FANTASTIC FICTION – Escapes to other places and other times

There has always been a tension in religion and spirituality between two impulses. These are 1) To affirm that the world is fundamentally good despite its imperfections, and therefore to embrace it. God, after all, is reported in Genesis 1:31 as follows: ‘And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was […]

It is 1926 and the First World War is gradually receding into the past. Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world. The only, but huge, missing

This is the 2012 offering of ‘chick lit’ purveyor Sophie Kinsella. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Kinsella) and (http://www.sophiekinsella.co.uk/) The summary goes as follows. Poppy Wyatt has never felt luckier. She is about to marry her ideal man, Magnus Tavish, but in one afternoon her ‘happily ever after’ begins to fall apart. Not only has she lost her engagement ring

Lanark has more claim of importance in the life of William Wallace than Stirling. The local William Wallace Heritage Trust has long campaigned for more to be made of the connection. In this work Dr. James Mackay shares meticulous research on what can really be known about the man apart from the myth. Read this

Steven Pinker (http://stevenpinker.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker), Professor of Psychology at Harvard, is truly one of the big beasts of academia. One suspects that he must suffer from headaches because it seems he’s got six brains inside one skull. Not content to confine his research to learned journals Pinker has published, amongst other titles, The Language Instinct (1994),

Interested in sex? No? OK, you need not read this recent history of social attitudes towards the grisly function. Philip Larkin famously wrote in ‘Annus Mirabilis’ Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.  The observation is both

Written by an anonymous English monk during the late fourteenth century, The Cloud of Unknowing is a sublime expression of what separates God from humanity and is widely regarded as a hallmark of Western literature and spirituality.  It stands in the tradition of the ‘Via Negativa’. This suggests that one must give up all conceptual

Le Grand Meaulnes is a modern French classic. François Seurel, the narrator, is the son a village schoolmaster in the Sologne, a region of lakes and sandy forests in North Central France. A new boy Augustin Meaulnes, who comes from a poor background, arrives in class but soon disappears. Later he returns from an escapade

American thriller writer Clive Cussler (http://clive-cussler-books.com/) has seen over 50 titles published under his name. He has had 17 consecutive titles reach The New York Times fiction best seller list. His fiction leans toward the fantastical and glamorous and is powerfully plot driven. In this outing of 2012 we are introduced to the greatest advance in American defense