the Rest of God

This book by Mark Buchanan is a deeply encouraging, highly insightful exploration of what we mean when we talk about 'Sabbath' - how in the scriptures it is of great significance in people's maintenance of their relationship with God, and therefore care of one's own soul. Personally I found it a challenging and simultaneously wonderfully encouraging book - as I think in myself I've recently got far too used to the notion of Sundaily churchgoing as just a thing, part of routine, and it all blends into normality a bit too much, and perhaps this is even happening in the culture of the wider church around me as I often find myself on these such Sundays concerned more with rota'd responsibilities than with throwing myself in awe at the feet of the sovereign God of the universe... who made the Sabbath, and also us, who defiled it. Stark. Every chapter has a thematic focus that would warrant a whole post in itself to unpack as there's so much richness to the joy and truth of what Sabbath is and means that I'm not even going to bother trying to list the themes,* you can have a scroll through the contents page on the Amazon preview if you really want but if reading liberating words about the reality of God's plans for human rest and flourish sounds like your kind of jam probably just read the whole book. It's that good. Probably one of the main Christian books I've read this year I'd recommend to all Christian readers, and even to non-believers - who may not get behind much of the theology but there is an abundant wellspring of wisdom here that can be applied to work and play and rules and reflections and so much in between - it's really good. Mark writes with everyday relatability, and it often feels more like reading the blogpost of a friend than an actual book of theology, as the humility and wisdom with which ideas are presented involves you in his journey of just resting with God - it never seems dry or essay-like. Also, every chapter is appended by a liturgical passage that helps process the learning points of the main text in ways that help bring it beyond academic ideas and deeper into worship, praise and rejoicing in the good ways of the Lord of the Sabbath - what more could you want?



* Okay, one chunk of insight affected me so much that I'll have to share it here - there are two distinct Greek words used for time in the New Testament texts. Chronos is the linear sort of time which has to be measured, rationed, managed carefully with the knowledge that it is a scarce resource that once lost cannot be regained. Kairos on the other hand is the gift-opportunity kind of time - to be inhabited, enjoyed; surely of course recognizing it is only for a season, but with a depth of purpose that fills and redeems the time spent. Mark drops this early on in the book and draws on the contrasting natures of time recurrently throughout, and for someone who'd never heard of this subtle-yet-poignant distinction, it was a mindblowing exhortation to both look at ways of better managing my own chronos while better living in kairos - as they're the same time, really, aren't they?

Total Church

This book by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis was one I've been meaning to read for years while somehow simultaneously feeling like doing so would be largely redundant, as its two authors were the founding elders of the church I grew up in, and therefore its theology had already broadly been thoroughly absorbed by my adolescent self in the form of a life's worth of sermons, pastoral care & conversation, and even hymns (written by Tim).
   Glad to say - reading it was a highly rewarding experience even if not particularly insightful in the sense of exposing me to new forms of presentation or argument about what the gospel is and how it does, or should, work - the premise is simple: if churches are intentional communities centred around the gospel, then that gospel is manifest in both the content (words of truth around which those church communities are unified) and the mission (actions & life-patterns within this community springing from those truths, which are to be shared in the wider world and affect every element of life). According to the blurb comments, this book was apparently considered 'provocative' when it came out - but reading it over a decade down the road it's a wonderful testament to the robustness of post-Christendom evangelical missiology that it basically echoes (or rather pre-echoes) mostly the same kind of ground that I would consider hegemonic in the field, albeit without becoming academic or wishy-washily impractical (as some texts can, maybe, be criticized of doing). The book itself is extremely readable, and draws helpfully on both biblical underpinnings to their ideas and experiential examples of things working out in contemporary efforts. After an introductory pair of chapters exploring what 'gospel' and 'community' mean in this context and the particular challenges of pursuing the fullest overlap of the two (which is what a church, in the total sense, is meant to be), Tim and Steve then apply this robustly simple framework to various areas of Christian living - including evangelism, social involvement, church planting and world mission, discipleship and training, pastoral care, spirituality, theology and apologetics, children and young people, and how we conceptualize success.
   There could be much more to unpack from the ideas presented in this book - but since this is not presented as a manifesto, rather an ascertainment of the way church already is (or at least is meant to be), the parameters discussed in here may be flexible enough to be readily applied to anything not covered here. Overall I think most Christian readers would find helpful food for thought in here, in terms of approaches to missional living and community particularly, and would recommend this book to believers looking for workable roadmaps to keep their witness relevant while rooted together in the gospel.

Mostly Harmless

This book by Douglas Adams is the fifth and final instalment of his cult classic trilogy,* and before I dive into discussion I'd like to gently warn any readers that unlike the four posts about his previous four novels in this series, this post WILL CONTAIN THOROUGH SPOILERS for the WHOLE SERIES, because without giving some context for the characters and events portrayed in the books I won't be able to meaningfully reflect on their themes or any implications I may have decided to draw from them in a way hopefully efficacious in communicability to the readers of this blog - unless those readers have also already read this whole series, and are just reading this for the same reason I'm writing it,*** in which case I can only congratulate you for your evidently excellent taste in both sci-fi-comedy novels and weird niche blogs.

   I should also probably gently warn you that I love this series; this reading was my fourth time working through the whole collection of five (previously aged nine, fourteen and seventeen) and even between those occasions there have been many a quiet in-between-other-books moment where I've sauntered casually back into their pages to revisit certain poigant/funny/both/all three bits. I've also seen the film adaptation by Garth Jennings multiple times (having viewed it in the cinema as a kid, and it was one of my first ever DVD purchases), watched the old TV series (which is alright I guess) and used to listen to tape compilations of the original radio series in bed as a kid - all of which probably shed some light on the deep almost-obsessive relationship I have had with this series and, as you may gather from either knowing the series already or from what you're about to read in the following reflections (combined with the bizarre aggregation of events comprising the books as hintingly described in previous posts), its impact on my cultural tastes and philosophical sensibilities cannot be understated, in a developmental sense. Therefore I am quite apprehensive about having to try to describe and reflect upon them in such a way as this post; much like when I tried to do a systematic analysis of Salinger - and I've reached the laziest-way-of-remaining-constructive attitude of just going for it in what is already perhaps-too-strongly a stream-of-consciousness gonzo style.
   If you're going to read this whole thing, you may want to make sure you know where your towel is first. But worry not - we'll get there, you zarking froods.

   First though - key/amusing events of fifth book. Arthur - whisked away from his happy life back on Earth with Fenchurch; is hopping from planet to planet looking for anywhere he may call home which reminds him of his actual one. He finally settles in a cushy job as the sandwich-maker for a primitive but endearing tribe of people, only for Trillian to turn up to drop off their daughter - Random - whom Arthur hadn't known existed. Meanwhile, Ford has been investigating the Hitchhiker's Guide offices, where strange plots seem to be afoot, including the Vogons; a significant element of this is the realisation that to save money, the Guide is no longer actually producing the book for which it is famous, instead saving an inordinate amount of money by now just producing one single 'book' in the form of a multidimensional quasi-omniscient bird-robot thing. In any case, Ford, as well as this bird, wind up with Arthur - where he, Ford, and Random then hop through dimensions on voyages apparently determined by the bird; during this they see Elvis Presley in a bar somewhere - but I digress; and do eventually find their way back to Earth, only to quite outrageously improbably end up in a club with a name that Arthur recognises as being the place where his nemesis [see] foreshadowed that Arthur would have to encounter & kill him at before our hero Dent could, himself, die - which, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, he then does, just in time for Earth to be destroyed [again] by the Vogons, who by this point are really rather sick of all the multidimensional fuckeries getting in the way of their destruction of this silly old planet for the construction of the hyperspace bypass.

   Okay.
   Now for the dense bit.****
   The core themes of the series I'm going to divide into five chunks - appropriate, no?
   These are:

1. The human comfort zone*****
2. Meaningful perspective, and the tendencies of [1] to impinge on the attainment thereof
3. The constant froth & business of our universe, which ambiguously effects [1] & [2] as well as making life by-and-large generally rather unpredictable & stressful
4. Innate metaphysical & phenomenological tendencies within [1] & [2] mean that even when beings, natural or supernatural, are to whatever extent able to find or bestow upon others any kind of satisfactory resolution to [2], experiential limiting factors tend to render such meaningfulness either impotent or transitory
5. Reflective conclusions that given all this, the best we can do is not think about it all too much & just get on with life as best we can

   Sheesh. I'm regretting this already.

   Here we go:

ONE

   This is the driving force of Arthur Dent's character - and while the inciting event of the first book, the wholesale destruction of first his actual house and then his entire planet, are obviously quite extreme versions of the threat to this - his desire to rediscover some semblance of generic human comfort is what keeps him hopping across time and space as he does throughout the series, but for his brief respite in the fourth book. It's also a root to the developmental arc - expressed primarily through his relationship with Trillian; his initial attraction to her in the pre-first-book bit stemming I think from an allurement to her sense of adventure, which as we all know was too much for him to match up with, and she ended up going off across the galaxy with Zaphod while he went home alone from that fateful Islington party. The nature of the pair's budding romance is hindered by Trillian's blunt fact of just coping better with interstellar life, and though Arthur does grow across the series in this regard, he still never quite gets much of a handle on how to navigate all this mess with much aplomb, hence the meta-fuckup with Fenchurch [with whom the almost-normal re-settling in the fourth book is as close to Arthur gets in the whole series - but it was not to last; we'll return to Fennie later on] and the literally 'Random' [good subtext-disguising there Douglas] daughter stemming from the series' main human romance - since the other factors thematically at play here render the pursuit of [1] and [1] alone totally unviable, if not for us in real life, then certainly for the characters in these stories.

   Humans though do generally live with this as their chief pursuit - a fact I'm not confident enough to go as far as to say Adams himself disapproved of necessarily, but certainly one he saw the drawbacks to, hence the low regard more intelligent races tend to hold humanity in - namely, dolphins and mice.

TWO

   Given that life, what with the universe and everything, can make the maintenance of a properly-comforting comfort zone somewhat difficult, it is an innate tendency among the intelligent species to seek deeper meanings, or proper perspectives. This is always best as something sought rather than thrust upon you - as the Total Perspective Vortex to which Zaphod is submitted in the third book is literally a high-degree punishment - but even the cleverest of advanced races do tend to seemingly consistently only get so far before then lapsing back into the baser pursuits of [1]: even by the End of the Universe itself, all the richest and most successful of the cosmos's inhabitants don't seem to have anything better to do than go to a restaurant to watch the firework display of The End... these dalliances with outrageous excessive luxury also lie precedent to the planet-construction business of Magrathea, where the wealthiest citizens of the universe could order custom-built worlds to their exact specifications - if nothing else this is a superlative caricature of [1] taken to its maddest extremes. And one is left wondering if there weren't something perhaps more meaningful they could have been doing with their efforts?

   But of course, there is - and the pursuit of meaningfulness in perspective is still very much sought by the hyperintelligent beings otherwise known as mice, as they commission the Magratheans to build a computer to answer these kinds of questions - namely, The Question, that ultimate bottomless 'why' of life, the universe, and everything - and the computer they built, Deep Thought, does in fact come up with an answer, but then necessitates the secondary building of an even more complex computer - so vastly intricate that even life itself would be part of the meta-calculatory mechanisms - in order to work out The Question to which the answer was of course forty-two, and this computer was, of course, Earth.

THREE

   But the universe is a strange, and busy place - neither basic comfort zones nor quests for any kind of meaningful perspective can expect to persist long entirely unhindered by all of the cosmic traffic flowing unceasingly left and right and back and forth and through whatever prepositions are most appropriate to use of journeys in hyperspace. A poignant embodiment of this fact is Agrajag - the being who self-styles as Arthur Dent's nemesis, on the really quite reasonable, if imponderously improbable, grounds that every time Agrajag lives a life, Arthur Dent kills it, only for it to be born and reincarnated in myriad forms to once again meet its death at Arthur's hand, slippers, fishing rods, or sheer happenstance proximity. Things do just kind of happen and we won't always know why, and to expect a kind of cosmic fairness to be naturally emergent from all this doesn't hold much water in the grand scheme of things. Another example I'll give for this is the planet of Krikkit - its inhabitants being a race so warlike, so mindlessly destructive, that its surrounding powers had to construct for it a concealment lock to keep the world completely separate from the rest of the universe; and without wanting to delve deep enough that I'll need to try to explain the entire plot of the third book, neither this scheme nor the planet's inhabitants was, in the sense of cosmic justice, entirely cricket. It's an exceptional series of dense subtextual points made in a kind of stupid pun, which is entirely forgiveable when you layer in the consideration that it also leverages a weird but effective & unique angle on talking about all of this in relation to English culture. But I won't get into that here.

   So this particular thematic chunk obviously routinely upsets [1] and adds all kinds of odd complications to [2]; though there are a couple of these latter type woven into the series that I'll discuss a bit more fully. The computer designed by Deep Thought to work out The Question, which later came to be named by its inhabitant-components "Earth", seemed to be doing its job more or less fine as far as anyone could tell until the second book. Here it is revealed that during the prehistoric periods of Earth's operations, a spaceship full of the most useless middle-class off-scrape of a race biologically very similar to humans called the Golgafrinchans crashed on Earth, and it is heavily implied that by weight of numbers, superior technology, and generic idiocy, these people pretty much wiped out the cave-dwelling actual humans who had been part of the planet's calculation system - though the further questions as to whether interbreeding or some other systemic operational factor may have rendered the Golgafrinchans' offspring as being the new Earthlings and so having the developmental capacities necessary for continuing the working out of The Question - alas, Douglas doesn't tell us these things. What we do know though is that even if they had, and I think there's good reason to suspect this [see notes on Fenchurch below] - it would have all come to naught anyway, as the Vogons then destroyed the Earth; in the first book and again in the fifth. An interesting aspect of the Vogons' part in all the mess of the universe is also worth touching on, as they aren't necessarily what one would call evil - they're very much just unimaginative bureaucrats doing their jobs. Which isn't to say that one couldn't consider them evil - I think they largely are, but not like they're bloodthirsty destructors of the typical trope - it just opens an interesting meta-ethical door here.

FOUR

   This one is partially emergent from [2] but also features a number of metaphysical and cosmic points that I think are more just reflective of Douglas Adams's humanistic agnostic worldview generally. We'll start with the paradox of advancement - that as beings get to be more technically and whatnot 'developed' it doesn't necessarily have anything like any kind of meaningful concurrent 'advancement' in those beings' general levels of contentment as is the root of [1]. One place where this is brilliantly comedically sketched is in the bit-part character Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged - a being who, through a ridiculous and irreplicable mishap, found himself immortal, and promptly got extremely, horrendously bored of it all, eventually making it his mission to fly around the whole entire universe personally insulting each and every other living being, for no other reasons than that he can, and it seemed to him a worthwhile endeavour - one which nobody else would have the time to commit to. Another is of course Marvin; the manically-depressed robot who is one of the series' main characters. While we're never given a huge amount of insight into the extent to which [2] or for that matter [1] are salient elements in Marvin's life, it is, he makes abundantly clear throughout, a matter of fact that his immense cognitive capacity does nothing to alleviate the crushing sense of depression he lives with; and while you'd do well to point out that this is an innate feature of his Genuine People Personality programming by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, it does also seem throughout that at points that the possible apprehensions of a rational holistic explanation for why the universe was in actuality all okay would have been a balm to his cybernetic mind; but we will come back to this in a moment.

   'Deeper' meaning or insight is sought by most of the characters throughout the series, in a range of forms and places, and to a variety of successes. An interesting and thoroughly amusing exploration of the nature of spiritual questing can be [it may or may not be there intentionally to this point, but it's certainly there if you wish to smell it as thus] sub-read into Arthur's encounters with oracles in the fifth book - he goes wanting easy answers or a handy hint at where he might at least start looking for them, and comes away having only been bamboozled by nonsense, impossibilities, and overpowering bad stinks. Adams was, as I mentioned, an agnostic - and while religion/God and the skewering of thus is dealt with by the Guide itself in excellently flippant but not entirely irreverent manners [ed. I say not entirely because it posits its points on the grounds of both comedy and generic experiential logic, and given the absolute borderline-irrelevant mess that English Christianity looked like - especially from the outside - in the late 1970's and early 1980's, I think it's entirely reasonable to take his points as a jocular but sincere critique of Christendom at face value, which of course, to the shock of absolutely nobody, the Church of England hasn't: in much the same manner as Monty Python's critiques] - the only times we really see religious figures do much in the series are still pretty interesting, but do little to deeply or seriously aid the [2] problem. The first of these is when the prophet Zarquon - a pretty obvious sci-fi analogue of Jesus/Mohammed/Zarathustra/etc - shows up at the Restaurant just before the universe is about to end, only to be interrupted before he can divulge his final revelations, by the context itself. The second is a phrase inscribed in thirty-foot high fiery letters on the Quentulus Quazgar mountains - purportedly God's final message to creation: it just says "WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE" - which in absolute cosmic terms is obviously a joke, but in the context of the plot it does seem to be some consolation to Marvin, who dies at peace shortly after having it read out to him.

   Okay, and one last bit - Fenchurch; and here we'll be going back to the whole of Earth's original programming for the finding of The Question - on the very first page of the first book, we're told that "a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything." While I'm not confident we're ever told this explicitly, I think Douglas leaves enough breadcrumbs throughout the series that we can infer that A. this girl was Fenchurch and B. this realisation was her cognizance of the ultimate Question, or at least something close to its developmental approximation. In bleak reality however - Douglas Adams did not know The Question, or if he did he didn't include it in anything he wrote; and got around this contrivance for plot purposes by the space-time wobblange that happens somewhere between the first and fourth books, as by the time Arthur meets Fenchurch, we are told that some time ago she had a profound realisation - as well as noticing that the Earth was destroyed - but whenever things then got rebooted she had forgotten the realized truth-bomb that prompted it, and is now only slowly recovering psychologically from the whole thing.

   Here's where my reflections get really weird though. Imagine if you will, the generous benefit-of-the-doubt extended: the quantum entanglements of all manner of improbable nonsense where life may imitate art or art life or both-and - and of course I'm not saying this having had some kind of specialist secret insight, it is a purely fantastical but deeply intriguing speculation: I think there's a good chance that Douglas Adams really believed that humankind were clever enough, and weird and crazy enough, that the positing of an idea such as that Earth is a computer designed to calculate The Question, as well as the selection of a specific number [42] as 'the answer', would sow psychosociocultural seeds of an ilk capable of someday, utterly uncontrollably and yet as if inevitably, sprouting into the real possibility that someone who'd overthunk things, or just happened to string together a brainful of requisite connective elements - using this jocular springboard as an inspirational fertilizer - somehow manage to phrase the problems faced by sentient life in such a manner that it could be formulaically or whateverwise simplified as such and the whole existential mash of Life, the Universe and Everything cogently brought to fruition in a single Question; probably something rather simple, when you've boiled it down that far. I have no evidence to support this hypothesis but sheer paranoid excitement, and I most certainly amn't claiming to have 'cracked' it. But that brings me onto the final point...

FIVE

   So - yeh, life is a beautiful hot mess and it can be tough.

   That's the driving undercurrent to Ford and Zaphod's characters, I think - though Zaphod deals with it by pushing himself ever deeper into [2] as well as the attainment of a higher state of luxurious [1] - while Ford: he's a pure-bred Taoist, if you ask me, plain & simple; he seems to have mastered the artful navigation of a mad, unpredictable universe with all the poise of a - well, an experienced interstellar hitchhiker who's so good at the game he makes his living writing contributions for the very book that helps people who want to do what he does as well as he does it, and so the book of the Hitchhiker's Guide itself also is a balm to these other stranger plot elements by helping simplify the mess and madness, to facilitate easier travel. This is why the betrayal of the bird-guide in the fifth book hits home so well, as well as the spectacular applicability of its cover-slogan DON'T PANIC.

   One arena where the series takes this attitude to its max is in the meta-implications of how Douglas deals with the scientific quandaries involved in making any faster-than-light travel work in ways explicable to skeptical readers - which is to say, he just doesn't bother, instead devising cop-outs that are still cop-outs but that are so ingenious that you don't need to care & you certainly can't deride them for creative laziness because they're some of the funniest most original concepts in science-fiction - for one, the Heart of Gold's infinite improbability drive [which is also the catchall source to explain literally everything that may seem outrageously improbable which happens to its passengers throughout the series] and the bistromathics used later on by Slartibartfarst's ship for number two. How do they work? As far as the reader should be or need be concerned, they just do, so calm down and don't think about it too closely. A similar approach underlies the Somebody Else's Problem generators.

   Final thought - all of what I've said here can be brought to its fullest, most insanely perfect genius in the scene in the second book where they go to meet the man who, so it is apparently the case, makes all the decisions that run the whole universe. He's just a man, without notably superior intellect or wisdom or other such faculties, with no capital or infrastructure or otherwise resources to his name but a cosy shack on a rainy planet where he lived with a cat. The sole things that stand out about the man are his childlike curiosity and humility, taking nothing for granted and always willing to believe he could be wrong about anything and everything, even things he already thought he might have in some time or place thought he knew to be true. As Zaphod and Trillian concede as they leave the man's shack; "I think the Universe is in pretty good hands, don't you?"

And whatever kind of faith Douglas himself had in Earth or humankind or anything beyond the realms of our own knowableness, I myself can attest quite assuredly that I do indeed, that is, think the Universe is in good hands - as with respect to the many, complex and strange caveats we must append to this consideration with all that humanity have built, done, destroyed, thought & said & written - God alone is in charge, and God is good, and though perhaps not the easiest of presences to see or hear at work in the Creations there is, if you listen, much more than radio silence there.

   And I hope, if you've read this far with your brain intact, you've learned the same main lesson that I have from all this: don't over-analyse escapist fiction through any systematic holistic philosophical lenses. It's arguably some kind of satisfying fun, once you've done it; but you'll almost certainly sprain summat in the process.
   Not to mention the backlog you'll accrue on your blog...

* See following links for the first, second, third and fourth. The first post contains a bit of a probably-less-thorough-than-this-one** explanation of how I approached the series as a whole in order to write reflective responses about it - basically, the first four are little more than rough random-detail-selections to give flavours of what each book is about while not going into much actual synoptic detail about actual plot or themes or anything, because I'm going to do All of That in this post.

** I don't know, I haven't written most of it yet. Such are asterisks.

*** Why not?

**** Full disclosure - this post, though dated February 2018, is being written in June 2020, as for a variety of reasons I won't go into here, this blog suffered something of a backlog over the last couple of years and this fucking post was - not the lynchpin, nor the critical mass, of this, but certainly kickstarted the whole thing as I realised that to even begin to do justice to my own attempt at a synchronized systematized analysis of my reflections on the meanings underlying this insane, sublime trilogy in five parts was a task not easy to rise to. But I'm ready, I've worked through most of the backlog, and refreshed my thoughts on Douglas Adams's crowning work - and hence, above.

***** Which, for sake of simplicity [as we're never actually informed exactly what race Ford or Zaphod or etc are, and the series was written by a human so obviously will subconsciously be applying innate human tendencies as projected features of alien psychonormativity] I here use as an inclusive term for the comfort zones of pretty much all the chief characters we're meant to empathize with throughout the pentalogy, regardless of whether or not they're technically human; with the sole exception of Marvin.

The Outsider

This book by Albert Camus probably doesn't need much of an introduction. It's a shortish novel (or longish novella) that lays out, in narrative format, one of the most enduring and harrowing portraits of absurdity in the human life committed to paper. An enormous amount of literary and philosophical commentary on this book already exists, probably in far greater depth of critique and shade of nuanced understanding than I can be bothered to lay out in this mere blogpost, so true to the spirit of the book I'm not going to write a proper post about it at all (because truly, what is the point?) and instead am going to break all my own rules by giving you, in reverse order of their probable significance to the reading experience,* a curated selection of spoilers from the story.

• The main character, Meursault, shoots a man of Arab descent five times on a beach halfway through, partly because of a complicated situation in which a group of Arabs and Meursault and his friends (including Raymond, who owns a gun) have been threatening each other, and partly because it was a very hot sunny day.
• Marie, to whom Meursault gets engaged, wears an attractive hat when speaking as a witness in his trial.
• It's only when complaining to a prison guard about the unfairness of his confinement that Meursault comes to realise that he is being deprived of freedom as punishment. While in prison, he passes the time by reconstructing memories of his room at home.
• Meursault is condemned to be decapitated, and when finally visited by a priest, he is provoked into a rage and starts roughing him up.
• Meursault is not a friendly man, but he does happily accept an invitation from a man called Raymond Sintés to drink wine and eat black pudding together. This blossoms into a friendship in which he soon finds himself writing poetic letters on behalf of to a girlfriend whom Raymond is cheating on.
• Everyone smokes cigarettes, constantly.
• And apparently Celestés is the default go-to restaurant.
• Meursault's mum dies and this causes him a great deal of awkwardness when her friends and the staff of her care-home find it odd that he doesn't seem to care.
• Salamano, an elderly man with no friends or family and only a dog that he calls names and pulls around, becomes very sad when this dog runs away or dies.

   All this in mind, this novel is not one that can be spoiled by spoilers. Camus' writing style and the atmosphere he creates both in environment and in Meursault's mindset are deeply unsettling for their stark absurdity blended effortlessly with a levity, a sensuality, which makes the protagonist sympathetic at times (usually until he says something) - and this twists your perception of the whole thing, meaning however outrageous or alien Meursault may seem at times, ultimately the strangest character in the book is the world he lives in itself, which is basically the same as reality, and all kinds of micro-frustrations and sadnesses lie beneath both surfaces.

   Basically, worth reading. Also I realise that by the addition of this final paragraph-and-a-bit I have betrayed my own previously declared intentions for this post. So what?

* Which, because significance is a subjective and arbitrary element of reality merely tacked onto anything which the ones who perceive it wish or are compelled to deem significant for whatever reason, means in no particular order.

the Children's Classic Poetry Collection

This book, compiled by Nicola Baxter and illustrated by Cathie Shuttleworth, is designed as a means of introducing children to the magic of poetry in such a way that they will be captivated and spurred into a lifelong interest in and love for the craft.

   I can only say that it seemed to have worked on me. This book was given to my family when I was six years old by my teacher at the time (Miss Smith, you're almost certainly not reading this, but regardless, thank you) as a 'well-done-for-not-dying' present when I spent some time in hospital. I was already a fairly bookish child, and the broad selection* of verse accompanied by simple and engaging illustrations truly captured my imagination; though that said, my interest in poetry then plunged once I discovered the joys of (in this order) sci-fi, fantasy, literary novels, and non-fiction, and only two or three years ago did I to whatever extent revisit the purity of non-prosaic linguistic forms - but even almost two decades after this book was gifted to me, when I had forgotten the bulk of its contents and even most of the illustrations had so far faded from my memory that they didn't even strike me with déjá vu this reading, it brought me a deep and strange comfort to realise that several of the poems contained within I was able to recite (Ozymandias and the Jabberwocky in entirety, and portions of others), and if that's not a testament to the profound impact on one's cultural subjecthood that books like this can have if bestowed upon people at appropriate times in their life, then I don't know what is.

   With my revisitation concluded, I am going to return this item to the bookshelf in my parents' house (where I found it yesterday and asked as I flipped it open in surprise 'no way, was this the one given to us by Miss Smith when I was in hospital?'), in the hope that another small child may someday have a similar experience.

* It contains verse by Williams Blake/Shakespeare/Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walters Scott/Whitman, Roberts Browning/Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti, Emilys Brontë/Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Edgar Allen Poe, Byron, Tennyson, Longfellow, and a few others, including more than a handful of anonymous rhymes.

Pollution and the Death of Man

This book, by Francis Schaeffer (and with a final chapter by Udo Middelmann)* is a fairly short and readable but still very academically potent exploration of how well-exposited biblical theology can shine new and profound light of insight into the ecological crisis faced by contemporary society. I feel this blog has already delved so thoroughly into both aspects of this intersection in topics, and so this post will mostly be hyperlinked so as to maintain some degree of brevity.**

   The book places the ecological crisis into context of Christian narratives of creation, fall and redemption, and seeks to draw on scientific understanding as the powerful force that it is for explaining how things in the world work. Pantheistic naturalism and materialistic atheism are both dealt with in Schaeffer's typical aptitude for negotiating philosophical complexities, and the picture worked towards here is a hopeful and proactive one, in which people who do give a shit about our planetly home (a broad category that hopefully includes Christians, and this is gracefully increasingly becoming the case as a mainstream norm, at least in the egalitarian-liberal echo chambers I'm part of, but in churches these are never as potent in their constrictive insidious-ideological force as they are in secular activism, or further afield) try to become part of the solution;*** especially since during the reign of Christendom the church's capacity to exist as a counter-cultural alternative community which spoke truth to power was blunted by its proximity to those same powers - and even cursory surveys of historical developments of social and moral norms reveal that the Western established church does indeed have a lot to answer for in terms of helping construct and maintain a relationship between human society and the rest of the natural world which has been anything but shalom. Fortunately, the church is not a static entity, and as the vast ripples of the reformation continue to break in the rock pools of newly-changing contexts (which bring with them new challenges to the world demanding gospel-grounded responses from the church) there is always hope.

   This is a must-read for Christians with an ecological conscience so that we may better advocate the significance of stewardship to those of our brothers and sisters who 'just don't get it' yet. It would probably also be a very interesting read for people of other (or no) faiths who share these concerns about nature - as there is an unshakeable spirituality to biology, and even perspectives whose foundations you disagree with may prove to be illuminating or thought-provoking in ways you cannot foresee. Or - even if you're the hardest-cored atheist - this would be a fantastic source of ammunition for asking the kind of questions that will really make your well-meaning Christian acquaintances squirm.

* And a pair of appendix essays; The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis by Lynn White Jr. and Why Worry About Nature? by Richard Means - both of which add wholesomely and enrichingly to the discussion sketched out above.

** If you really want to know, I'm two months behind on this blog, and so am catching up with posts on a large stack of books most of which I found extremely interesting and quite relevant (some very) to my aggregate interests and attempted understandings, which is why lots of these posts are quite short, if still trying to capture with accurate sincerity my actual personal responses to each.

*** I use this term in a broad sense: the church is God's chosen vehicle of participatory work for the reconciliation of humanity and our world to His will, but by no means can or should we fully expect justice, social or ecological or otherwise, to be achievable by any other than divine means - and since to speculate as to the nature of this process is by definition to think eschatologically, there must be a degree of humility there, and clear recognition that we cannot discern the details of God's plans.
   However, we can from our understanding of His intentions and character form clear directions and intentionalities for human action - something only touched on in this book as it deals mostly with the core outline of how the issue and Scripture intersect, but fortunately there is a wealth of other books and resources about ways in which this can go further. I'm particularly excited by the growing vocality of the church in opposing exploitative and unsustainable (not to say idolatrous) tendencies implicit in the capitalist system; hopefully popular consciousness of this will extend to critique the whole ideological justifications for this economic model, and open space for imagination of grace-based forms of organisation which are far more conducive to global equality and sustainability.

the Gospel According to the Son

This book by Norman Mailer is a novel, and yet carries a persistent acuteness of tone and perspective as it walks through the first-person narrative of Jesus, told by Norman Mailer's version of Himself; I'm not going to say a great deal about it because otherwise I'll end up writing an enormous post peeling apart speculative layers of Exactly Just What Is Heresy and Where Does Art Stand In Relation To This, and basically I would like to skip that (as it's quite late and I'm writing this actually a few weeks after I've actually finished the book so a combination of wanting-to-get-off-my-screen-based-appliance-before-bed and it-was-that-long-ago-most-of-my-juicer-ruminations-have-dissipated-anyway is in effect) and just affirm that while this book does embellish upon the Biblical Gospels, it does so in the self-conscious medium of a novel, a literary format designed to embroil its lone audiences in worlds of empathy and imagination and brokenness and nuance - much like the world Jesus inhabited in ways far messier than word-for-word portrayed in the formal accounts. Any theological liberties it takes it does so with an careful caution which maintain the religious integrity of its main character, while by taking those liberties in the context of a (superbly written) novel allows Mailer to powerfully and poignantly explore what can only be speculated as to the inner life of someone who thinks God is trying to tell him summat uniquely important. As an exercise in literary practice for those who already believe that Jesus was fully divine and fully human, this twist - subjective narration of the most well-known story in history - makes for excellent and thought-provoking reading, and I am quite confident agnostic readers may also enjoy the fresh retelling of familiar scenes in ways altogether 'less preachy' than perhaps generally perceived to be accessible.

the Prophetic Imagination

This book by Walter Brueggemann was one of the most holistically profound, affirming, challenging, enlightening and generally energising-of-the-spirit books I've read in a while. It explores through radical and faithful analysis of Biblical themes and narratives the lens of sociopolitical critique common in the prophetic traditions, which with deep relevance touch on everything from economics to personal virtue to cultural memory in both their original contexts (as cries lobbied against Israel as an ancient people and state, trying and failing to live in collective relationship with their creator and liberator God) and you-don't-need-to-dig-too-far-down-to-find poignant assessment of the world's ongoing broken mode of being; the theological thrusts found here are characteristically recognisable in the human condition and so universal enough to have a pertinence that fully transcends historical context, speaking to us as persons in a much broader sense. Brueggemann tracks these themes through God's covenant with Israel, as Moses and the Law-based society was intended as a developmental (and flawed/incomplete) model of how humankind could live in relationship with God - and this formed an alternative form of community which was fundamentally at odds with those mainstream form of community prevalent among the species, termed the 'royal consciousness', which prioritises individual gain and power such that everyone is trying to be the king of their own little worlds (which is lucky enough for the tiny minority who actually are kings, or royalty, or whatever, but obviously then leads to entrenchment of inequality and alienation of people from each other which compounds the breakdown of a society of sinners); this is particularly stark reading in our current vein of history, where never before has the average human had so much sheer abundance of resources to consume, concretely or abstractly, in lives of competitively-dulled-to-its-own-spectacularity blasé luxurious discontent. The countercultural forms this alternative community takes are discussed in broad scriptural strokes, as are the forms of counter-countercultual suppression launched in response by the royal consciousness. Next, from closer analysis of prophetic writings, we look at how particuarly gifted members of the alternative consciousness/community are able to stir up remembrance of the betterness of that alternative through: exercising sympathetic and empathetic action as a critique of the lovelessness of the mainstream order; and energising the collective imagination of the alternative community's members to provoke amazement at, and thereby realign social consciousness toward, the God who liberated and established such a community at all. Further chapters then explore how Jesus took these aspects of prophetic function to their extreme in his teachings, life and death etcetera. Finally, there is a chapter and also a postscript considering how these ideas may be applied in practical ministry.
   This is not a book for everyone. It will unsettle many conservative and liberal Christian readers alike, at its clarity of argument and yet the seemingly-radical nature of working through its implications. But Brueggemann is a well-rooted scholar of God's word, and this book is a hugely potent systematic examination of one of the most intangible concepts in theology (relative to the current hegemony of materialistic positivism anyway) in ways that shed great light of insight into recurrent Biblical themes and narratives, while being inarguably of immense and urgent necessity in our world today. As a global civilisation, we are careening slowly across the wilderness without even clear voices to be heard more than few far between shouting in it; I believe as believers the truths of faith are as brilliantly and deeply relevant as ever yet we have lost our capacity for meaningful cross-cultural dialogue in societies poisoned by secular anxiety and corporate blinkers - thus it is even more imperative that Christians with a capacity for communication, for engaging their sociocultural contexts in ways that are as pragmatic, flexible and sensitive as they are conscious of the primary, holistic, eternal context, to do so with such things in mind as they speak, write, create and relate.

Multiplying Churches

This book, edited by Steve Timmis, is a short and readable collection of essays on the broad theme of church-planting. My church is very much a church-planting church by its nature and intentionality, and so everyone in it was given a copy of this a few months ago to help us generally think and talk and pray through corporately how to go ahead with an upcoming pair of new church-plants. I can say straight-up that it's a great book for this; each chapter is accessible, jargon-free, biblically-grounded, and thoroughly proactive and exhortational in style - I won't discuss it in much depth here, because I'm currently also reading another book more centrally focused on a holistic exploration of biblical theology of church, and I'll save reflections for the post on that.

   But yes - the chapters:

• Tim Chester - church planting as the work of spreading Christ's light
• Henri Blocher - church planting as the work of a renewed humanity in Creation
• Steve Timmis - church planting as the work of God's people witnessing to Him
• Matt Chandler - the motive of grace
• Reuben Hunter - the method of Word-centredness
• Matt Chandler - the means of empowerment by the Holy Spirit
• One Mokgatle - how churches can/should transcend ethno-cultural boundaries
• Steve Timmis - men's role in church planting
• Ruth Woodrow - women's role in church planting

   Overall, a great book to work through in church communities facing upcoming plants (or not - yet it might even inspire one!)

   Regular readers (ahahahahaha who?) may suspect, rightly, that I do have some thoughts on the last pair of chapters which I haven't divulged in this post - and that's because, to put it quite honestly, I have been convicted in recent months about the extent to which my social/political consciousness is allowed priority over my life in Christ (which then necessarily entails a degree of accountability and humility toward the body of Christ which is the church) to determine my opinions and reactions to things. And that's not to say that I'm still far from in agreement with many of the senior leadership (in both my church and the wider Acts 29 network of which it is a part) on the issue of gender roles (the thoughts I laid out here are still basically what I think), but I recognise that such arguments aren't as neat as I'd've liked to think. My uptake of support for feminism was rooted in hearing and reading the experiences and reflections of women, talking about the oppressions they faced; and while I'm not convinced the church isn't complicit in this to a significant degree (especially considered historically), I also have to recognise that there are many wise and socially-conscious women in the church who accept the seniors' position on gender roles (in a nutshell - complementarianism, so men-only-leaders), and that doesn't end the argument, but in humility creates new space for constructive discussions about where to go from there. I don't know. We're in an interesting period of political and cultural shift regarding gender norms, as we also are regarding the role of traditionally hegemonic religion: my personal opinions aren't as important as the wider attempts by the church to seek unity for all in Christ, which won't be overly aided if the whole church is busy arguing internally about the finer shades of theological nuance in this or that egalitarian theory, or where we draw the line between being subversive in a Spirit/grace-led sense and just being downright subversive. I wish I could explore these avenues further because trust me I've got views - but so what? Maybe some day there will come a time and a place for these conversations between the secular, the philosophical, and the church to take place, with all degrees of no-holds-barred criticality alongside an earnest intention to find workable common ground: and if or when that day comes, I will spring into action and try to help radical feminists and complementarian church leaders realise where their concerns overlap - or whatever else may come about. But until such hypothetical scenarios arise, I am not complacent, but merely refraining from unhelpful or divisive arguments.
   Let dialectics get on with themselves.
   You just get on with being.

Vagabonding

This, by Rolf Potts, is one of the most simplistically profound and positively challenging books I've read in quite a while - for certain one of those all-round well-worth-keeping-as-an-indispensable-dogeared-companion-that's-been-reread-multiple-times kind of books.

   Ostensibly, it is a reference/guidebook for people who want to go travelling around the world long-term. But it is far more than that: Rolf's advice, though thoroughly and flexibly practical, cuts deeper to the whole point of travel itself, and brings the reader (who can be presumed as a would-be traveller) to question some serious unexamined things about goals, attitudes, and various mixtures of these that may hinder the actual experience of travel. I would not even dare to summarise his broad reflections on this - as there is so much wisdom and insight packed into this relatively short and delightfully readable book, derived both from Rolf's own travel experiences, his friends', loads of other travel writers from contemporary and historical times, and anecdotal biographies of people who should be inspirational goal/attitude-models to people who might consider vagabonding. Travel is ultimately, argues Rolf, about broadening your understanding of yourself through broader experience of more of the world: and so an openness to unconventional and unexpected, a sociality and generousity, an ability to rest in the present moment and take things as they come, getting to know people just as much as (if not more than) places; this is how adventures happen, not by intricate planning and paid tours.

   I've already pencilled in a short list in the back of this book of places I want to visit. Not that I travel much but after a charity hitch-hike from Sheffield to Croatia via Krakow I went on nearly four years ago now (yikes) I definitely developed an adventure bug, and so when I've paid off the bulk of my post-postgraduate debts and saved up a decent chunk of annual leave, I'll be ready to hit the road.

   But - as Rolf also wants to make clear from his philosophy, this approach to travel isn't one that strictly even necessitates travelling particularly far from where you live: soaking up new experiences and avenues of society and culture is literally something that can be done any place people are, and most people tend to live in places where people are, I mean, I know I certainly do.

   So what does that mean?

   Live is an adventure - treat it like one!

Persepolis: the Story of a Return

This book, the second part* of a graphic autobiography by Marjane Satrapi (see first part) was even more gripping, radical and brimming with righteous indignation than its prequel. In part two, we follow her through teenage years struggling to find her identity as an Iranian in Europe, as she explores new experiences and subversive ideas - only then to return home to Tehran in desperation for belonging; but here, she meets obstacles of the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic repressing freedoms (especially for women) that only deepen her sense of struggle. As with part one, it's as educational as it is entertaining, and cannot be read without rowing out across a sea of empathic storytelling in a dinghy made of simplistic and striking illustrations; the dialogue matter-of-fact, sharply succinct, so that developments and relationships that spanned years are neatly condensed to their essence in the wider life story in a few pages, and the visual style and deftness of person and setting characterisation really pulls the reader into Satrapi's world.

* Okay fine I know that link is actually just for a book containing both parts - childhood and return - as I received it for Christmas and didn't see the point in reading the whole first half again just so I'd be able to do a post about the whole book. My blog, I make up the rules as I go. Maybe follow the link to the post about the first part anyway as this post is particularly short because I don't want to have to re-type out all my broad reactions to the general style and thrust of what Persepolis is, and the post about part one deals with those adequately.

Window to the World

This ebook by Andrew Knight* is a short, punchy little text designed to psych up Christians for world mission. Bookended by some powerful chapters on the urgency and simplicity of the church's global task of evangelism, the bulk of the book is a series of statistical overviews giving a birds-eye big-picture view of the state of the world today - in terms of missional reach, need, and socioeconomic factors that real and effective Christian work should be pervading and changing. These include global economies, poverty, missionary force, urbanisation, refugees, world religions, people groups, Christians and money, and world evanglism: the statistics appear well-sourced and build up a striking outline of large trends in the world, many of which are somewhat disheartening but just as many show signs of encouraging promise in slow aggregate change. The discussion sections relate it all with biblically-centred grounding to the calls of all Jesus' followers to personal faith, mission and service, and overall the book reads well as a wholesome exhortation to the church to continue and ramp up its work.
   It's very readable, and given that it's free to download for Kindle I'd recommend giving it a look and sharing around church circles if you think your missional community could benefit from a shot-in-the-arm of evangelical hype - and which one ever doesn't?

* He used to be student worker at my church; Andrew is humble and passionate, a natural gospel-sharer, and he and his family have been the source of good friendship and much inspiration to me in the years I've known them.

OFF. your digital detox for a better life

This book by Tanya Goodin is basically what it says on the tin - a kickstart book for those who want to, or feel or think they want to, or want to want to, embark upon some extent of digital detox. To be honest I just read it because it's short and I didn't have much to do this afternoon, and my flatmate Adam (whose it is) said it had some quite nice little tips in it - also last week I watched all the new series of Black Mirror, and (though I've been slowly digitally detoxifying myself in all regards but YouTube and Netflix for the past year or so, the insidious tendrils of social media still cling to me far too closely day by day) am inspired anew to maintain my course of steadily weaning myself off extraneous usage of the internet, especially in its mobile forms.

   It's practically perfect for its purported function. Goodin splits the book up into six sections, each peppered with soothing and attractive images of whatever non-screeny activities a given page is exhorting its pixel-addled reader to undertake, and while not at all text-heavy, the prose therein is focused but accessible, giving clear explanations of the simple human flaws or needs that give rise to a particular aspect of digital addiction and simple human strengths or needs that provide straightforward avenues for behaviours and attitudes to escape.

1. Setting boundaries - this section has really good common-sense hints, like putting aside certain times for not using screen-based technology, committing to not using it before bed, at mealtimes, whatever.
2. Go with the flow - basically just a list of mindful activities to try out instead of going by default onto a screen whenever boredom itches; e.g. cooking, reading, colouring, jigsaws, exercise, etc.
3. Get back to nature - extending the mindfulness out of your house! Go for a walk and look at clouds! Sit on some grass or near some water! Plant something!
4. Tame your triggers - common-sense tips on structuring your lifestyle or adjusting your technologies to reduce the temptations they exude.
5. Choose analogue - using difficult and esoteric methods known these days only to hipsters and people older than 37, can you work out how to perform basic tasks without using smartphones or the internet? Give it a go!
6. Reconnect - social media is a lie! The real social network is the innavigable shambles of delightful abundant beautiful mess comprising human civilisation, and guess what, you and everyone you know have free lifelong accounts, and the range of options for creative and positive interactions between users is almost limitless!

   Frankly, I don't feel like I've learned very much from this book, but that's because I'm a reader with a well-developed suspicion of the digital world anyway, and so much of the content herein struck me as being wonderfully basic. But it still needs saying. My generation is one lost looking down its own nose, crippled by its own self-induced anxiety and loneliness, and I dearly hope this book may spark people who need it into choosing to be present and awake in their own lives. Would make an excellent gift-book to your friend who's always on their phone and always seems sadder than they think they are.

Seven Sacred Spaces

This booklet by George Lings is one of the more famous publications by Church Army (my current employer). It explores seven commonly-recurring features of buildings designed to house monastic or faith communities (the cell, chapter, chapel, cloister, refectory, garden and scriptorium), and meditates on what it means that such features recur as they do - drawing their practical everyday functions into a picture of various aspects of how healthy spiritual rhythms can be cultivated and maintained in such communities. George walks us through established Rules in various monastic traditions with regards to each of these spaces, but also draws practical and poignant connections with aspects of these spaces' functions present (or absent) in current spaces or practices in contemporary Christian life; as such this book yields a surprising amount of insight into how shaping the context of shared life together can have considerable positive (or not) effects on how the people living in that context are able to cultivate and maintain healthy spiritual rhythms to their shared life as a Christian community. I'll admit I read it mostly out of curiousity as it's a resource that gets mentioned a lot and seems to be widely-known among Church Army people, but I would thoroughly recommend this to anyone who'd be open to some refreshingly practical and historically-grounded exploration of how faith communities can use structure in simple ways to encourage harmony.

2017 overview

So, every new year on this blog I do a recap post for the year just past - and man, what a year 2017 has been. The world continues noisily going mad, I've finally finished university having submitted my Masters dissertation in September, and I'm lucky enough to have gone from studenthood straight into a part-time job with the Church Army, alongside which I continue to write - poetry here and there, but mostly grinding away in an effort to produce a workable draft of the first in my planned series of novels, The Improbable Interplanetary Revolutions of Naomi Moss; but you don't care about my life, dear internet stranger who for whatever unfathomable reasons may be reading this weird little blog of spewed idiosyncratic reflections on various wodges of paper and ink - you care, like me, about books, and so if you're reading this recap post I can only imagine it is to glean some insights into my final reflections on the material my brain has eaten and digested (and in places excreted) across the last twelve months. And wow! In 2017 we saw a new record set for this blog, with 69 books finished - a full 23 more than the previous best.

   To what can we attribute this enormous disparity?

   Well, to an extent it's because I've read quite a lot of really short books, which I'm still obligated to write individual posts for, but which I won't be mentioning most of here. To a larger degree, it's because I spent most of summer dedicatedly reading masses of material about Kurdistan for my dissertation - which is easily the most enjoyable research project I'd ever undertaken.

• Most interesting specific field in non-fiction: Kurdistan

   Also, since November last year I've been trying to develop as a poet, and so have been reading lots of poetry: these books tend to be a lot shorter than typical others, but are far more often worthy of wide recommendation, so:

• Poets worth checking out: Alan Ginsberg and the beats generally, Vikram Seth, Kate Tempest, e. e. cummings, Mark Waldron

   Eh, there's quite a lot of books I'm going to link into this, so rather than keep trying to preface each mention with a properly couching bit of prose I'm just gonna dump them all in no particular order. C'est la vie.

• Best comic strip (in anthology format): Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson
• Most redundantly common-sensical non-fiction: The School of Life's On Being Nice
• Most reductively status-quo-apologist non-fiction: The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
• Non-fiction that uses immense philosophical complexity to assert conclusions that are basically common-sense morality: Peter Unger's Living High & Letting Die
• Books by Noam Chomsky to convert hand-wringing liberals to genuine progressives: Occupy and On Anarchism
• Most sentimentally enjoyable series I've revisited: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• Classic kids' book (The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) which, though good, is nowhere near as good as an edgier funnier modern classic kids' book - Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
• Classic experimental play (Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett) which, though interesting, is frankly just a bit pretentious and boring compared with a play with similar experimentation applied in a far more theatrically rewarding setup - Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
• Really good Christian book on healthy perspective: John Ortberg's When the Game is Over It All Goes Back in the Box
• Really good secular book on healthy perspective: David Foster Wallace's This Is Water
• Best textbook - Feminism: Issues and Arguments by Jennifer Saul
• Most depressing non-fiction - James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia
• Least depressing non-fiction - Helen Russell's The Year of Living Danishly
• Books all conservative Christians would benefit humankind greatly if they read and absorbed - James Jones's Jesus and the Earth and Justin Welby's Dethroning Mammon
• Probably the most difficult to describe: The Age of Earthquakes
• Thinking back, probably the highest enjoyment to word ratio - Where Cats Meditate
• Most likely to become a legit classic in the future: W. P. Young's The Shack
• Best biographical work - George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia
• Most satisfying non-fiction (also a bonus mention for being the only book on this blog so far which has been stolen by a party-crashing drug dealer and then returned to me safely) - Benedict de Spinoza's Ethics
• And I read lots of really really really good novels this year, and they're all good in different ways but in also kind of overlapping ways, and it would be hard to break them down into 'best emotional tuggings' or 'funniest' or 'most exciting' or 'most poignant' or whatever, so here's just my selected top seven: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Kate Tempest's the bricks the built the houses, and Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

   I'm still very much enjoying writing this blog and finding value in it as personal project, so buckle in for a buttload more books in 2018. There's been a pre-selected pile of items which I'd been planning to read alongside the start of my writing project, which I've now started working my way through, so there are some very interesting posts coming along hopefully. I'm still trying to tip the balance more toward reading books from female and minority background writers, as I'm painfully aware that most of the stuff I read (and most of the stuff most people read, given the nature of privilege in publishing industries and the tides of literary and academic history) is by white men, not at all to say that these aren't generally good books, but if one of the core points of reading widely is to broaden your empathic horizons then it is woefully shortsighted to read without taking such factors of context into account and seeking to correct for them in what one chooses to imbibe.

   Anyway.

   Whoever you are, dear reader, I wish you all the best, and thank you for visiting this blog whether you are a regular or first-time-stumble-across-googler: happy new year.

   Peace & love

   Isaac Stovell

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.