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Books Read: August 2024

11 September 2024

Here’s August’s book haul: This month I enjoyed three novels. The most experimental of which was Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd Century, which has the form of a series of witness statements from the crew of a ship, now far away from earth. The workers, both human and artificial, have been tending a number of exotic objects from the planet New Discovery, and they find their lives changed in subtle and not-so subtle ways. The novel touches on workplace oppression, freedom, and longing for what is absent.

The other two novels were Lords of Uncreation, the final entry in a series by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and The Mercy of Gods, the first entry in a new saga by James S. A. Corey Both Tchaikovsky and Corey are adept at weaving together a compelling tale at interplanetary scale. I particularly enjoyed The Mercy of Gods, which starts off with the petty academic politics of research teams competing for funding, before all hell literally breaks loose with an invasion from an implacable colonising force. We get to see our research collective deal with the PTSD resulting from witnessing the destruction of their entire way of life and being swept away to another world to do the coloniser’s bidding.

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Books Read: July 2024

22 August 2024

July and August have been really busy, not with teaching (it’s the summer teaching break), but with research and research supervision, a little bit of holiday travel, and various life things taking up my time and attention. I have had time to read, but not so much time to write paragraphs about each book. Instead of skipping the books-of-the-month post entirely, here’s a stripped back version with a link and a sentence for each book.

July was Kierkegaard month. I enjoyed reading through : Fear and Trembling, which I’d known of for many years, but never read through. He’s a striking prose stylist, as well as a thoughtful reader of the biblical Abraham and Isaac story. Alongside, I read Jeffrey Hanson’s Kierkegaard and the Life of Faith, which is not only a commentary and analysis of Fear and Trembling, but an extensive treatment of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical, and a thoughtful and sympathetic treatment of Kierkegaard’s account of the life of faith.

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Books Read: June 2024

10 July 2024

June was also an enjoyable month for reading. This month’s reading was dominated by Diarmaid MacCulloch’s 864 page doorstopper Reformation: Europe’s House Divided. Having been educated in Australia, the view of history I was taught was oriented around the colonisation of the continent by the British and its aftermath. As far as the religious and social history of Europe was concerned, and the division of the Western Church that predated that colonisation, I knew some of the details, but I had no idea of how the centuries-long convulsion in church and state that was the reformation (and the counter-reformation) spread across Europe, over the 16th and 17th Centuries. MacCulloch’s painstakingly researched and very readable history helped me understand how the historical contingencies and the different twists and turns of these times have led to the distinctively modern world that took shape in the reformation’s wake.

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Books Read: May 2024

25 June 2024

May was a great reading month, but I forgot to upload my notes until June was nearly done. This month I read nine books, but one was an unpublished draft of a novel that a friend is writing, so I won’t say more about that, until there is more news to share. The other fiction reads this month could not be more different from each other. Beyond the Light Horizon concludes Ken MacLeod’s most recent politically charged Scotland-based near-future science fiction trilogy. The ending was a bit rushed for my taste, but it was an enjoyable ride along the way.

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy could not be more different. A gargantuan (736 page) novel, it reads like a stream of consciousness. It is set in the north of Australia, with a cast of indigenous characters making their way in a surreal world falling apart around them. I was enchanted by the rhythm and the texture and the distinctive voice of the words, sentences and paragraphs, while I struggled to hold the whole thing in view. It’s not an easy read, but it is up there with the most memorable novels I’ve read in the last few years.

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A Chinese Translation!

21 May 2024

Earlier this month I got a lovely package in the mail. A Chinese translation of my intro logic text. My colleague and friend Min Xu completed his translation of my text, and it’s now available.

Books Read: April 2024

1 May 2024

Another month, and another pile of books I’ve managed to read. This month’s reading started on the Isle of Iona, where we had a short Easter break. On the last day on the island, and then on the ferry journeys back to the “mainland”, I finished The Life of St Columba, who served as the Abbot of Iona and, as legend has it, brought Christianity to Scotland, from Ireland, dying in 597.

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Proofs, Rules, and Meanings, Arché Workshop

13 April 2024

I’ve just emerged from two intense days of proof theory. Three of my graduate students, Sophie Nagler, Viviane Fairbank and Francisca Silva, organised a two-day workshop on proof theory and its connections to philosophy and other fields.

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