On choices

April 25, 2026

One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is how my reading has changed over time. I make widely different choices now from those that I made 20 years or 40 years ago.

I do a great deal more re-reading of old favourites than I ever used to do, and this I think is partially due to my age, and realising that this could be the last time I read and enjoy a particular book. Some of my great favourites I have now read five or six times over the course of my life, and each time, as I’ve grown older, they have offered me different things, new perspectives. I have never been able to understand people who say they never re-read a book…

And I realise that in some ways I’ve become lazier, and chosen more often to re-read books that I’m already familiar with, rather than branch out into new territory. In fact, having noticed this tendency towards the end of last year, I made a deliberate decision that this year I was only going to read books that I haven’t actually read before. And so far, I’ve managed to stick with this resolution, apart from one book which I had to re-read because it was a choice by somebody else in our book group. Satisfyingly, the large pile of unread books in my study is diminishing. I won’t have eradicated it by the end of 2026, though!

There were times, obviously when I was a student, where my reading choices were determined by my academic courses of study or my research. Nevertheless, at the same time I still had particular genres that I explored in addition to what I was studying, for example science-fiction, and literature from Eastern Europe. That last field has remained with me pretty much throughout my entire life and is obviously linked to my family origins.

When I realised that, as a result of a deliberate decision not to not to fly anywhere, my travelling and exploration choices were necessarily going to be somewhat circumscribed, I developed a serious and long-lasting interest in the field of travel writing. And I soon realised that the kind of travel writing that I was most interested in was writing that came from before the days of easy and cheap travel, when travellers actually travelled or explored rather than were mere tourists. There are some astonishing accounts of the world from mediaeval times; equally, there are riveting tales of journeys undertaken only a century ago.

For a long while, linked with my academic research, I read an enormous amount of science-fiction and also reviewed a good deal, and then I stopped. But recently I have become aware of how much new, interesting, and very different science-fiction has been written and is being written, and my interest has been renewed, as various posts in this blog demonstrate.

When I reflect more deeply, I realise that my interests have basically been driven by curiosity. Hence my reading of travel writing, history, theology, and some science, politics and economics. There has never, apart from during my student days, been a structured approach to my reading. There are always new ideas that I come across, new subjects that I suddenly feel an urge to delve further into. I also frequently ask myself what’s the point? because in the end all this reading, all this knowledge, all this understanding will vanish with me. But that doesn’t put me off. That’s one of the things about being a human.

Posted in fiction, history, poland, rambling about reading, Russian literature, science fiction, travel writing | Leave a Comment »

Catherine Nixey: Heresy

April 25, 2026

         Nixey collates huge amounts of evidence from a wide range of authors about the early years of Christianity and how it developed, and there are quite a few surprises and shocks here. In its early days, Christianity deliberately set out to separate itself from other contemporary religions as something special, different and apart from all other religions, whereas in fact is wasn’t.

Ultimately one form of Christianity — the one we have nowadays — crushed a wide range of variants that co-existed, and then, when that version of Christianity attained power over the Roman Empire through the emperor Constantine, it crushed all other religions too.

Nixey evidences how many of the stories about Jesus — miracles, death, resurrection and so on, were actually common stories about many different deities. Equally, there are around forty gospels mentioned in various places, rather than just the four of the accepted canon, and some of them contain extremely strange stories which would shock many of today’s faithful: we are invited to consider why some gospels were ‘chosen’ and others eliminated from history.

Once in control of the Empire, a real 1984-style eradication of evidence took place: many of the names Nixey mentions are only known through fragments of their writings which have survived, sometimes via the Nag Hammadi scrolls, more often because quoted and ridiculed by their Christian opponents in their quest to root out heresy.

It appears that quite early on stringent laws were enacted and vicious punishments meted out to adherents of non-Christian religions, in days when only ten per cent of the empire’s inhabitants were Christian; knowledge of the existence of some of the texts Nixey mentions, and other variants of Christianity has only been available since the 1950s.

In sum, the book is a fascinating hotch-potch of interesting information and pointers to further reading; it’s a compulsive read and an eye-opener, but also intensely irritating due to poor editing. At times there’s insufficient information about many of people she mentions, as well as sweeping statements and generalisations about such things as ‘novels’ from Roman times. It’s a random collection of stuff rather than an academic work, as if the aim of the book and its target audience were never completely clear.

Posted in history, religion | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , ,

On time (part 2)

April 22, 2026

To my mind there is a small slice of time which is ‘mine’, and I share that time in this space with others like me. Logically, the thing to do is to get on as well as possible with the others, to do as little harm or evil in my time as possible, and within that, to enjoy the time I have. To me that involves doing what I see as good things but I don’t know that everybody necessarily sees their existence in the same way.

It does seem to me that the particular thing that stands out about us as humans, as far as it’s possible to see it or understand it, is that we have well-developed brains, minds, reason, faculties for knowing and understanding, however you want to put it, that lead us to behave in certain ways.

And I think the greatest thing about me and about humans generally is our brain and our mind, and what follows for me is the idea that we should use this capacity fully. Our innate curiosity, our quest for understanding and knowledge defines us, even though it may ultimately be totally futile if our species vanishes, if there are no other intelligent beings in the universe, if we destroy ourselves. But somewhere in me I believe very strongly that using our brains, using our minds is good for us. I watch my grandchildren grow, and what continues to astonsh me is their curiosity about the world around them…

Our time of life is limited, yet the wealthy are on a quest for longer life: why? what’s the point? Too much money and not enough time to spend it all? I don’t know.

When I recall the exploration of time in literature, various books come to mind: immortality in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels doesn’t get the Struldbrugs very far. Six hundred years old and their bodies show it; they are no longer understood because the language has moved on and left them behind, and their descendants want to get their hands on their inheritance…

Arthur C Clarke tackles the issue differently in his thought-provoking novel The City and the Stars. Humans live a life, then are encoded in the memory banks of the computer which runs and controls everything (and apparently has purposes of its own) and randomly brought back to life for further existences: this has been going on for a billion years…the best of all possible worlds, except for entropy.

Ivan Yefremov’s novel A for Andromeda imagines the world a thousand years after the triumph of (Soviet) communism and the disappearance of religion. But that has not erased humans’ spiritual yearnings… And Ursula Le Guin, in her Hainish novels and stories offers another perspective on time and its passing: humans travel the entire universe at great speeds, but so vast is space and time that we encounter travellers who set off knowing that on their return everyone who they knew and who knew them will be long dead and gone: and yet they go.…I’ve already referred to The Time Machine and the fascinating first vision of the end of humans, the end of their time.

And I come back to the Buddhist understanding as ultimately expressed in Hermann Hesse’s haunting tale Siddhartha, with its image of the river, to which the eponymous hero returns eternally at the end…

Posted in history, philosophy, religion, science fiction | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

On time (part 1)

April 22, 2026

The universe is several billion years old and apparently it’s got another few billion years before it all collapses  — we think — into itself and, for all we know, it might then start all over again. It’s absolutely impossible to get your mind round all these crazy amounts of time. (There’s also the notion that time is only a thing we humans have invented for our convenience…) Then in and among all of that, there are us human beings who might live for 70 or 80 years on this tiny planet that’s at the arse end of nowhere. Is there anything else, anyone else?

The mind boggles. And we live and try to make the best of, and enjoy our lives. We pack in all sorts of different activities, pleasures, pains. We hope we will be remembered. We think about future generations. We read about the past and our existence is only a tiny fleeting proportion of anything.

Back in the old days there was only religion to try and explain things. We believed we were the centre of the universe, we thought we were specially created and we thought there was a god that had created us and everything else, and then there was also a special eternal future designated for us, all of which now seems pretty bonkers, to put it mildly. Now we have some perhaps clearer, perhaps more factual knowledge and understanding of who and where we are and how we got here, but how does this actually help, here and now?

Writers have long played around with the idea of time. We have science-fiction stories set in the future. There is that astonishing ending to HG Wells’ The Time Machine where he takes us some 800,000 years into the future and we see the dying of our planet and realise that end of the human race has happened. Because of who we are, it’s verging on the impossible to imagine existence without us. Are there other intelligences out there? We don’t know, we think there may be, we calculate the odds, we imagine trying to communicate with them. Stanislaw Lem’s challenging novel Solaris imagines an intelligence so different from ours, and the impossibility of communicating with it, despite our best efforts and desires.

But then it’s equally possible we are a single, unique incredible accident that will be around for a blink of time in the lifespan of the universe due to an astonishing chain of coincidences and chances, and then will be no more: one day, nobody ever will know or ever will have known about us and all our achievements: it’s astonishing, mind-blowing, painful to contemplate: why?

How do we cope with all of this? I think of my own existence: I’ve done 70 years so far. I’ve done what biology intended and required of me: I’ve lived and I’ve reproduced; in addition I’ve had a career, I’ve known love, I’ve been sad, I’ve been happy and contented more than I’ve been sad. I know my days are limited, but then that was true from the day I was born. I can do the sums and calculate that being part of the memory of any human goes back to my grandparents born in the 1880s, and I suppose my current grandchildren, if they live a natural lifespan will get to the next century, the 2100s; maybe they’ll talk to some of their offspring about me, so I will have had an existence of a kind in human memory for perhaps two centuries. It’s a blink in time. How does all this help me?

Increasingly, I think I understand and value the Buddhist perspective, that there is everything that is and that we are forever part of it; for a time we manifest ourselves like this, as people, on this planet, but eventually we return to the previous and permanent everything that is. What I’m not sure about is whether I find that helpful or comforting, even though it is beginning to make sense. What does it mean for my short time on earth?

Posted in rambling about reading, history, science fiction, religion, philosophy | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Thomas L Thompson: The Bible in History

April 15, 2026

       Is the bible history or myth? Does it actually matter either way? Thompson posits the allegorical nature of what has long been regarded as historical and factual in the bible; the Israel to which it constantly refers is not the Israel that exists in historical and archaeological evidence. His basic thesis is that the bible does not make any sense as history.

It’s a very difficult book to read, largely because it’s so detailed in its references, reflecting a very detailed knowledge of the bible itself as well as the actually evidenced history of the region, and so it doesn’t sit easily with the lay reader. The ideas he raises are interesting in themselves, but I don’t have the impression of an author in tune with his readership.

I was interested to learn about the drifting meanings of Israel, the Hebrews, Palestine, all of which appear to have been long in a state of flux. He also considers the very different purposes of the writers of the various books of the bible at the time they wrote, compared with us as readers now and what we are looking for, or believe about, what we are reading, and this seems very important.

The first part of the book considers the information in the biblical narratives purportedly recounting the history of Israel and its kings and prophets; the second part looks at the factual information and evidence we currently have about the region: its history, archaeology, geography, society, anthropology. The chapter on climate changes and the economic development of the region is fascinating. All this evidence is presented without an overlay of biblical names, places and so forth; it becomes clear that Israel and Judah as they appear in the Old Testament are tiny, insignificant parts of a much larger region often dominated by the Egyptians or the Assyrians.

In religious terms, syncretism seems to have been the name of the game, and here Thompson evidences well what has been utterly and deliberately eradicated from memory over many centuries, for obvious reasons. I found myself wondering if Judaism as we now know it was in some ways almost a creation of the early Christian world to justify its claims and needs of prophecies…If we see the old testament as history related to the origins of Christianity then we are completely ignoring the theological orientation of the  Jewish bible (at least I think that’s what he’s basically saying)

As you can see, it’s a very complicated book, and not one for a general reader, really. I’ve done a fair amount other reading in the field over the years and I found it very difficult to get to grips with; I don’t think I’d recommend it.

Posted in history, religion | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Philip Goff: Why?

April 15, 2026

       The book presents itself as a philosophy primer on some very big ideas (how the universe works, God, the nature of consciousness), which is aimed at the lay reader rather than a student of philosophy. Initially, I was not sure, though it was carefully structured so as to guide a lay reader through the basic arguments and offer the possibility of avoiding the more complex sections until one felt ready…

I think I can honestly say that it was the most difficult book I’ve ever read, even harder than Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which I made myself read a good twenty years ago now, and of which I can remember absolutely nothing.

Goff is fascinating when attempting to explain consciousness and how it exists/ behaves/ operates.It’s headache-inducing stuff, though. And at a certain point I found myself thinking what I’ve often thought before, and accused myself of, too: here is science and logic trying to explain everything, in the way that science has been claiming it can/ ought to be able to do for the past several centuries, as it has shrunk the scope of religion; here we are again, trying to rationalise the irrational.

It also seemed to me that these complex theories and attempts to explain the inexplicable are inevitably shaped by our own consciousness, our understanding, our minds and so are necessarily limited, per se… are not our endeavours ultimately futile here? And yet, I cannot reject the book or the ideas or the theories: we are curious creatures, we want to know and we want to understand, and for me that is one of the great things about humanity, and one of the reasons why we are here.

There’s a sudden, abrupt swerve in the final chapter, where Goff returns to spirituality, and recommends the use of psychedelics to help us explore; quite a shock after what had gone before, but here I rather warmed to the author. He spoke to my condition, as we say. He is also very political, in directions close to my heart.

It was a sudden whim to buy this book, a serious challenge to read it, and I’m glad I did: there’s good material for further thinking here.

Posted in philosophy | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , ,

Octavia Butler: The Parable of the Sower

March 25, 2026

      Something or someone finally triggered a ‘more than a vague interest’ button in my brain and moved me to get this one: it was a decent read and has certainly had me thinking about the changes in the nature of dystopian novels since I first got into them.

Here we are faced with a West Coast ex-USA which has apparently collapsed and drifted into anarchy, with small settlements striving to protect themselves and survive in different ways, but always being the prey of random outside forces. It being America and guns being everywhere does not help the situation, and senseless violence and drug-abuse are the norm, pretty much: if you have something, there will be someone who wants to take it from you. And beneath it all, predatory capitalism and the return of indentured labour and slavery are thriving…

What makes Butler’s vision particularly powerful and effective is the sense of not knowing: being isolated in your tiny community and unaware of what is happening only a few miles away is very disorienting, and when her characters are forced to leave their settlement and move on, they have no way of knowing what they may encounter en route.

I found myself reflecting on the post-nuclear dystopias of more than half a century ago such as Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, and also George Stewart’s Earth Abides, where disease has wiped out most of humanity. What’s different in Butler’s vision is that destruction has not come from without, but rather disintegration has erupted within society. It’s also compounded by climate disaster. This means there are far more people about, competing to live, and co-operation is basically not on their agenda, except in small groups and with short term goals. A mess, really. And yet, as in Canticle, religion is an element of survival.

Butler has a teenage girl —Lauren — as her lead character; there is a spreading drug-induced genetic mutation which makes certain people liable to experience mentally and physically the feelings of others close by, which certainly complicates the situation when one is involved in any kind of violence (or sex, for that matter). Her upbringing has been benevolently but seriously religious and she has a strange-seeming vision of building a community — Earthseed — which will leave the planet somehow, and build a better, more co-operative and less violent world somewhere else. She has not got very far at all with this by the end of the novel, although she has built up a small group of like-minded folk who have set off to strive for better things. There is a sequel, which I am interested enough to read.

It took a good while to get into the book: it was hard, initially, to see where Butler would go with this, and decide whether I wanted to continue with the rather strange mix of religion and violence, but I think it was worth it in the end: the plot became more interesting and gripping once the group had been forced to leave their original base. And her vision of the future, sadly, feels rather more realistic than those earlier ones I mentioned; I was reminded of the visions of life in the big cities as presented by Marge Piercy in He, She and It. We live in grim times.

Posted in science fiction | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Kim Stanley Robinson: The Ministry for the Future

March 18, 2026

        Not long after I’d started reading this door-stopper (550+ pages) I realised here was someone who had read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, a similar work from the late 1960s. Brunner’s novel deals with the prospect of overpopulation, its implications and how to address it as planetary issue (as I recall) and Robinson’s book (I hesitate to call it a novel) addresses global warming in a similar fashion.

I say I hesitate to call it a novel: like Brunner’s masterpiece, it loosely tells a story, but its wider scope is rather more significant: imagined worldwide meetings, conferences and actions — legal and illegal — to tackle the current threat to life on the planet, but there are basically only two characters with any substance, an Irishwoman who heads the official global efforts, and a young American volunteer in the Third World who is traumatised by his experience of a heat disaster phenomenon which causes the deaths of several million people in a few days… other characters are merely sketched in for narrative convenience. This makes the reading a it of an effort.

Where Robinson excels — as did Brunner — is the contextual material, the scientific analyses and the exploration of social, political and economic possibilities for dealing with the emergency.  But there’s an awful lot of this, and at times it does become a tad tiresome: am I reading a novel or a tract; why am I skim-reading sometimes?

Do texts like this ever change anything? They are certainly written to make the intelligent reader think, to convince one, if that is needed, of the impending disaster, and to encourage one to think that there are ways out. Robinson is well aware of the cynicism that currently exists, and is maybe even being deliberately fostered by interested parties: we cannot and will not cope, the problem is too big, we just have to get used to it, etc etc. Or, the problem doesn’t even exist, according to certain moronic politicians and leaders.

Is terrorism — or what most politicians would currently label terrorism — an acceptable tactic in the face of climate emergency? Robinson certainly doesn’t duck this question. It’s possible for anonymous groups to target aviation, container ships, meat production pretty effectively and perhaps trigger change… Robinson’s premise is that all change has to take place within the current capitalist system, and since we don’t have any currently viable alternatives, perhaps he’s right: he certainly explores closely how the international financial system might be subverted or converted to support changes, including much more deliberate and effective state and international interventions. Can capitalism really save the world?

It’s not until about halfway through the book that you realise Robinson is presenting an optimistic scenario that over several decades does succeed, against enormous odds, in turning the tide, and beginning to save the future. However I did find myself thinking that, although we definitely do need visions and visionaries like this, do we really understand how it might be done? It’s a complex and challenging read (I’m certainly glad I read it) but is Robinson ultimately preaching to the converted? Or an I just an aged cynic who has seen too many promising ideas for making a better world go down the pan in my own lifetime?

Posted in current affairs, science fiction | 1 Comment »
Tags: , , , , ,

Jorge Amado: The War of the Saints

March 11, 2026

       A book for the book group, not one I’d have picked to read otherwise, but I’m glad we read it – for one thing, I learned about religious syncretism, which I’d never heard of…

Amado is a Brazilian writer, and so, almost inevitably magic realism drifts into the reading frame, and while it’s definitely in evidence, it’s very different from the Marquez variety I’m familiar with.

Briefly, a religious statue, on its way from its parish church to an exhibition of religious art being curated by an up-himself monk, disappears and comes to life, to rescue a young girl and free her from the oppressiveness of a traditional Catholic sexual stepmother, who is at the same time a stunningly attractive but sexually repressed woman. Traditional African religion and imported Christianity battle it out while various representatives of officialdom, in the time of the military dictatorship of the 1960s, attempt to track down the statue; the saint has plans of her own…

The structure of the novel is interesting, with many chapters broken down into smaller sections, each captioned with ironic or humorous pointers, which serve as authorial commentary. The narrator is never far from the reader, his voice lyrical and repetitive, and then there are the names, the terms from African religion…at times I found all this rather too much. Clearly the traditional religious terms needed to be there and there was a very helpful glossary at the end of the book, but this did get in the way a bit, at least initially. And then there were all the characters with complex Portuguese names, which made me feel I was reading one of those nineteenth century Russian doorstoppers which have a list of characters and all the possible combinations of their names before you even get to the story…

But, it gripped and became ever more fascinating and I came to overlook all those irritants. I learned much about a land and culture I knew nothing of, and I was rooting for the right people throughout. We’re in the time of liberation theology, which caused major ructions in the Catholic Church at the time in Latin America, and in Brazil there are also the competing – and gradually integrated – traditions from the generations of slaves imported from Africa by the Spanish and Portuguese colonists over the years. The Church has both attempted to accommodate and subvert these traditions in its mission to keep the upper hand

Amado emphasises sexual freedom, and there were times when I found his approach salacious, while at the same time realising he was reflecting the inherent machismo of his society.

It did take me quite a while to fall into the rhythm of the novel and let it take me along with it; the various layers of the narrative eventually slotted together, and I could see how the author was deliberately manipulating and shaping my attention and response in a way I’ve not often come across in European literature; the story ended rather abruptly, yet Amado was there to tie up the loose ends carefully afterwards. What I felt at the end was what I’d have to call a sense of joyousness, of feeling uplifted, and I recall this from the few other Latin American novels I’ve read…

Posted in fiction | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , ,

The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories

March 5, 2026

        I received The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories for Christmas. There’s a really good and thought-provoking introduction by Olga Tokarczuk, in which she makes some very lucid remarks about the nature and purpose of the short story, in contrast with the novel. And this has got me thinking.

I realise that for years I had pretty much dismissed — deliberately (and arrogantly it now seems) — the short story form as not offering me enough to bother with. So apart from the Sherlock Holmes stories, which I met at the age of seven, and reams of science-fiction stories, I’ve not really encountered short fiction. And I find myself unsure of what to make of short stories, or how to assess or judge them — what are they for? I ‘get’ novels: stories leisurely developed, with due attention to plot, character development (usually) and some ideas and themes to get me thinking, and the whole draws me in and keeps my attention occupied: I can lose myself in a novel.

Here I’m faced with much smaller nuggets, often of delight, sometimes leaving me completely cold. I feel like I’m being thrown in at the deep end, or at least joining something in medias res; no lead-in, little subtlety to character, no ideas to latch on to.

At times, poetry feels like a parallel: the use of language, and how the writer’s idea is exposed/explored. There’s a single event or situation to look closely and carefully at, that seizes the attention and draws you in quickly. It’s hard, if not impossible, to carry on reading one story after another, as I’d consume the pages of a novel: the shift from one story, one author to another with no connection to what has gone before, is just too jarring.

So here was a very real challenge, where I was being forced to grapple with literature that’s beyond my ken, as it were. I enjoyed most of the stories and wonder at the variety…

The stories are thematically arranged, which is a good notion — animals, children, soldiers and the like — and there are some of the most disturbing and challenging tales I’ve read in a long time, particularly in the Women Behaving Badly section of the book, and, more obviously in stories focused on the war. The whole was for me quite an eye-opener, as I’ve always had a picture of Polish literature as quite restrained, traditional and conservative, compared, for instance, with what I’ve encountered in Czech literature. It’s an excellent collection overall, and quite hard, but rewarding work. The translations are by a variety of different translators, including Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the editor of the collection and one of Olga Tokarczuk’s translators; they are well-done.

Posted in fiction, poland, science fiction | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , ,

« Older posts
Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started