Death List

We are doing a Lent Course on the theme of 'Circle of Life' - matters of life and death. So far we've looked at making preparations for our own end and topics to do with end of life care and assisted dying.

The Bishop of Worcester is doing a future session on biblical theology so I won't tread on his toes, yet.

The other day I was preparing for bed. I had discarded my denture, hearing aids and glasses prompting my wife to suggest that there were more interesting bits of me on the bedside table than under the covers. Time to update that will.

Over the years I have found insights on death and dying from unlikely sources beyond the Christian ones you might expect me to list. Here are some of them:

Philip Pullman

The Amber Spyglass
(His Dark Materials III)

The parallel world Pullman invents for these books is occupied by a people who live with a daemon - another creature part of, yet separate to, them representing their personality. When some of these folk travel to yet another world they encounter others, who live not with their daemon but with their death as a companion. This relationship gives the people great confidence and hope - that death can be entered into with a trusted friend and holds no fear. These books are a huge feat of imagination and have some critical points to make about organised religion.

Christopher Hitchens

Mortality

Confronted with a terminal diagnosis, rather suddenly, Hitchens tackles his forthcoming conclusion with eloquence, wit and not a little anger. God remains an enemy,

Philip Gould

When I Die

We often talk about people 'battling with cancer'. I put this book down determined to stop using fighting talk in such circumstances. Maybe it is better understood as a journey together, albeit an unwanted one. This is an honest, personal and well-written biography of Gould's cancer, from which he died
. When I finished it I was moved to send more than the cost of the book to the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity.

Julian Barnes

Nothing to be Frightened Of

One of our greatest contemporary writers muses on life and death. Expect to read philosophy, autobiography, polemic and a few jokes. On Christian faith he is agnostic. 'How can we be sure that we know enough to know?' he asks.

John Humphrys and Sarah Jarvis

The Welcome Visitor

Having experienced his own father's slow and agonising death Humphrys wonders whether we might have accidentally decided to prolong our lives too much. Co-writing with a palliative care specialist he looks at recent history and asks what it might mean to have 'a good death', the 'welcome visitor' of the title.

Rio Ferdinand

Thinking Out Loud

The difference between a good footballer and an elite footballer, explains the former Manchester United and England centre-half, is that good footballers love winning whereas elite footballers hate losing. They expect to win. Every time. Ferdinand takes this analogy and explains how he found it hard to accept his wife's terminal illness. He hated losing. He couldn't imagine accepting its inevitability.

Holiday Reading 2023

Spent more holiday time than usual doing things (having retired I no longer feel the urgency of relaxation) but still managed almost eight books in a fortnight. Here are my holiday reads. I am pleased to have read a majority of women this time round. Next target is to read more African fiction. I have given a mark out of ten but it represents my enjoyment rather than a comment on the work as literature:

Devil in a Blue Dress: Walter Mosley (7)

I have always read good things about Mosley but had never read him. His most famous character is the detective Easy Rawlins. This is the book in which he was born, more a chancer than a detective in the first instance. It was a fine page-turner to start my holiday and I will be reading more. The story played out well with a context of the extra set of difficulties a black hustler faced in 1950's America.

The Men: Sandra Newman (5)

Another book I had seen much reviewed, this one more recent. What would it be like for all the world's men to vanish in an instant? I enjoyed the early passages describing the immediate problems. I felt the story of how things then turned out was underdeveloped and the glimpses into the back stories of the leading female characters a bit unnecessary. The denouement sucked. Disappointed.

Live Wire: Harlan Coben (7) 

Crime solver and sports agent Myron Bonitar is called to find a missing person. He is an interesting character, often battered and bruised but quick-witted. He has an accomplice/colleague/friend, Win, who often gets him out of trouble and hurts people when he finds it necessary, which is often. Fine story with decent twist.

Oh William! Elizabeth Strout (6)

A friend gave me this and asked me to tell him what I thought, without clue. First thing I discovered was that I was reading book three of a trilogy. It didn't matter. Protagonist Lucy Barton is a writer (and often speaks in writing). She is in good standing with William, her ex-husband, although when she spends long periods of time with him recalls why they are no longer married. But William is recently divorced (again) and Lucy has just lost her second husband so agrees to accompany William on a trip to explore his roots. I enjoyed it enough to want to read the first two; my friend said it was dull.

The Lighthouse: Alison Moore (8)

Thin novel that is easy to read but explores the rhymes and rhythms of life and the generations. Futh is a rather inadequate central character, a naïve abroad on a walking holiday for which he has made careful preparations. He seems emotionally unprepared for everything though. It is seedy, sad and eventually shocking leaving us with a 'Well, what would you do next?' Booker short-listed.

Shrines of Gaiety: Kate Atkinson (9)

One of our best working writers constructs a wonderful tale about Soho in 1926. London underlife, policing methods, missing young girls, illegal drinking and gambling dens and some wonderful characters help the reader jog along. Club owner and social climber Nellie Coker is apparently loosely based on the real life of Kate Meyrick. We expect a dramatic culmination but, as in much of life, the coming together of the characters in the story is not for ever. In a final chapter their futures are sketched out for us. An absolute joy.

The Heron's Cry: Ann Cleeves (7)

This is the second in a series about DI Matthew Venn based in North Devon, from the crime writer who gave us Shetland. It's a bit sleepy when the tourists are missing and not the sort of place you expect to find someone stabbed to death with a shard of fancy glassware. No sooner have we joined the investigation than it happens again. What's the connection?

The Far Corner: Harry Pearson (7)

This was written in the 1990s about a season following football in the north east of England, at all levels. I have a fondness for the north east having lived there for five years and a fondness for football having lived there for more than sixty. It is full of characters and local details and is very, very funny. Each short chapter is based around, and a description of, a different match.

Holiday Reading Recommendations

Here are a few books I read on holiday, or recently completed, which I feel might be good away-from-it-all reads. The score out of 10 is by no means justified in any other way than the level of poolside/beach escapism each provided:

Graeme Macrae Burnett

Case Study

2020

(9/10)

This story is so realistic and convincing that I joined the vast number of people who have googled 'Collins Brathwaite' to see if the novel was based on a real person. Was this charismatic counsellor a regular guest on 1960s cult TV programme 'Late Night line Up'?

This is a cracking yarn. Narrator 'GMB' (the author?) blurs the line between fiction and faction beautifully. The story examines whether a controversial psychotherapist could have caused someone to take their own life. The deceased's sister adopts a false identity to become a patient and investigate. It does her head in.

John le Carré

Silverview

2021

(7/10)

A retired MI6 agent uses a bookshop in a sleepy seaside town as a front for some clandestine stuff. All the usual dialogue-based plot advancing we've come to expect from the master in his final novel, plus a few fine lines of political observation, '...poor, toothless, leaderless Britain ... still dreams of greatness and doesn't know what else to dream about.'

Sarah Moss

Summer Water

2020

(6/10)

I really enjoyed 'The Fell'. This, her previous book from 2020, has the same sense of foreboding and dread that something bad is going to happen, but who to? And what? It is a short, but slow, read until the final pages, which you will read too fast feeling like your roller coaster has hit the first drop. Then you'll go round again to be sure you know what happened.

Anne Tyler

Redhead by the Side of the Road

2020

(6/10)

So it's just possible that the person on Micah's doorstep claiming to be his son is telling the truth. More interesting is the impact this revelation has on the life of someone who lives by routine, once it gets thrown. Short and nicely observed.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Sympathizer

2015

(8/10)

People of my age all have the filtered and edited story of Viet Nam in our heads. It was in the years after the end of the war that the questions began. In 'The Sympathizer' Nguyen addresses these issues through a narrator who is part French, part Vietnamese, a communist trusted by the south who ends up in America. Time in the film industry leads to many discussions about the depictions of the Vietnamese in the movies. When he, nicknamed 'the bastard' because he belongs to no-one, returns to his home country he is needlessly tortured, not for secrets but to admit his own lack of knowledge and identity. Leaving us with the question 'What was all that for?' Funny, moving, gruelling, complex and thrilling. Won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016.

John Banville

Snow

2021

(8/10)

My previous experience of Banville is of beautiful, but slow, writing. Here he gives his attention to the death of a priest in a country house murder mystery set in Southern Ireland in the 1950s. DI Strafford (always irritated when the first R is omitted from his name) feels the December cold as he investigates. It is not one where the bodies pile up but where the slow graft of investigation through conversation in the age just before easy mass communication reaps rewards. Splendidly done and well paced.

Broken Ghost

Niall Griffiths

2019

(9/10)

My best read of the holiday. Three people experience a strange spectral vision on a Welsh mountain top. One blogs about it. It goes viral. The place of the experience becomes a place of commune and pilgrimage. Ironically this is at the same time as the actual rehabilitation community nearby loses its funding. The three characters, one closely associated with the commune, return to their chaotic normality - for one alcohol, another sex and a third violence.

I found it easiest to read by giving a voice I knew to each main character as the chapters chop and change between them, and the narrator. So in my world:

Cerys Matthews played Emma

Iolo Williams narrated

Rhod Gilbert was Crawley

Jamie Carragher was Adam

This book is hugely important in its acknowledgement of social problems and authority. It is quite sad but very real. Redemption is dangled and reached for. Who can hang on?

The Appeal

Janice Hallett

2021

(8/10)

This is a very unusual page-turner. A Head of Chambers asks two Junior Counsel to read a file of evidence - mainly messages, emails and transcripts with the occasional post-it note. He asks them who they think was murdered, why, who went to prison and whether that was the right decision.

We read the same documents as them.

They have a stab and are then given some more info. The context of the crime is members of an Amdram society putting on a play at the same time as raising money for a sick child.

Some of the insights into village life are extraordinarily perceptive and funny. But do enjoy solving the case. I picked up a couple of clues but did not piece it all together until the denouement.

Also recommended this year:

T.J.Newman - Falling (page turner airplane hijack thriller) (7/10)

Abigail Dean - Girl A (forensic exploration of siblings rescued from abusive parenting) (8/10)

Steve Cavanagh - The Devil's Advocate (courtroom and thrilling - the new Grisham) (7/10)

Steve Cavanagh - Twisted (7/10)

Chris Brookmyre - The Cut (murder, mystery, thriller) (7/10)

Dave Eggers - The Every (trying to stop big tech taking over the world) (8/10)

Danile Wiles - Mercia's Take (life of a Black Country miner in the C19th) (9/10)

Amor Towles - The Lincoln Highway (road-trip in the wrong direction; beautiful characters) (10/10)

Tim Weaver - No One Home (three couples, one hamlet, all missing) (8/10)

Colson Whitehead - Harlem Shuffle (furniture shop owner does petty crime on the side then gets caught up in something bigger) (8/10)

Get the Reference

I am reading The Cut by Chris Brookmyre. He used to write very dark crime dramas bordering on science fiction, full of contemporary social commentary and black, black humour, as Christopher. Now, as Chris, it is all a little more tempered and very plot-driven. Often who-dunnits or what-have-they-duns.

A few books back he dedicated one to Billy Franks. I discovered we shared a love of Billy's (RIP) 1980s' band The Faith Brothers. At the beginning of The Cut there is an unacknowledged quote from a Faith Brothers song. I got it. I got the reference. Throughout the novel the two protagonists joust with movie references. Not being such a movie buff I missed a lot. But I felt I had been invited deeper into the book's world than others, for which I was grateful.

In my final appointment in ordained ministry one of my tasks was to be Vicar of Trendlewood Church in Nailsea. Its birthday was Palm Sunday 1989 and so yesterday it was 32. Many churches have saintly dedications, some stranger than others. I enjoyed St Leodegarius (Basford, Nottingham) the most, until I met St Quiricus and St Julietta in Tickenham. Who they? I know now. You can google them too.

More common church dedications are to All Saints, Holy Trinity or Christ Church. There's one of each of those within a mile of my house. Really. I guess Trendlewood would have to call itself the Church of the Triumphal Entry. Unlikely.

Yesterday there was a procession between the two churches of the soon-to-be Harbourside Benefice of Bristol we have been attending since I retired. We walked from HTH (Holy Trinity, Hotwells) to St Stephen's, Bristol, pausing to pray at the boundary between the two parishes which made us late. I enjoyed not being responsible for the lateness whilst failing to avoid noting the things which had caused it. Old habits.

The thing that made me ponder was that we were invited to give palm crosses to any who asked us what was going on. I reckoned that a palm cross was a visual aid, of course, but the answer was considerably longer and wrapped in Christian heritage and tradition, missing donkeys, Pastoral Measures and Scripture. And that's the thing. You needed to get the many references.

The telling of the Palm Sunday triumphal entry into Jerusalem by Jesus in the Gospels (it's in all four of them) is littered with references. If you saw a man entering on a donkey you may not have known this was referencing Zechariah 9:9. You may not have recognised the shouts of praise were from Psalm 118. You might have known that crowds were encouraged to line the street when Roman dignitaries came to town but that, thus-forced, they often remained completely silent or even turned their backs. The comment that, if silenced, the stones would cry out references this. The extended metaphor of Jesus on his ass was not for all.

I have always subscribed to the school of Christianity that is a little timid about worshipping on the street corners and would rather Christians referenced acting justly and loving mercy as interest-gathering activities. Look how the Maundy Money thing has become about the Queen not about the poor.

There isn't long enough to explain how we got to processions, parish boundaries and palm crosses in the time it takes for one person to walk past another. You have to hope that interest is piqued and eyes are opened. But what a joy it is to discover you are deeper inside a fabulously mysterious story than others because the author has posted a riddle of an invite and you got it.

Welcome to Holy Week my friends.

Take your shoes and socks off; it's right around the corner.

Review of the Year 2021

Bit late for a review of the year but whilst there may be a tradition about these things there is not, to my mind, a rule that says January 20th is too late. Anyway I've been busy.

Annually, I find the same problem. Things I discovered in a particular year were often published before then. So, trying to keep it all vaguely contemporary, here are the arts and culture stuff I enjoyed most in 2021:

Television

Having someone culturally aware come and live with us was helpful and top of the incoming list was our discovery of Succession. If you've missed it then Brian Cox (actor not physicist) plays Logan Roy, a hugely successful businessman trying to stop his dysfunctional offspring from inheriting and ruining his empire. Very sweary. Three seasons available.

If major infrastructure programmes have a fringe benefit it is that they let loose the ubiquitous Alice Roberts to share details of archaeological discoveries under the road, pipeline, railway. Digging for Britain ensued and educated this household muchly. In the same vein, plaudits to BBC2's Stonehenge - The Lost Circle Revealed and the archaeology of back gardens disclosed in The Great British Dig.

Mobeen Azhar's Hometown - A Killing started as a podcast but became a BBC docu-series. Investigative journalism at its best.

I continue to be a sucker for food shows such as Great British Menu, Masterchef and Professional Masterchef. The celebrity versions of these shows can go hang, though. In fact I enjoyed most shows where people demonstrate brilliance at something I can't do, so stand up and take a bow Pottery Throwdown, Bake Off and Great British Sewing Bee.

Clarkson's Farm surprised me by being educational.

Ghosts continued to be lovely and very clever.

Gone Fishing was nice slow tele. Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse have delivered public service broadcasting gold.

Music

Squid promised much with their first few singles. Their debut album Bright Green Field was only three stars from me but the blending of maths rock and shouty punk was a fine mash-up and continues to promise much.

Jangly guitar fans could get their fix with The War on Drugs - I Don't Live here Anymore. Album of the year.

For joyful story-telling pop my guilty pleasure was Demi Lovato's Dancing with the Devil ... The Art of Starting Over.

Honourable mentions for Floating Points collaboration with the LSO on Promises.

Twitter

Henry Sotheran Ltd is an antiquarian bookshop, which I will probably never frequent because of money and that but @Sotherans is a delight of a Twitter feed. Sample:

'...we've been around longer, on average, than most empires last. We sell old books and other stuff but mostly books, and definitely not opium anymore because it got banned. Wednesdays are not for talking.'

Films

The Trial of the Chicago Seven was a favourite. Bond a bit disappointing. Didn't see enough as cinemas felt unsafe.

Podcasts

Lost Hills told the story of an apparently random killing in more detail than the cops seemed to have gone into with Dana Goodyear finding out more and more connections and coincidences. From Pushkin.

Books

My wokeness was polished a little by How Not to be Wrong - The Art of Changing Your Mind by James O'Brien.

Good novels included Catriona Ward's Last House on Needless Street - a murder mystery that pulled all the rugs from under both your feet at various times. Very diverting and more than a little odd.

What happens once the easternmost house falls into the sea? Juliet Blaxland's follow-up is a bit more metaphysical, but also keeping alive the stories of those who will crumble next in The Easternmost Sky.

Alice Roberts' (her again) pre-history of Britain in seven burials is exactly that. Who should live in Britain? Who came first? Who are we? Read Ancestors and stop hating immigrants.

Food

Pintxo (tapas) and Appleton's (fine dining) in Fowey made a holiday in this country great. Pony Bistro in Bedminster delivered everything you'd expect a Josh Eggleton enterprise to do (including a Valentine's finish-at-home meal in a box). For tapas in Bristol try Gambas on Wapping Wharf.

Good pubs included Bedminster's North Street Standard, The Salamander in Bath, WB at Wapping Wharf, The Priory at Portbury and Coates House, Nailsea.

Art

We enjoyed wandering around Bedminster's street art festival Upfest and being under the Moon in Bristol Cathedral.

That's about it. I've saved you from the format 'Stuff I found this year that everyone else has known about for ever', which would have included an updated review of experimental German electronica from the early 70s which I'd miss-dissed. Belated apologies to Faust, Can and Amon Düül II. Although for some reason I always liked Tangerine Dream.

Thought for the Day

As delivered on BBC Radio Bristol to James Hanson's Breakfast Show just now:

What is the point on which the soul should fix its intellectual eye? Not my question, but that of author, Mary Shelley, a talented teenage writer who wrote of Dr Frankenstein's creation. The House of Frankenstein in Bath takes the visitor into an experience of her times and the world she created.

The attraction includes an enormous model of Dr Frankenstein's creature. Mary Shelley wrote it between the ages of 18 and 20. As she said, 'There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand.'

Philosophy Professor Patricia MacCormack says that the Creature addresses the most fundamental human questions: 'It's the idea of asking your maker what your purpose is. Why are we here, what can we do?'

In the book of Job, a tale of suffering, a comforter comes along who, in his own words, waited until last to speak because he was the the youngest. He then gives Job better advice than his first three comforters and yet is completely ignored. The book never mentions him again.

I wonder if, in order to ask questions about her own purpose, Mary Shelley created a creature to ask for her. Such good questions that, 200 years later, we still discuss them.

Influential Books

I love reading the question and answer interviews in Sunday supplements. Given how unlikely it is that anyone will ever want to publish my answers I thought I'd have a go at the question about 'influential reads'. I reckon all books influence me, even if it is to eliminate the author from my future enquiries. But what tomes really changed me? If we are honest they are rarely the books alleged to be 'improving'.

Here are ten. They may not be quite the top ten because I didn't want to overthink. I may do ten more later. The order, by the way, is the order in which I read them:

Aboard the Bulger
Ann Scott Moncrieff
1935

Not very old I was taken to Selly Oak library by my Dad. Here I was amazed. We didn't have many books in our house but Dad was always reading. So this is the secret. Borrow them and take them back. For nothing. Wow. This was the first book I borrowed. I read it wrapped in an eiderdown on my bedroom floor in front of an inadequate electric fire.

The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (Increasingly improbable trilogy)

Douglas Adams

1979

Adams probably stands in a long line of great word-play authors but I had slowed my reading habit between the age of 12 and 18, perfectly undoctrinated by a school literature list which failed to move this adolescent teenage male at all. I read nothing but cheap thrillers from 1973-1979. Then this. Someone told me I should read it so I didn't because I am a recommender not a recomendee. Then I did. If writing can be like this, breaking the rules once you understand them, then it made me want to write. A few years later I had a go.

'The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.' One of my favourite lines of all time.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M Pirsig

1974

The Late Review used to be tagged on to the end of Newsnight but I saw some precursor of it around the time this book was published. I probably (aged 19 or 20) thought the discussion was a load of pretentious rot. I can't recall. It would have been late night midweek and once I started work I only ever stayed up midweek to watch the footie.

Anyway I found a copy in St John's College Library sometime around 1983/4 and, as an enquiring theological student, felt that it was rebellious to read something not on any lecturer's book list. Zen Christianity has accompanied me ever since and I swear that having a cool head in a crisis is something I decided to have rather than was born with.

I also learned that there is usually a good reason why some books get reviewed and others don't.

Illywhacker

Peter Carey

1985

College, despite my previous post, did get in the way of reading for pleasure. Then, in my first curacy in Nottingham, I met some lovely new friends who helped by lending some books they had enjoyed once I had announced at a dinner party that I was fed up with the quality of my reading. At the same time I started enjoying bookshops (libraries were going a bit downhill) and (yes, design does matter) the boxed-out Faber and Faber logo always caught my eye.

This epic narrative about coming-to-terms with what Australia actually is, narrated by a confidence trickster and liar, was a lucky find. It meant a lot that, despite Carey being a double-Booker winner and well-known, I had not heard of him before I bought this book and, having now read everything he has ever written and only found one book I didn't really enjoy, feel I discovered him for myself. I always recommend him, knowing that the reaction will be a bit Vegimity.

Dispatches from the Front Line of Popular Culture

Tony Parsons

1994

This sat on the shelf above my desk for many years when I worked in the late lamented youth department of the Christian home mission agency CPAS (Church Pastoral Aid Society). All the other staff bookshelves seemed to be full of things conservative evangelicals are supposed to read. All you imagine they ever learned was the result of a massive echo chamber. It seems to me that teaching people to live the gospel in contemporary society is pretty hopeless if you have no clue how contemporary society works, what it means and who the movers and shakers are. This set of columns, articles and essays from 1976-1994 was a priceless journeymate. What does it mean to be a Christian amongst this?

Passage to Juneau

Jonathan Raban

1999

Robert Runcie - The Reluctant Archbishop

Humphrey Carpenter

1996

The Case for God

Karen Armstrong

20009

These three books changed my attitude to genre. If all travel books were written like Jonathan Raban writes I would read them all. I would read about anything if Jonathan Raban held my hand. Even a yacht journey from Seattle to Juneau.

Likewise Carpenter taught me to read biography if the biographer can write and Karen Armstrong renewed my sense of enjoyment in theology

Unapologetic

Francis Spufford

2012

Some books help like a session of psychotherapy. You rarely know which one it will be. Spufford's sub-title is 'Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense'. As I read I found that he had written what I wanted to say. Christianity does give me a place of emotional safety from where I can explore the intellectual complexities of doing theology. If I had spent the first term at College reading this it would have saved a lot of time.

Thinking Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

2011

Having read a book that explained to me who I am this was the book that helped me understand everybody else. What is going on when people make decisions? How do we choose? Why do we decide some weighty matters without all the necessary information?

Well, to use a technique that the book describes, I'll answer an easier question than those. Should you read this? Yes. In fact you should study it.

Holiday Reading

There is a summary of my holiday reading. The marks out of ten are based on enjoyment and escapism rather than any splendid literary quality.

Jane Harper - The Lost Man (8/10)
I enjoyed The Dry, Jane Harper's first crime novel set in a remote part of Australia. This is her third, so I missed one. I read The Lost Man on the hottest driest day of the year so far in the UK. It is set in the Outback where near neighbours are a three hour drive away and everyone tells someone else when they are setting out solo to fix a fence. So how did Cameron Bright come to die alone without shade, shelter, his car, phone or water, miles from anywhere or anyone?

This story unpicks family feuds, local rivalries and complex relationships under the intense glare of the Sun. Did someone do something? What did they do? Who did it? A very satisfying page-turner. It'll make you thirsty for more.


Ben Smith - Doggerland (9/10)
To examine human behaviour, one tool an author has in their box is to remove almost all outside influences. Ben Smith achieves that by having two characters (Boy and Old Man although we are left to guess their ages) charged with the maintenance of an enormous wind farm. They are alone, reliant on the one other character, the deliverer of supplies. Why are they there? What dramatic event led to their dystopian existence? What happened to the boy's much-discussed father? This is a slow page-turner, beautifully sparse. Not unlike Magnus Mills.


Tom Drury - The End of Vandalism (10/10)
Seventy-odd characters wander into this story of life in Grouse County. We are treated to a little of all their back-stories. Sometimes in detail; sometimes just a tease. 'She considered dog issues her speciality, and once, at a convention in Moline, had given a slide presentation on the history of the muzzle.' Do you have questions now? I do.

In my literary world Peter Carey writes the best books, Tom Wolf the best chapters, Douglas Adams the best sentences. Tom Drury is a contender for best-paragraphs.

Before blotting his reputation somewhat, Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon was the place to go for this sort of thing. In a foreword introduction another of my literary heroes Jon McGregor suggests that anyone embarking upon this book will, inevitably, become an evangelist for Tom Drury. It is the case.


Andrew Hunter-Murray - The Last Day (8/10)
A second post-apocalyptic novel during a pandemic holiday. This one's conceit is that the Earth has slowly stopped rotating leaving half with permanent cold-dark-night, half with hot-light-day and a narrow band in the centre which is habitable. The author is that bloke from off the tele who takes supporting roles in The Mash Report, and is also a QI elf and a Private Eye journalist. This is his first novel. It's clever and gripping.


Neil Oliver - The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places (9/10)
I like to have a book like this close at hand. 100 short chapters explore Britain in roughly chronological order from 950,000 years BCE to the present day. I did history to A level. It was kind of forced upon me by being the only other timetable option if I wanted to do Geography and Statistics, which I did.

If this book had been available then I probably wouldn't have read it, because I wasn't that sort of kid. But read now, fifty years too late, it makes sense of how all those bits of the curriculum and primary school history stories fit together. I loved it.

It opens for debate if you would have picked the same one hundred places. I think I would have wanted to see Jarrow in there somewhere. At the same time as I was reading, the statue/slavery discussion rose up in the UK. It occurred to me, as I read up about Black Lives Matter, that the chapter on abolition is told from a white point of view and there are black martyrs missing from the story.

It has slightly more Scottish places than I would have expected but I came to see that Scotland has punched well above its weight in contribution to the history of the islands here. So that is not so much a criticism as an acknowledgement of my own ignorance.


Joel Dicker - The Baltimore Boys (9/10)
Moving about in time from the 1960s (briefly) to date, this story is of four childhood friends. Not all related to each other but who came to feel like family. Marcus Goldman, one of the four, is a writer and narrates the story from 2012. Dicker used this character to narrate his excellent, previous novel The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair.

In this latest story we are told, on the jacket, that 24/11/04 is 'The day of the tragedy'. It is written in five parts:

The book of lost youth 1989-97
The book of the lost brotherhood 1998-2001
The book of the Goldmans 1960-89
The book of the tragedy 2002-04
The book of atonement 2004-12

So for the bulk of the novel we know that there is going to be a tragedy (and there are minor tragedies and triumphs on the journey too) but not what it will be. We know from sentence 1 of a prologue that Woody, one of the four, was about to go to prison for five years, a month before the 'tragedy'.

It's a delightful book. Very easy to read and hard to put down.

Non-fiction

I am currently reading, and loving, Robert Macfarlane's Underland. On the basis of the first 100 pages it is going to be my favourite non-fiction book of all time. This got me wondering what my top five are, currently.

I think my criteria would be:

1. Something that adds to the sum of my knowledge in an area where I am already interested.

2. Something that persuades me to be interested in a subject about which I know nothing.

Here is my list. It nearly included some academic theology, sport and biography but, with apologies to Nick Hornby, Andrew Lincoln and Humphrey Carpenter, these made the cut:


Passage to Juneau
Jonathan Raban
Picador 1999

This came under category 2. I have never been at all interested in sailing although the sea had some attractiveness when viewed from a sturdy platform. I toyed with the idea of the navy but the navy successfully put me off during a course designed to put me on.

Then I read a newspaper review of this book. It caught my imagination, I think because the writing was praised as much as the subject matter. Quite rightly.

Recreating a 1000 mile sea voyage north from his home in Seattle, Raban speaks of the myths and truths of the sea as only an experienced mariner traveller can. During the voyage he explores ancient documents and his inner world, reaching some dramatic places and conclusions.



Prisoners of Geography
Tim Marshall
Elliott and Thompson 2015

I enjoyed many games of Risk as a child, quickly working out that the places that could be attacked from few sides were the most easily defended. Who knew that this would be the key to the dominance of the actual world as well? The winners were always going to be the people who populated North America. The Europeans are separated by so many mountain ranges and rivers they will never get on without some sort of union. The Russians need an ice-free port. The arbitrary way former empires carved up the territory of people who already didn't like each other very much was never going to be a recipe for peace. Why is the world like it is? Easy to understand if you have this book.


Mark Forsyth
The Elements of Eloquence
Icon 2013

I was given a good grounding in English by my two schools and owe the second one an apology for under-achieving. What my education gave me was an ear for a phrase which sounds right. When the writer hits a sweet-spot. And how to notice a dud.

What I failed to allow my education to give me is a knowledge of the science behind this. I didn't develop an interest until Junior did English Language A level and we chatted about how language works and both read David Crystal.

This book, a gift from a friend, added science to my natural ear. It answered questions I didn't know were worth asking, such as why we play ping pong and not pong ping, why Please Please Me is a good song title and why we say knives and forks when we mean cutlery (that's a merism, by the way).

Excuse the errors. It wasn't enallage it was clumsiness.


The Essential Difference
Simon Baron-Cohen
Allen Lane 2003

Men are from Mars Women are from Venus popularised the long-discussed idea that males and females see the world differently. Simon Baron-Cohen, interestingly, does an academic version of what his brother Sacha does through the medium of comedy. Sacha disguises himself as an unusual person in order to deconstruct mainstream thought. Simon analyses unusual people to find out what makes them different.

He does find differences between male and female brains - some because of nature and some nurture. One year old babies faced with videos of cars or people did divide on gender grounds. But not all men are better at stacking the dish-washer than all women. But, by and large, his research showed a male interest in systems over people and for women the opposite.

Reading this I understood myself better. It was sobering to read that people with my score, on his self-assessment paper, had, in the past, been given an autism statement.  I fell one step short of being an acute systematising male. Which makes me a cute, systematising male. You knew that.


Unapologetic
Francis Spufford
Faber and Faber 2012

The more biblical I get the more liberal I find myself. Which has always begged the question as to what speaker I might take people to hear, or what book I might give them, to explain why I am still able to own the insult 'Christian'.

When all has been deconstructed what is left? An ethics teacher once told me that when you deconstruct a light bulb you are left with everything but illumination. True. But there is no need to deconstruct a light-bulb if the manufacturer is still around to show you how it was made.

Spufford deconstructs nothing. He constructs an emotional defence (wrong word because he wasn't attacked) of hanging on to a dream, a story, a meta-narrative that there is some other. Not in the gaps that human understanding will one day bridge but so far so beyond and above that only the Christian story can pull it together and provide a base from which to explore.

First time I've read the story of someone who is emotionally content to be an ordinary Christian, although an extraordinary writer.

Holiday Reading

It's about this time that I like to show off about my holiday reading. The mark out of ten is nothing about class and all about ability to entertain a man on a beach or by a pool in the sun.

After a fairly light start I spent the whole of week two on a magnum Trollopian opus - all 870 pages of The Way We Live Now. I don't normally advise people to stick with things for the first 300 pages but in this case the middle section, as a series of relationships fold and unfold due to being conducted by correspondence and no-one ever saying what they mean, is fascinating. And later we come to discover whether Melmotte, much sought after for his investment backing and his patronage, is a man of means or just an upper-class gambler. Much serious gambling takes place in the book but only so that a series of IOUs can be passed round a gentlemen's club with no-one ever being so uncouth as to call in a debt. Even the club itself may not be as financially buoyant as it seems. And if it isn't well, where is a chap to get breakfast at noon now?

And its relevance today? How about ''Melmotte was not the first vulgar man whom the Conservatives had taken by the hand, and patted on the back, and told that he was a god.' (8/10)

Back to the start. Never read any Val McDermid before but will be. Broken Ground is a police procedural crime novel. No twists but an unusual story, several turns and a satisfying outcome. (7/10)

Kate Atkinson's Transcription is the story of a war-time counter-espionage project and how it catches up with the young heroine of the book, several years later. It does what Atkinson does best of all - flits between the dramas of 1940, 1950 and 1980 with the greatest of ease. (8/10)

Jon McGregor is one of my favourite authors. He writes dreamily slow-paced page-turners (how does he do that?) with insights into everyday events with an eye not to forensics so much as to the bits of stories that don't usually get told. So Reservoir 13, which I read last year, was about a missing girl but that incident was used as a lens to see the effect the event had on the village in which it was set. The Reservoir Tapes is the story, made for radio, of the people in the previous story; allowing them to be interviewed and to answer for themselves. (9/10)

A Peter Carey is never far from my reach and The Chemistry of Tears was a delightful piece of writing. Museum researcher Catherine, grieving for a dead lover, is given a project to investigate, to rebuild an automaton made by a great inventor to entertain his sick son. (6/10)

Mark Billingham's The Killing Habit is a DI Tom Thorne case inspired by a true life story of the M25 cat killer. Quite a romp. Page turner. Not, it turns out, much about cat killing at all. Last 100 pages shoot by. (8/10)

I try to catch up on things I missed in my yoof. I think school inoculated me against decent writing so Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway was probably on some English Literature curriculum. I managed to fail the O Level but would fancy another go now. Gritty real life intrudes on a posh party in a day in the life of our eponymous heroine. (6/10)

And to add a bit of learning. Well Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister and university economics professor, distils his wisdom about trade, money and the future of the world into words his young daughter might understand. Interesting section on how cigarettes became money in WWII prisoner of war camps.

Bible Book Club - Further Reflections

Bible Book Club met for the third time last night. A group of six of us met in a pub and discussed the Book of Jonah. It has been harder to put out of our heads our apparent familiarity with the story this time and the group did well in spotting that a better title than Jonah and the Whale might be Jonah and the Assyrians.

This brief reflection is on one question which our group has found more fascinating than we expected. A classic Book Club questions is, 'If this were a film, who would play the parts?' It leads to much discussion about how people see the characters in their mind's eye. I for one, have Robert Powell's Jesus stuck in my head from the 1970s movie Jesus of Nazareth. When I read the gospels that is what pops into my head. So an answer to the question does impact your future reading.

Who plays Jonah? A young man? A fit man? No. A man who is grumpy. A man who jokes without laughing. A man who finds humour in the relentless inevitability of the nature of God. 'I knew you'd forgive them. Kill me now.'

Our Jonah, is Jack Dee.

We are moving on from the great Hebrew stories. Our next book is the Gospel of Mark. We meet again on December 12th. Contact me if you are interested. Steal the idea if you are not local.

Need Resources?

I have no idea when it happened, but some time over the last thirty years we, where we are the people of the Christian community, have managed to convince ourselves that we need a 'resource' in order to do anything.

It's been quite a handy thing for me since, having never used someone else's resource in my life without completely redesigning it, I have spent some of my ministry selling the things I have already done to the Christian market so others could do them too. I even sold a book twice by rewriting it in a different order and, get this, the people who paid me the second time knew that was what I had done.

Still, I have no truck with resources. Jonny Baker used to be fond of telling people that only 5% of people ever have an original idea. I think he might have got that from the same place that I got '67.3% of all statistics are made up', but we'll let it pass. Come to think of it that was another Johnny, the Vegas one.

Later I heard h-less Jonny say that originality is forgetting where you found something. So I guess we can add him to the list of self-deprecators we know.

My point, my point? Ah yes. If you need a resource then there are plenty about. I've no idea how you tell which one to use but I want to pass on this bit of wisdom. When faced with a group you want to train, a problem you want to solve or an idea you want to generate, try and have a go yourself first as if no resource exists. We all hate preachers who have read every commentary and background book but not the Bible passage. We all recognise guys wearing badly fitting off the peg suits. Likewise it is easy to see through the person who has bought a resource that is not quite the best fit and then they train a group in not quite the right thing.

Talk to some people who are stakeholders. Find out what the problem really is and what sort of solution people might buy into. Use space, prayer and tea as your main tools here.

Write up an idea for an answer and see if people can add to it, tweak it or bounce off it. Be open. Leave ideas up in the air and accept lots of contributions.

Assume that the wisdom to solve the problem might be in the room rather than the Christian Resources Exhibition (CRE), for now.

When staffing the Church Pastoral Aid Society (CPAS) stand at CRE a wise old sales manager (Hi Clive) taught me a great open question to use to greet people who visited our stand. It was 'What area of ministry are you looking to resource today?' It took me into many fine conversations but also helped me to point people who were on the wrong stand, seeking something we did not sell, to a more likely source of help. Their only memory of CPAS will be that a nice young man (I was then. Young I mean; I'm still nice) saved them wasting time.

But if you spend a good chunk of time detailing what you need you will always stop short of buying an inadequate resource marked 'Ready to use'. It will only be ready to use if your situation matches exactly the one the writers envisaged. And you may realise that you can fix the problem yourself. Then you save money and everyone feels better about not needing help.


Steve Tilley's book 'How to avoid buying unnecessary resources' has been remaindered.

Bible Book Club

We launched a Bible Book Club in Nailsea last night. It's like a normal book club (read a book, get together over a drink and discuss it) except that we use books of the Bible. No faith necessary. No previous Bible reading experience necessary. No church allegiance necessary. No lectures. No context (at first).

My preliminary conversations had led us to believe that it might appeal to:

• People who liked book groups

• People who found Bible study notes and reading in ten verse chunks difficult

• People who liked to meet others for a drink

We decided to start with some stories so six of us got together having read the Book of Ruth (or listened to it as an audio-book in previous days). We agreed that this group needed to understand that there were no right answers. We could all contribute (we did). We had a lively hour chatting about patriarchal cultures, the significance of genealogies, whether Naomi was a devious and manipulative Jewish mama and how to stage 'Ruth - the musical'.

We meet again in the Ring O Bells on Wednesday August 22nd at 8.00 p.m. to look at Esther if you would like to join us.

For anyone wanting to steal the idea we used some generic book group questions to help us:

• Did you enjoy the book? What part did you like most? What least?

• Did you engage with any of the characters?

• Did you follow the plot? What, for you, was the hinge point?

• If this book was a movie who would you cast?

• What art work would you put on the cover of the book?

• Did you have a favourite quote?

• Would you read other books by this author?

• What did you think of the length? Too long? Too short?

• What did you think was the author's purpose?

• Would you like to read the same story from the point of view of one of the characters?

Lent Reading with a Difference

Do you want your Lenten reading to give you an opportunity for some spiritual reflection? How about changing your relaxation-reading habit for Lent?

All these (mainly) novels walk alongside Christian texts in some way, shape or form. Rather than reviewing them, although some have been reviewed here previously, I have suggested one, all-encompassing, discussion question. If you read only one make it Quarantine.

The Gospel According to the Son - Norman Mailer

The life of Jesus as he attends to the voices in his head.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ - Philip Pullman

What if the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith were actually two people?

Quarantine - Jim Crace

What sorts of people were around in the days when spiritual novices wandered off into the wilderness to fast?

Three to See the King - Magnus Mills

Would you wager your current contentment against the possibility that there may be more to life than this?

Have a Little Faith - Mitch Albon

What does faith look like from the outside?

Blind Faith - Ben Elton

Does the fact that somebody is watching you all the time change your behaviour?

The Book of Strange New Things - Michael Faber

How possible is cross-cultural evangelism without selling our culture too?

How to be Good - Nick Hornby

What does 'being good' even mean?

Even the Dogs - Jon McGregor

Could there be such a person as one without value?

The Testament of Gideon Mack - James Robertson

Is there a difference between a true story and a story that really happened?

Thought for the Day

As delivered at BBC Radio Bristol just now:

As you have heard, today is World Books Day. If you had to dress as a favourite character from a book, who would you choose?

There are web-sites that will give you ideas. And the supermarkets stock off-the-shelf costumes.

I'm not sure teachers would recognise my hero, Douglas Adams' wonderful creation Dirk Gently - the holistic detective. He wears a brown tattered suit, a red checked shirt which doesn't match and a green striped tie which refuses to speak to either of them. He talks and eats pizza but rarely appears to listen. Or as Adams puts it, 'The traffic through his mouth was incessant. His ears remained unused in normal conversation.'

Gently believes in the ultimate inter-connectedness of all things and so if a car speeds away from a crime he will, as likely as not, follow a different vehicle in the firm expectation that their paths will cross again some day.

It makes his cases interesting and his expenses extraordinary.

In another of my favourite books, the Gospel of Mark, Jesus also constantly surprises people with his reaction to situations. He never does what they expect. One of Mark's favourite sentences, as Jesus touches the untouchable, heals the incurable, welcomes the toddler and sends the rich packing is, 'The crowd were astonished.'

For Mark there is a God, revealed in Jesus, who inter-connects all things.

I am a keen reader. A few days back I realised, with some disappointment, that I would not have time in my life to read all the books I wanted to. I tweeted this and a friend sent me a postcard the next day. It gave me today's thought, 'Life is short; read fast.'

Repentance

In Brian McLaren's book A Generous Orthodoxy (Zondervan 2004) there is a chapter, towards the end, called Why I Am Depressed -Yet-Hopeful. It is a remarkable piece of writing and in the final paragraphs he implores the reader not to read on without pondering, praying, reflecting or taking a walk to breathe.

About what? Well many of us repent in order to forget. We say a quick sorry and put the offence out of our mind. McLaren's thesis is that the stories we tell, from individual, community and nation should, if they are to be helpful, include stories of repentance.

So he points out that Jews constantly remind the world that the Holocaust should not be forgotten but that actually this should be Germany's job. Afro-Caribbeans want the world to recall their origins in the slavery diaspora, but it should be the white westerners who do that.

So what are the stories of my past that I should constantly tell to remind the world that I am part of an individual and corporate repentance?

There are two. Firstly I live in the Bristol area. Much of the wealth of the city was built on slave-trading. Our stories about how we got here should always include that, with appropriate shame and penitence. It should leave us a strong desire to use our wealth, indirectly-generated, for the good of all people without exception.

Secondly, a grandfather I never met went to prison for business fraud in the 1930s. It is quite possible that some of the things I enjoyed as a child in the 1950s were, at least in part, ill gotten. I cannot undo this. But I can be open and honest about it and be as sure as I can, as my father did before me, to live generously and nowhere near such a crime.

It gives me a whole new angle on repentance. It also reminds me that the more I tell the stories the more they lose their power to harm me in the future. For nobody can drag up my past if I have walked with it as a constant companion.

Thought for the Day

As delivered at BBC Radio Bristol this morning:

Today is World Book Day. Right now you may be helping a child to attend school dressed as a favourite character from a book.

I love books. I almost never go anywhere without one in case there will be an unexpected wait.

An English teacher, Mr Parry, once picked on me to tell the class what I was currently reading. I remember, with some embarrassment because I was a happy reader, the mind-blank moment I had.

He championed teaching by sarcasm. 'When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow sound,' he said, 'it is not always the book's fault.' Ouch. In those days you could hit your pupils over the head with a book.

Ever since I have recorded the titles of books I have finished. Just in case Mr Parry pops up again, I guess.

Writing is time-travel. My writing in one place and time becomes your reading in another. What a luxury.

When printing first came along communities had very few people who could read. Priests were often the best-educated members of their village or town.

As a vicar I am no longer in such a position. Indeed, if I preach something people find distasteful it won't be long before they have searched online for six other sermons on the same subject. The internet has changed preachers from dogmatists to gentle guides. Jolly good too.

My key text in my work, the Bible, is not one book but sixty-six, by at least forty different authors and editors. It still tops publishers' lists yet may well be the world's best-owned, least read book. Here's a thought for World Book Day. Have another look at the greatest story ever told. It changed my life.

Why Retreat?

From time to time, those who have pretty ordinary working lives look across at us clergy and wonder why it is necessary to take sabbaticals or go on retreat quite so regularly. 'Chance would be a fine thing', you almost hear them say.

Don't get me wrong. Retreat time as part of work is a privilege and not one I take for granted. I also get to worship and pray as part of my working life. Equally nice.

Someone once, in a fine evangelical sermon, used the example of the two biblical seas. The Sea of Galilee receives and gives and is alive; the Dead Sea only receives and is dead.

It reminded us all of the need to serve and be served if we want to live as Christians. I have met followers of Jesus who were out of kilter in both directions.

If you only give, only serve, especially as a preacher and teacher, you will soon not only dry up, but cease to exist. A sea that doesn't receive will soon be a place where the water used to be.

So I am away for a few days. I am with a friend who shares a comfort with the routine and timetable we have established over the years. We set aside times to talk - about what we are reading and about our ministries. We set times to eat and times to read and even a time to nap in the afternoon.

It is a luxury. But our churches would not want to experience us trying to minister without this six monthly half week away. It is not holiday. It is an investment in our being better by stepping back. To this end it would be a useful addition to the annual timetable of many senior leaders in industry. Stopping to think is not actually a luxury. It is a necessary. Many walks of life would be the better for those responsible having not just holiday, but thinking breaks.

You can often better reflect on your situation by getting out of it for a while. Get away.

Thought for the Day

As delivered just now at BBC Radio Bristol:

It's St Jude's day today. Based on one of the final lines of his letter, 'Be merciful to those who doubt; snatch others from the fire to save them...' he is called the patron saint of lost causes.

Are libraries becoming a lost cause? Not enough of us using them.

I recall the excitement I felt as a child when I discovered books. Matched by the wonder of being able to go and borrow three at a time from Selly Oak library, to read as quickly as I wanted. Jennings the schoolboy. The adventures of Biggles the aviator. Summer holidays' stories Swallows and Amazons or Coot Club.

In those days buying and owning books was not the family habit. The only books on our shelves at home were reference books.

I used to work as a writer. One day a week I would be at the library researching. Not yet was all information in the world available from my mobile phone - in those days the click of a mouse would have sounded like some weird magic spell.

E-readers, tablets and other devices have replaced books. I can't easily buy my wife a book for Christmas. She reads electronically so I don't keep up with what she has read.

Maybe book-libraries are disappearing, relics of a by-gone age along with old-fashioned pubs where you simply drink and the sort of churches that smell of Evensong and pigeon.

But the surviving pubs learned to do food and live sport. Growing churches are more guitar than organ. If libraries are information-exchange centres maybe it's not all about books. My local library is popular for internet access.

We don't quite need St Jude yet. But we have him on stand-by.

Quotes of the Day

Missed yesterday so two today, as a punishment (for me, not you).

Anthony Grayling returns, here quoting Lichtenburg:

896. ...a book is like a mirror: if an ass peers in do not expect an apostle to look out.
(The Reason of Things, page xiii)

And the musician Carlos Santana:

910. 99% of life is God's grace and 1% is personal effort. It's stupid to say 'I did it my way'. Can you imagine dying and going to heaven and singing that song? The angels would leave you belly up.
(OM The Observer Magazine, Easter Sunday 11/4/04)