Mr. Bliss

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

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

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

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

the Dispossessed

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

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

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

the Left Hand of Darkness

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

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

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

the Amber Spyglass

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

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

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

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

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

the Subtle Knife

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

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

Northern Lights

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

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

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

War in the Museum

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

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

On Liberty

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

the Lord of the Rings: book three

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

Galatians Study

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

Heresy

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

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

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

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

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

the Glass Hotel

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

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

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

Carbon Black Cicada

This book (available as a free download from that link) by David Brookes is a remarkably diverse and powerful collection of short stories. He was an extremely talented writer, with a knack for delicate phrases that lend surgical accuracy to his descriptions of situations and feelings, and a keen eye for human nature in all its variety, from the odd and unique to the universal and predictable.

   I will give a potted summary of each story in the book. We open with Sugar Cube, in which a father & daughter acclimatise to life in a new, strange, remote place. Next we have the titular Carbon Black Cicada - a snapshot biography of an aging sailor told through his tattoos. Head Under Water sees a man trying to set the world record for holding one's breath while wrestling with unrequited love, In Hellas is an exploration of the little frictions between a newlywed couple after the wife suffers an injury, and Vanilla is a close dissection of a guy's protective jealousy over his girlfriend's "friend". In Follow the Sun Underground a wealthy Mexican emigré returns home to quarrel with nature and spirituality, in Identifier a fisherman reminisces about his friend Jack after his trawler dredges up Jack's corpse from the Channel seafloor, and A Good Match is Hard to Find gives an account of a weird experience in the tricky modern dating scene. A Dictionary of Our Time in the Wild, probably my favourite piece from the whole book, is an alphabetical collection of memories of a spiky but deeply meaningful relationship with a nature lover. The Destination Before Next sees a film location scout investigate an Istanbul dockyard, then in Silverfish we remember the story told by a boy's sister about her three-day disappearance when they were seven. Precious Targets tells the story of a wildlife officer who gets roped into security detail for a rare orchid discovered in a park, in Pass, Pass an insomniac struggles to fully engage with a normal social life, and In Your Arms is an anecdote in which a diver off the Cornish coast gets detained by an octopus. Finally in The Only Lasting Beauty we are treated to reflections on the lessons about love taught by a deceased alcoholic mother.

   I don't read many short stories, but I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, and I reckon anyone with a healthy appreciation of humanly sensitive and invigoratingly originally-voiced fiction will too. You may also be interested to check out David's poetry, which is also of a superlative quality.

the Present Age

This book (available for free online from that link) by Søren Kierkegaard is a short but hella punchy treatise about the political and psychogical malaise that European modernism has left us in. The passion & activity of antiquity is gone, replaced by a blandly "democratic"* equilibrium roiling about in the seas of reflective intersubjectivity - the boons of education and understanding and the free press have left us all deeply well-informed, yet the sheer glut herein has left us existentially paralyzed when it comes to actually putting those informed understandings into action. He writes, "every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move." Rebellion in such a culture is essentially unthinkable. Readers familiar with old Søren won't be surprised to hear that he concludes that the only way for individuality and society to healthily balance each other out in any meaningful sense is the rediscovery of true religion.

   This is by far and away the most accessible Kierkegaard text I've read to date - it's not technical philosophy and should be easily readable by anyone with an above-your-average-American vocabulary. A final thought - though written in the seemingly alien atmosphere of mid-19th-century Copenhagen, this prophetic text speaks to the cultural, political and psychological snafus of 2025's dim/bright crazy/inevitable future presents with sparklingly uncanny accuracy & profundity.

   And did I mention it's very short and is online for free? Go read it.

* Kierkegaard's polemic here has left me considerably more favourable in my view of C. S. Lewis's takes on democratic equality, which as I've said left a lot to be desired when I read them in their own context.

Lays of Lost Thoughts

This book (available from that link as an online .pdf for free) by my late friend David Brookes is a phenomenal collection of poetry consisting of material written between 2016 and 2025. Before I talk about the book itself I want to talk briefly about David. He was a semi-regular attender of the spoken word night I host; I didn't know him as well as I would have liked but I liked him a lot. Softly spoken & articulate, considerate & generous, wise beyond his years & extremely easy to talk to however small or deep you wanted to go - he was a great guy and a much-valued part of our little community. So it was with great shock and sadness that I heard last month that he had taken his own life. I am publishing this post exactly a month after his memorial service. Heartbreakingly, mere days before he left us, he uploaded all of his work to his website as free .pdfs; alongside this poetry collection is a collection of short stories (which I aim to read very soon) and a monumentally ambitious five-part epic imagineering a lost mythology of the British Isles, complete with gods, monsters, heroes, and the like (which I will read at some point and which I thoroughly regret never having had the chance to talk to him about when he was alive, as it looks utterly fascinating); I urge you to check all of this out as David was a profoundly gifted writer.

   Which brings me to the book. All of the poems herein are free verse, and this collection is a dazzling testament to the power and profundity of that medium; contained within is also a breathtakingly marvellous breadth of expression. The poems range in theme from love & loss to the natural & cosmic to history & memory and more - I really struggled to select ones to mention specifically in this post as I could very easily highlight every poem in the book, but I've tried to limit myself to about 30-40% to leave a bit more wiggle-room for surprise when you go and read it yourself, which you absolutely should. In the opening few poems we get the bleary wanderlust of Where Were We followed by the tentative longing of Spools of Wool and the sheer wistful beauty of Listening to Your Recorded Presentation on Mortuary Practices in Medieval Byzantine Anatolia (which I read at our spoken word night in tribute to him after we'd heard the news). Then we get the simmering heartwrenching jealousy of There is a Burning Cold I Feel and passionate physicality of Yours Are Not the Cold Touches, the tender parasociality of The What That Happened to Brendan Fraser and even tenderer (if possible) silence of We Are Good at Looking at Each Other. After these, the blunt cynic realism of Paterson, and a delicious contrast between the indignant quietness of Look at You and the chaotic lovingness of The Riot of You. Then the demure nostalgia of Mosborough Moor and the detached pain of To the Marble in My Mouth, the familiar care of I Can't Help Her, the grimy determination of Scour, hopeful gratitude of Rievaulx, and remembered adventure of Wild Swimming. Catching up to current events, Invasion is a sensitive expression of solidarity with Ukraine, following which is the ponderous brilliance of Jabberwocky Prayer (one of my favourites). Flea Bomb almost leaves you personally itchy - you definitely feel the residual guilt, while Gold White has a gorgeous blending of love and nature imagery, and then Playlist (a found poem constructed out of collaged song lyrics) displays a deft selective precision. The final section of the book is called Songs of Extinction, each poem dedicated to a species of animal that has gone extinct within living memory - so treated are the desert bandicoot, the gloomy tube-nosed bat, the laughing owl and western black rhinoceros. Tragically, the final poem in this section and indeed the whole book is titled Self-Portrait as Animal (extinct by choice), and functions as something of a poet's farewell letter to a world that has given all it can to make life worth continuing. Serious content warning to readers who get to the end of the book for that one as though it is a beautifully written piece it is also a heartbreakingly honest portrayal of anguish and annihilation.

   This is a difficult post to write, but I think it's probably the most important post I've ever written on this blog for the simple fact that David deliberately bequeathed his work unto the wider world before his departure, and it would be a tragedy if his memory were not kept burning as brightly as possible by sharing and enjoying and being inspired by the brilliance of that work. So please, if you have even the slightest fondness for poetry (and his style is as wide as it is deep - precise yet pliable, erudite yet never indulgently elusive); go download this book and read it at your leisure. And lest it not be said, be kind to one another. You never know the intensity of pain someone might be plastering a stable face over. I've been torturing myself with the thought that had I been just a bit friendlier or more intentional or encouraging I might have tipped the balance and David would still be living and laughing and breathing and writing. But I know from his memorial service that there were many people far closer to him than I who were far better positioned to be that kind of support and it still wasn't ultimately enough to assuage everything that pushed him to where he ended up. That said, we all walk our own roads and bear our own burdens, but company is always nice and is more often than not helpful in the struggle. So share, and listen, and love. Nobody makes the world a better place simply by leaving it.

the Traitor's Hand

This book is the third Caiaphas Cain novel by Sandy Mitchell. It is preceded by a short story titled The Beguiling, in which Cain and a ragtag team of his underlings get embroiled between Nurgle-cult & Slaanesh-cult shenanigans; then in the novel proper we have much more Slaanesh-cult shenanigans with a bit of Khorne thrown in at the end to spice things up.

   That's all you're getting on the plot itself, as this is the final post about this series that I foresee doing on this blog which means it's time for me to crack out a honest can of opinionated bloviation about the characters, themes, successes & failures of this omnibus insofar as I assume it represents the [over ten books] fuller series. My main takeaways are thus:

• Sandy Mitchell is good at being funny. While the Gaunt's Ghosts series does have its moments of levity, and whole comedy novels have been put out by the Black Library, overall the grimdark nature of Warhammer 40,000 as a setting does not lend itself to making you laugh, primarily. But here we are shown a relatively reliable means of doing so.
• Caiaphas Cain narrating in first-person is a nice change from every other Warhammer 40,000 novel I've read; it makes the tension more visceral and the character interactions/situations more immersive.
• Cain being, effectively, a lazy coward who wants nothing more than to be able to keep being respected as a commissar without ever having to do anything difficult or dangerous, is such a good premise. The setting is full of paint-by-numbers heroism; the shambling accidents by which Cain "saves the day" [i.e. survives with a bonus prize] make for extremely unpredictable storytelling, which I really enjoyed.
• Because the novels are in first-person but deal with things like planetary-scale warfare which is obviously better suited to third, Mitchell has made the genius editorial decision to frame each of these books as curated snippets from an autobiographical text file Cain himself was working on; where he misses out on certain pertinent details because he wasn't there or didn't care or both we have an entertaining sporadic slew of intermission chapters and asterisky footnotes filling in the gaps. This adds an excellent dimension of depth & distance to the text as the additions are being made by one Amberley Vail, an Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, who personally crops up in these stories herself a few times.

   That's it I think. Funny Commissar, exciting action, Jurgen smells. Recommended for those whose interest has been piqued by the Warhammer 40,000 universe but have hithertofore found it Too grimdark to enjoy.

Caves of Ice

This book is the second novel in Sandy Mitchell's Caiaphas Cain series. In it our cowardly hero winds up struggling to survive on a winter planet trapped between an invading horse of orks and an awakening army of necrons. As with the first book in the omnibus there's a short story preceding it, this one called Echoes of the Tomb, in which Cain encounters yet more necrons thanks to the short-sighted lust for archaic tech of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Stand by for post about book three, in which I'll give some fuller reflections on the series as a whole.*

* What I've read of it, that is. I have no plans to read past book three - I'm enjoying them but I've got lots of other stuff to be reading & frankly I'm running out of shelf space.