better if elucidated firsthand by someone who seems to only do so as an afterthought to describing the hilarious muddle they have otherwise made of their efforts to access the topic, not to say reflect endlessly on a host of other disconnected and uninformative but worth-hearing things. If the 125ish-year-old linguistic styles don't put you off (they make it better honestly, it's like discussing Oscar Wilde's disastrous holiday with him) then this is definitely one to read; who doesn't enjoy a funny book after all?

Understanding Scripture

This book was another from the budget bookstall at UCCF Forum. It's a collection of short essays, edited by Wayne Grudem, C. John Collins and Thomas R. Schreiner, about approaches to considering and studying the Bible. The topics broadly cover:

• How the range of texts included in the Bible originated and were collected together to form the book's canon.
• How the languages these texts were written in work translated into contemporary English.
• Archaeological evidence supporting for the historical claims of these texts.
• The coherence and variation of the thousands of pre-printing copies made of these texts.
• How older (Old Testament) texts share huge amounts of depth and meaning with newer (New Testament) ones. 
• How these texts collectively (i.e. the Bible) have been interpreted throughout history.
• How we as modern individuals can return to the Bible and read it to glean literary, theological and personally applicable insights, and how this can enable us to better proclaim textual messages to others and grow in prayerful communion with its main character (God).

If this doesn't sound rivetingly exciting it's because it isn't (this probably won't be a long post because most of the book is dry fact that fills mental gaps for dry facts instead of provoking further thought). Read something else if you want something juicy or stimulating. I'm not being irreverent in saying this - the book fulfils its purpose excellently, and that purpose is to inform one about the Bible's origin and reliability, and give a few vague pointers as to how one might adopt an appropriate mindset to go about reading it. It's sort of like the Bible's unwritten instruction-manual-cum-background-info compendium. I didn't read it for amusement or even interest, but to help shed some light on some questions that had been prickling my beliefs, and for that it did somewhat alleviate my doubts* and so while barely enjoying it I'm very glad indeed that I read it.

   If you are keen to know about how ancient Greek pronouns can be tricky, or be surprised at the inerrant transcribing skills of 1st century C.E. Mediterranean Christians (the statistics for meaningful variations in the texts are almost negligible, and there are literally thousands of surviving transcripts, which in ancient-document terms is a goldmine of historical surety), or how various councils decided against including the apocrypha in the final canon, or many other facets of the Bible's journey from being written to being read, then there are probably far better books out there covering the topic of your interest in more detail. This is still a fairly decent place to get a broad introduction though.

   The best section is the second one, with five approaches to reading the Bible; as theology, as literature, for personal application, for prayer and communion with God, and for public preaching and worship. As with the more factual sections, this is worth skipping if you'd rather read a whole book about the particular section of interest, but I still found this section an encouragement as it is the section of the book most imbued with a sense of the Bible's purpose, which is overwhelmingly positive; and when read properly engenders love, thoughtfulness, generosity, wisdom, gentleness, faithfulness, humility and such.

   This book then does what it says on the tin; it won't change your life, but scripture ostensibly does and this book helps you understand and approach it to bring you toward better facilitating that.

*asterisks are a great way of avoiding too-long parenthetical statements. Anyway; I mentioned in the last post about the challenge of being a christian and a philosophy student, you have to think very hard and run to a great many helpful books to retain a firmish belief in your beliefs. This most recent surge of doubt was brought about by the Philip Pullman novel discussed last post - not a great story but an interesting provocative point about how stories become stories, including histories, including Jesus' life as the centre of christian theological truth. I realised I didn't have enough of an understanding of the Bible's origins to ensure my confidence about its legitimacy, and this was the book I turned to to alleviate those doubts. Somewhat effectively. This footnote has way too many hyperlinks in it, I'm sorry.