Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

This book by Jen Campbell is very much what it says on the tin: a humourous compilation of zany things that customers have said in the small handful of bookshops whose owners collaborated in the making of this humourous gift-book. I got given this for Christmas (only yesterday) and so hate to be nit-picking so soon, but the majority of these weren't funny. The majority of entries attest, at best, to customers either having a range of toxic views (a handful of racists, a bagful each of xenophobes and homophobes, and a whole lotta sexists) or simply being outright ignorant of what a bookshop actually is or is for (dozens of entries of people who seem to think that a bookshop constitutes the same roles as a library, cafe, creche, general store, or almost infinitely variable helpline services); the more I read, the more I felt that the occasional genuinely amusing entries weren't worth the ever-mounting sense of despair I felt at a society so losing its grasp on literate culture that requests like the ones contained in this book were possible at all. Basically, it entertained me far less than it fuelled my incumbent misanthropy, which at least has a kind of value in that I have always been somewhat put off independent bookshops by their tendency to have very grumpy misanthropes as owners/staff - but now I see why, and if one of the main points of reading is to develop empathy, then I have developed such with a small group of people who I have given lots of money to over the years but struggle to like or understand, but if bookshops truly are plagued by customers coming in and asking things that are bafflingly dim or gobsmackingly rude or both and everything inbetween, then... ugh. Neil Gaiman's commendation on the front calls this book "so funny... so sad" - ditto. I do not recommend this book except as a present to anyone who works in a bookshop themselves, as to read of ludicrous customers whom they themselves have not had to deal with may be vaguely cathartic.

This Is Water

This book is the text of a commencement address given by author (of Infinite Jest, which I will probably get round to reading at some poi- oh, who am I kidding) David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005. It also belongs to my flatmate Jack, who has gone home for Christmas, so I figured I could read it, blog about it, and return it all without his noticing in the interim few days of otherwise-festivities. The general thrust of his speech is about the complexity, difficulty, and ultimately the absolute necessity of trying to live a compassionate life. He's talking to a bunch of liberal arts graduates, so he hopes that something of the proactive and critical use of ideas which their education purportedly challenged them to grow in their capacities for might pay off here - that they may enter the world, twisted and nonsensical though it may be, and hold firmly able to interact with it as independent rational agents who are deeply and warmly aware that they are also very much interdependent beings, and they will need others' help just as others will need theirs, and to close themselves off from being able to ask for or offer this is to render themselves less than fully human for the sake of pursuing some insidious constructed lie. I found it interesting that David, though by no means a man of faith, talks at some length in this about the need for finding a coherent centre to one's worldview to help one retain the keenness of their grasp on this truth: "everyone worships... the question is what?" and goes on to include what is probably the most cogent and universal meditation on the nature of idolatry that I've ever read in a secular text. Overall he's very clear that the whole point of this conversation is not one in which anyone really learns anything new, but in which we are constantly having to remind ourselves and each other of the deep old fundamental truths that pervade our cultures and consciences just as thoroughly as they are regularly and easily forgotten. That's where the title's from: he wants us to be so fully aware of the network of moral obligations that hold society together that we become constantly cognizant of it surrounding us, like fish, patiently reminding each other as they swim along, 'this is water,' even though they cannot see it and could very easily forget it was there altogether, swimming about their own business and looking straight through it. This is water. This is water. This is water. David Foster Wallace was an outrageously clever man, and this transcripted speech veritably swells with a perspective rich with clarity and blunt wise truths.

I Believe in Evangelism

This book by David Watson was one I've been reading as part of an ongoing literature review on discipleship in my new job with Church Army's research unit. While perhaps not as practical as other books on evangelism, Watson gives a deeply biblical and thoroughly encouraging exploration of what constitutes the subjective life of the individual Christian - i.e. continual response to the gospel. This should manifest itself in calls to love one another truly and fully, both inside church communities and from within those to outside: and bringing the gospel to people who have not been properly presented with it before is among the greatest acts of love a Christian can perform. Watson's view is a holistic one - effective evangelism emerges from rightly-motivated communities of grace-led people boldly diving into dark and marginal contexts to demonstrate the power of the Holy Spirit and God's word against the sinfulness prevalent in attitudes and cultures among the lost. This is not easy work. But ultimately, Watson reminds us, it is not work we do alone: it is God's work in which we share as instruments, and by stepping out in faith and with joy proclaiming the gospel's truth as we love all, particularly in difficult circumstances, the church can be expectant in God's part in this work. Tying up lofty quantified expectations of 'harvests' from cleverly-planned outreach schemes or making-the-church-cool-again events - well, these things can and often do yield fruit, but it is God's work. David Watson in this book gives a deep and potent series of chapters about the true nature of what we are doing in the work of discipleship, church life, evangelism, and all the parts of life in Word-centred Christian witness in which these all-too-frequently-compartmentalised things overlap in gloriously messy simplicity, rest on sustenance of faith and are powered by the Holy Spirit.

Freedom Movement: 500 Years of Reformation

This book by Michael Reeves is a very short discussion about the sheer historical potency of the Protestant Revolution, the first tinder-strike of which flew half a millennium ago. While this may be one of the most fascinating and powerfully-long-reaching threads in the whole of Western intellectual, social, political and moral history (and I do hope to read more on the subject, especially given [somewhat dangerously given my book addiction] that my new workplace is also home to South Yorkshire's largest library of Christian theological and historical texts - hence the relative shortness of this post), the book's aim is not to explore this in much depth. to remind us of the profoundness of the gospel truth which the Reformation was key in effectively democratising: before Wittenberg and Gutenberg the Roman Catholic Church was of unparalled power in controlling public understanding of the religion to which an entire continent was almost forcibly adhered; Luther's rediscovery of biblical grace was a radical return to the church's proclamation and effective witness of actual good news. Reeves plumbs the depths of the mysteries of the gospel for all people in all ages, and thereby shows the revolutionary brilliance of the Reformation in provoking and facilitating individual responses to biblical truth. It made me reflect with deep gratitude for the historical currents that birthed Protestantism (and more roundaboutly, dozens of gigantic and profoundly impactful ideas emergent from post-Catholic-hegemony European thought - the Reformation changed everything), as this heavily shaped our modern world and continues to do so - for better or worse, given the fractal-like nature of its spiralling influences and responses to these, but the fundamental change that sought to establish access to the gospel for all men and women and so helped rediscover the incredible paradigm-shattering truth that salvation is by faith alone: this is worth remembering with celebration. Martin Luther said, "I have done nothing by myself", and he's kind of right - God used him in history to challenge corruption in the church that had grown up to protect itself above proclaiming truth, and kickstart an immense process of rediscovery and reformation.

* Why should it? There's a very thorough wikipedia page, not to mention a pretty good documentary-drama on Netflix about Luther and his upstart protestance's impact. 

When the Game is Over It All Goes Back in the Box

This book by John Ortberg is a powerful and practical exploration of how to maintain our most meaningful perspectives in a Christian life - the eternal. He uses the metaphor of a board game, in which struggling too hard to win is rendered pointless as the game draws to a conclusion and (well, you know the title), and the whole book is structured around this metaphor - with concepts like main rules, being master of the board, getting on with other players, playing fairly, respecting chance, winning the 'inner' game, taking turns properly, understanding priorities, etc acting as springboards for each chapter to build on the same aggregate extended metaphor, and though it might sound like it gets irritating and repetitive Ortberg is a skilled enough writer to couch each reminder in the slowly-updating stream of ideas, and the whole book acts as a deep and powerful series of steps building an extremely well-developed and insightful collection of wise at the things we make life into games of and how such tendencies can be seen, mitigated, and resisted. It's a book that is enjoyable and accessible but, as any gospel-centred book on Christian life should be, is thoroughly uncomfortable at times, because it's written transparently and flexibly enough that readers will be bringing to mind their own struggles on game-boards as they work through each chapter, and confronting places in which we are failing to live our lives truly for the sake of Christ and are desperately still trying to win personal stakes in Monopoly or whatever is never a cosy process - but it does lead us to grace, and so even if we're losing a particular game we can look fondly to the orchestrator knowing that once all the pieces have been boxed away and all is forgotten, we haven't really lost anything, as they we are with them. I don't know, that was a very clumsy sentence, I feel like. It's late and I've had a long week. This book is highly recommended for Christian readers wanting to develop eternal perspectives; it's original, makes practical hints about mindset and attitude, and is biblically-grounded all the way through (although on surface level it may seem to hinge more upon the extended metaphor, this is always merely a springboard into proper discussion of scriptural truth).

Optimism over Despair

This book is a collation of interviews by C. J. Polychroniou with Noam Chomsky about the state of the world in 2017 - and boy, lemme tell you, it's bleak going. I got it chiefly because I hoped from the title that Noam was going to slice through the despair-inducing series of global events and trends dominating the headlines of this past year with a knife made of pure hope, but no, it's basically just a thorough, concise, and horrifyingly well-informed exploration of just how fucked we are, but of course resorting to despair will only make us get more fucked, and so the only morally or politically viable course for all those with progressive agendas to maintain as an attitude is a resigned, stoic, optimism.*

   Throughout, C. J. and Noam discuss:

• Collapsing American hegemony
• Unravelling European integration
• The new phase of the global 'war on terror'
• ISIS, NATO, Russia, and the shitstorm in the Middle-East
• Inequality and unsustainability in the plutocratic model of post-neoliberal 'really existing capitalism'
• Trump and the decline of American civil society
• Republicans (the most dangerous group of people on the planet) and global warming
• US meddling in other countries' elections/societies/etc
• Religion's dogged resistance to separating from politics
• Utter failures of US healthcare and education systems
• The potential of anarcho-socialist democratic change when all these trends/events are placed with optimistic consideration in their historical context

   It is very scary stuff. To be honest, with the level of detail and insight Noam brings to each of these broad fields of discussion, one is left with an overbearing sense of dread at the state of the world far moreso from reading this book than if one had read separate books on each issue or even a potent digest of leftist critique-responses to most of the actual news items comprising these larger problems over the past year. I'd recommend it as an oh-shit-inspirational text for progressive activists, but really most of those already know to a large degree just how fucked we are on all the fronts discussed herein, and so this book effectively just serves as an educational reinforcement from that raspy old prophet of contemporary western anarchism. You would probably learn a lot from this book, especially historical blips of detail that often elude mainstream narratives on these big issues - but overall I don't feel there is as much to be gained from reading this as there is by simply reading the news and maintaining one's dedication to taking action, if one is politically inclined similarly to Chomsky or myself, which if you're thinking of reading this you probably are. But yeh. It lives up to the title in prose conclusion only.

* That's not to say good things aren't happening, because they are. Just nowhere near big or fast enough to substantively offset some of the bigger and more pressing factors in why we're fucked.

The Shack

This book by William Paul Young is a powerful theological novel (a quote on the front claims it has the capacity to do for our times what John Bunyan did for his with Pilgrim's Progress) about suffering, forgiveness, sadness, and trust, wrapped around an exploratory picture of our relationship with God. I've just breezed through it in a few days because though I have read it before (years ago) my friend Charlotte and my little brother Ryan have both mentioned they're currently reading it, and I decided to revisit one of the more poignant stick-in-your-memory stories I've read. The book itself, in terms of the (non-God) characters, the plot, the writing, etc - to be completely honest is pretty contrived and average. Were it not for the fact that the bulk of the book comprises its main character (typical, if jaded, American everyman called Mack who has recently lost a daughter to a random kidnapper-murderer) basically just hanging out with corporeal embodiments of the three members of the Trinitarian Godhead* then I would find very little compelling about this book - but oh boy, the way he writes the character of the trinity is just kind of under-the-skin-tingles familiar and brimming with wisdom and truth. Loads of respectable theologians complained about this book's portrayal of the Trinity as three distinct persons as committing this heresy or that - but ultimately I don't really think it's meant to be taken as a speculative attempt at realistic imagination, more a leap into 'what if God wanted to do this, what would it look like, how could we observe the members of the Trinity interacting in ways that were recognisable to everyday human life?' - and this, I think, it does very well. Mack and God eat together, run across a lake, do some gardening and digging, and have several chapters-worth of extremely poignant gospel-infused conversation about his pain, his faith, the complex nature of right and wrong in a broken world and the God who is right there around him who he refuses to humbly and lovingly accept. These conversations are where the book comes alive and is where the meat of its being worth reading occurs: W. P. Young has wide and deep experience with worldly loss but also knows the character of God well, and this comes across in his writing - ultimately it's a book about how Christians can learn to practice living in joyful awareness of and sensitivity to the presence of God, regardless of how much confusion or trauma they feel separates them from that same grace and love. Many are the lines in this book that I think have a particular, soft-spoken but powerful straightforwardness in making a point rooted in biblical thought that speaks of our relationship with God, and couched in the (arguably heretical but artistically allowable?) interpersonal manifestations of these characters' conversational responses to human questions often deep truths will bubble to the surface and you will think, 'oh, I'd never thought of it like that before,' and you may be prompted to revisit your own attitudes and find them growing in humility and joy. And frankly, what more can one reasonably expect as a good outcome from reading a Christian novel?

* Jesus is portrayed with historical-ethnic accuracy, which is refreshing. God the Father is a motherly Afro-American woman who goes by the name of Elousia. The Holy Spirit takes the form of an ethereal Asian lady who calls herself Sarayu.

Meanwhile, Trees

This book by Mark Waldron is the first book of poetry I've ever bought purely because of its title. I am trying to read more poetry, but aside from the obvious span of classic or well-renowned names, it's hard to discover new ones - so in my last jaunt past a local bookshop I simply browsed the shelf of poets for any titles that sprung out at me, and obviously something about Meanwhile, Trees did the trick. And as haphazard and noncommittal as that sounds (and if it sounds so it's because it is), I actually very much enjoyed this book. Mark Waldron's poems have a darkly kind of twisted character to them, but also a bizarre and often verging on surreal current of playfulness, weirdness, irony and levity. The blurb proclaims, 'these poems may pretend they're joking but they never really are' - and that comes across; one can find oneself laughing out loud at a turn of phrase throwing a stanza headlong into absurdity only for the following lines to drag it back into a larger grimmer picture of, well, still absurdity. Would recommend to poetry-readers with a stomach for visceral imagery and shapeshifting ennui.

Jesus and the Earth

This book by the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, is a powerful short little tract on the implications for Christian environmentalism that can be derived directly from the life and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament accounts. Long-term readers will probably be aware that Christianity and environmentalism are both very much up my street - and I'd like to devote a longer post to some relatively in-depth discussion of how these two things overlap and converge, but I'm gonna do this in a later post as there's another book I'm reading at the moment that will empower a much juicier wodge of reflection. James Jones here has provided an extremely accessible text both strongly grounded in biblical text and mainstream theology as well as capable of discussing ecological issues without risking confusion or alienation of the average Christian reader (times are changing, but I still often get the impression that many in the church are almost hostile to environmental concerns, or at best actively passive - on numerous occasions my voiced concerns about climate change or whatever have been brushed aside with a deft 'oh well, it won't matter if Jesus comes back before then!'). In the years since this was published, the urgency of environmental matters facing humankind has rocketed, and the church could be doing so much more to pursue a renewed and beneficent stewardship of this one planet God has given us to live on; but such change is always a gradual process, with different persons or parts progressing at different rates - with that in mind, this book is one I'd recommend (as a text to recommend to or give to) to Christian readers who are for want of a nicer word ignorant about environmental issues: Jones' faithful and scriptural approach makes this book probably a good one to nudge those who love Jesus closer to practical up-to-date realisations about what that means for lovingly living in Jesus' creation.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

This book is the fourth in Douglas Adams's cult classic trilogy (of which there are five parts) sci-fi comedy adventure. In this instalment, Arthur Dent winds up somehow back on Earth, where he meets a young woman called Fenchurch (who turns out to be the person who worked out the meaning of life shortly before being destroyed by the Vogons - or at least, this happened on the previous iteration of Earth). Most of the book is a not-so-sci-fi pretty standard issue English comedy love story between Arthur and Fenchurch, as they try flying together, meet a rain god, win a raffle, and go in search of a madman (Wonko the Sane) who claims to know what happened to all the dolphins (who, I hasten to add, all disappeared - the title is their last message to humanity), before Ford Prefect rocks up in the last chapter with a giant space robot, shoplifts a load of films he'd never got round to finishing before Earth got blown up last time round, and the three of them go in search of God's final message to his creation, which is a tad anticlimactic, although the actual scene is very touching and has Marvin in it.

Probably read the post about the first one for a bit of context about how I'm doing posts for the whole series.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

This book is the third in Douglas Adams's cult classic trilogy (of which there are five parts) sci-fi comedy adventure. In this instalment, having been trapped on prehistoric Earth for about five years, Arthur and Ford escape through an eddy in the space-time continuum (on a sofa, no less) and find themselves at Lord's Cricket Ground, only for evil robots left over from an ancient galactic war to disrupt things - they are rescued by a friend with a spaceship/bistro, and go on to rejoin their Trillian, Zaphod and Marvin to avert the robots from rekindling the enormous galaxy-threatening war. During the course of all this, Arthur also meets his archnemesis and learns to fly. It's pretty zarking hoopy.

Probably read the post about the first one for a bit of context about how I'm doing posts for the whole series.

selected poems 1923 - 1958

This book, a collection of poems by e. e. cummings, was just gorgeous. I mean, if you like a good poem then (well there's no shortage of them but) dive right in - cummings's work is modernistic and incredibly inventive in places, but his style is so polished and honed that they are immediately accessible too (perhaps on second or third reading for some of the more experimental ones); you will be swollen with feelings from perfectly-constructed abstractions; you will come to learn the truly immaculate power of well-chosen/placed punctuation; some of the simpler ones are like drinking a warm mugful of springtime sunbeams blended with honey and rosepetals and lovers' embraces. There is blazing romance and raw human joy and natural beauty in these poems, and sword-sharp satire in some of them too. As with it seems most of the poetry books I've done posts about, I don't have any particularly strong reflective thoughts about the book overall, as these like all true and great poems are transcendent, and thus resist being directly digestible by mere intellect: they are to be felt, not made into some ingredient for a hodgepodge mishmash whimwham of ideas none of which could possibly grasp the elusive core of meaning upon which a body of poetic work ultimately rests. And so, to that end, I will conclude this post by copying one out.

no man,if men are gods;but if gods must

be men,the sometimes only man is this

(most common,for each anguish is his grief;

and,for his joy is more than joy,most rare)

a fiend,if fiends speak truth;if angels burn

by their own generous completely light,

an angel;or(as various worlds he'll spurn

rather than fail immeasurable fate)

coward,clown,traitor,idiot,dreamer,beast-

such was a poet and shall be and is

-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend

a sunbeam's architecture with his life:

and carve immortal jungles of despair

to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand

the Dave Walker Guide to the Church

This book is a collection of cartoons by Dave Walker making very Church-of-England jokes about the Church of England and those who are part of it. Though I am not one of those such people, most of the gags are either recognisable enough from watching shows like Vicar of Dibley or Rev or otherwise recognisable enough from general aspects of English church culture and organisation. It was mildly amusing; I would go so far as to say that perhaps a dozen or so did actually prompt me to emit an audible quasi-laughter-noise. But overall, to me the book highlighted (whether unintentionally or not is utterly indiscernable) the crushing depraved stiltedness of English culture, and how poorly this translates into the development of grace-abundant church environments that are properly outgoing, diverse, inclusive, engaging, and generally just good at facilitating basic human community. I mean, fortunately we have the gospel and that arguably offsets the Englishness to a considerable degree but still - I'm not gonna say it's no laughing matter, it just meant that the book doesn't read as particularly funny because lots of the things it's satirising are legitimately endemic cultural aspects of how organised Christianity in this country is clinging to institutions and traditions and whatnot that, bluntly, alienate the average majority in this our post-Christendom era.* The best use I can think of for this book is as a toilet book in a church office loo (tbh I read most of it on the loo anyway); it may bring one or two smiles and prompt three or four vague concerns about missional efficacy or entrenched legalism.

* I write this as one who is not a member of the Church of England,** and despite my devout faith, am strongly of the opinion that the church in this country should sever its historical-institutional ties to the state, for reasons which I can't be bothered to explicate in the asterisk-footnote to a post about a cartoon book even though I usually wouldn't hesitate at all before doing something like that but Giles Fraser basically makes the best case for it here, and links are easier.

** Although on the 24th I will start a job at the Church Army - which is kind of part of the Church of England, but yeh, whatever, dunno.

Ethics

This book (available from that link as a complete ebook from Project Gutenberg) is the best-known work by rationalist philosopher Baruch [a.k.a. Benedict de] Spinoza, and represents perhaps one of the most singularly ambitious acts of holistic thinking in the history of the western modernist tradition: to devise a completely cohesive logical explanation of basic metaphysics, epistemology, metaethics and ethics based on axioms (like Euclid did for geometry, a field widely known for its similar level of complexity to All Of Philosophy). Parts of this book were core readings for a module on the rationalists I took in second-year of undergraduate (wow that was a long time ago now), and something about Spinoza seemed more endearing and/or accessible than the other rationalists whose books I acquired cheaply (in the days before I became wholly reliant on the university library and only bought books I wanted for personal use) - so I kept reading it after the module finished, but it's fairly dense and there were lots of other things I was reading so it fell by the wayside; until September 2016, when I went in pursuit of meaty things to read alongside my [then]-new writing project and this fit the bill - only for my bag containing this book to be stolen from a house party in Manchester that same month when I was only thirty or so pages in (it was a whole ordeal); fortunately, it showed up the next day discarded in a cupboard as apparently the party-crashing thieves had only needed a bag to chuck people's phones left on charge in and were happy to leave behind a classic work of holistic rationalist philosophy. Crazy, huh?
   Anyway - onto the book itself.
   Spinoza lays out his axiomatic philosophy in five sections: on God (which explores the metaphysical nature of all reality and considers how this operates in component parts, including humans), on the mind (which explores from these metaphysical standpoints how self-awareness must be made possible and what the nature of its being is, as in humans), on the human mind's being intrinsically connected to physical existence and therefore subject to all manner of 'affects' (emotional-mental micro-reactions that underlie and inform rational agency) and what these are, how this plays out psychologically, and finally how individuals can transcend their affects to live by reason and find true freedom.
   Now, the intricate detail arguments of how effectively comprehensively cohesive a system of philosophical thought this all is is a question far beyond me, and if you want an answer (probably read this first anyway) then google John Cottingham or just read some of the Stanford commentaries about Spinoza's work and how it stood up to later criticism but basically, while it may be riddled with slight twinges of illogic and feature occasional propositions that do not clearly follow from previous axioms or propositions and seem to spring 'rationally' out of nowhere, likewise the explanations and corollaries and scholiums in each point often seem to harbour nested presumptions that certainly haven't been justified by the previous work - and fair enough, as it was a gargantuan task, attempting to literally distill the nature of reality and the good life into a provable, axiomatic, impenetrably logical system - and the sheer sincerity with which Spinoza goes about this effort is testament to the (in my opinion) incredibly strong ethical centre, and therefore transcendent moral drive, of his work. Cynical readers may think I'm just starting to slap words together willy-nilly with no regard for whether it's a tangibly-meaningful phrase, and well, they'd be half-right. What I was trying to say is that Spinoza inevitably gets a lot of the details and mechanics not-quite-spot-on, presumably because he's not omniscient (although, if you take his metaphysical arguments seriously, there is a case to be made for his being God, at least a bit*); however the general thrust of Ethics elucidates a world that is ordered, rational, explicable, where unity and humility and togetherness and reason are implicitly better than assuming one is already right regardless of psychological context - and these basic thrusts form the heart of his work, axioms and propositions and syllogisms devised and twisted around these to try to form as cohesive and self-supporting system of rational explanation as possible but never quite succeeding because he was, as I am, as you are, a finite being, intrinsically incapable of grasping the nature of the infinite or eternal, let alone penning comprehensive descriptions of its function and nature, but let the tautological nature of some basic truths preclude their being taken by faith as irrationality: that reason and compassion and joy and freedom are good things to be sought in our own and others' lives, and that these facts have some cosmic significance for, at the very least, us, who knows them.
   My edition's text was translated by Edwin Curley and, in prose if notsomuch argument, was actually extremely readable (and it gets easier as it goes along): if you love mindblowing hypotheticals but never even actually read a philosophy book before, Spinoza's Ethics could be an interesting and weird but manageable and inspiringly nice ride.



* I could do a whole post on religious nitpicking with Spinoza - he was denounced as a heretic by his contemporaries, and while there is much of interest and much to like in his philosophy, it certainly does not reflect stable Christian theology, which is fair enough for a Jewish writer I suppose, and is more like quasi-humanist transcendental pantheism if anything.

the Restaurant at the End of the Universe

This book is the second book in Douglas Adams' cult classic trilogy (of which there are five parts) sci-fi comedy adventure. In this instalment, the gang go for lunch at Milliways, a restaurant housed in a time-bubble at the literal end of the universe (though their journey there is delayed by an unplanned trip to the Hitchhikers' Guide head offices, where Zaphod totally fails to gain any perspective); after this Zaphod and Trillian meet the man apparently in charge of Everything (a superb character and his shortish scene is one of my favourites from the whole series) while Ford and Arthur wind up with themselves surrounded by idiots in an unseemingly familiar place.

Probably read the post about the first one for a bit of context about how I'm doing posts for the whole series.

the Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness

This book by Tim Keller is a potent little* meditation on the nature of Christlike humility, and how we as Christians trying to live faithfully and lovingly for the good of others and glory of God must seek to transcend the whining itches of our own worldly desires: we do this not by putting ourselves down, concentrating on our faults and trying to pull ourselves up by whatever the moral-theological equivalent of a bootstrap is, but by resting in the grace of the gospel, and simply thinking of ourselves less - devoting more mental effort and space to how we can glorify God and serve others. Humility is not something you impose upon yourself, like cold turkey of the soul, but is something that grows naturally in a heart that is day-by-day moment-by-moment reorienting itself to the gospel, which implicitly inspires God-glorifying and other-serving attitudes and actions, and as we grow in this so will the itches slowly subside.
   It's a great booklet, and one I'd recommend church leaders or whoever to pick up a few dozen of to throw people's way when seemly; there are indubitably fuller, more practical, more theologically-enriched books on more or less the same topic out there, but honestly Keller boils it down to its doctrinal essentials here in a work that is simple, applicable, and truthful, and what more can you ask of this kind of book?



* Key word - this is a very short book. One could read it, without rushing at all, in an hour.

the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

This book is the first in Douglas Adams' trilogy (of which there are actually five) of novels based around the radio show of the same name. As I am currently endeavouring to embark upon my own writing of several comedic sci-fi books it seemed prudent to revisit some of my core influences, and well, this is one of those - I read all five when I was nine, and again when I was thirteen and seventeen, and frankly it's been quite a while so they seem pretty fresh to me upon new readings (guess I've read quite a lot of other stuff since), and so it's safe to say I will finish the whole series pretty soon, and I'll save up my more typical reflective passages for the post about the final instalment (as though actual happenings of each book vary wildly, the characters and general themes are the same and should be fairly straightforward to track across all five), instead just summarising the book here.
   And now the point where I realise how difficult of a book this is to summarise.*
   Okay.
   So there's a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is basically a pan-galactic form of wikipedia, and a roving researcher for it, after adopting the name Ford Prefect and visiting Earth to find out what's going on here, gets stranded here because it's the bum-end of nowhere. He befriends a human called Arthur Dent, but one days picks up a signal that Vogons are on their way to destroy the Earth completely - which they do, but Ford and Arthur escape, only to be caught, thrown into space, and rescued at the last second by Ford's cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox (who is also the president of the galaxy), Marvin the manically-depressed robot, and Tricia MacMillan, a very nice intelligent young woman whom Arthur once met at a fancy-dress party in Islington and totally failed to get off with. Together, they then go off in pursuit of both the people who made the Earth and an answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.**
   If any of these arrangements of character and plot sound somewhat improbable - don't panic, that's just how the story works. And it does work. This whole series is to my mind among the cleverest science-fiction and outright funniest most inventive popular fiction out there, and utterly indisputably deserving of its massive cult classic status - if this series is alien to you, well, it starts here, and unless you're secretly a Vogon or something you'll probably find a lot to like about it.



* I'm gonna do the summaries for the first four all as spoiler-free as I can reasonably make them, but in the post about the last book, since I'll be doing some more in-depth stuff on the series' overall themes and arcs and things there will probably be a lot of whole-series spoilers in that. Fair warning.

** To which the answer is, of course, forty-two.***

*** It would have helped to know what the actual Question was.