The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death's End by Liu Cixin

I forget how I heard about these books but I am so glad I stumbled across them. They are hard sf: speculating with astonishing imagination around the laws of physics and letting those speculations drive the narrative. On and on it goes, unfolding fresh insight, unrelenting over three volumes. It's breathtaking. 

The Three Body Problem of the first title is the alpha-centauri system: starting from how life might have evolved there, and what it might do when discovering life around its nearest star, us, is how the plot gets going. Three books later, centuries into the future, the horizon was still expanding, the plot was still unfolding and I found myself stunned and captivated by the ending.

The second fun thing about the books is the Chinese provenance, totally fascinating and an unusual bonus in a sf book. As well as some of the settings, I love the way that the Chinese are the real flesh-and-blood characters and the Westerners are on the fringes; just the opposite to Western-inspired fiction. 

Having said that, you wouldn't read the books particularly for the characters, dialogue or relationships. Another thing to mention is they get  a little slow at times with Chinese/Communist preoccupations like lengthy discussions about controlling the morale of the people: all irrelevant in the West where no-one controls the public discourse.

Nothing about this spoiled these stories for me, which is the best SF I have read for years. I am a reluctant reader of long trilogies but it was easy to make an exception this time.   

I can't think of higher praise than to say Liu Cixin reminded me of Olaf Stapledon, the father of SF by some measures, in his sheer astonishing imaginative breadth. He seemed to think of everything; later writers in the genre merely filled it out. Liu Cixin has a brilliance of the same kind. 

Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore
I came away from this book with three impressions

1. The sprawling, endless history of this hilltop settlement, its stones and myths endlessly dug up and rebuilt.
2. The way much of world history --or at least the history of the Abrahamic religions- swirls around this single spot
3. The beheadings and rapes, generation after generation. My own village has a history going back to the eighth century, but in nearly all that time, sickles were just used for lopping heads of grain, rather than heads of people. Must be something to be said for not being so famous. 

A wonderful book, a work of  an unobtrusive author who sorts through the rubble and presents it to us, scene after boody scene. I learnt a few things. The Jewish people have been given Jerusalem back on odd occasions before the current time. Julian the Apostate, for example, the second after Constantine, returned it to them. 

The crusaders, while an embarrassment to Christians, were no more rapacious and deadly than everyone else. 

King David officially exists, thanks to an insription found in the 1990s and no thanks to the Bible account, despite it being one of the most intimate, many-sided accounts of a famous person in all antiquity. 

It was also fun to find the backstory of the Jewish puppet kings who stroll across the New Testament. All were collaborators with the Romans. Montefiore picks out the day (for example) that Augustus, Herod the Great and Mark Antony strolled out of the Senate together. The photo of that would have been good for a few quid. Or Bernice who not long after hearing Paul in Caeserea -- 'I would you that you were all as I am, but for these chains'--turns up as the lover of Titus as he dismembers Jerusalem in AD70. Josephus was with them that day, and got a few of his Jewish friends taken down from the crosses on which many had been crucified. It goes on.

Some gems of good writing too: Chateaubriand's travelogue 'set the tone of the European attitude to the Orient with its cruel but inept Turks, wailing Jews, and primitive but ferocious Arabs who tended to congregate in pictureseque biblical poses' (p384)

Glorious,

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

"I believe in the grace of God. For me, that is where all these questions end"

and then this:

"then there he would be, fresh from the gallows, shocked at the kindness all around him."

I can't remember the last time I cried while reading a book. I could feel the sobbing welling up inside. It was doubly embarrassing because I was lying next to a pool in the Cote d'Azur on a brilliant blue day, and my wife was reading Bill Bryson.

Perhaps it was post-traumatic stress speaking after my coma and paralysis three years ago. The book I was reading had the weight of an old hymn, suffering graced in music.

Or perhaps it was because God was beautiful and humans, like mathematics, need infinity to make the sums come out right.

Either way, Marilynne Robinson's Lila is extraordinary.

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville My rating: 3 of 5 stars I listened to this title as a Librevox audio book, lovingly and well read. It's exasperating. In here is a totally gripping account of the mad pursuit of a great whale in the 19th century, compelling, detailed, tense, very satisfying. Unfortunately it's wrapped in screeds of Shakespearean asides and philosophical meanderings that I found just plain dull. There's hardly a novelist's rule that Melville doesn't break, which is fine, except it just doesn't help. So joy and dismay crowd together. If this is the first 'modern novel' I hope it will also be my last. And yet, clear away the dross, and there's something absolutely special. View my Amazon reviews

Alister McGrath: C S Lewis

I wanted to write a detached, cool-headed evaluation of this book and even had thought of some suitably ironic ways of describing it: 'ostrich prose', for example (covering a lot of ground with great enthusiasm but never quite taking off). 

Unfortunately, I can't do it. I shamelessly and unapologetically absolutely loved this book. I have to confess some shared interests. Alister McGrath is a professor at my old college. He's a scientist and atheist who turned to Christ. In some of his other writings, he has discovered the loveable pinata-like qualities of Professor Dawkins. So I was predisposed to like this book and therefore quite determined not to.

I don't know if it's a masterpiece or not but I found it an entirely satisfying retelling and re-evaluation of the man that I will treasure for a long time. They even got A N Wilson, big-beast among Lewis biographers and newly -returned-to-the-faith-Christian, to say something mildly pleasant about McGrath's work. So, perhaps, it must be good. It's not just me. Generally I prefer reading Lewis to reading books about Lewis but this is the business.

Mary Doria Russell: Children of God

The sequel to 'The Sparrow' continues the plot with the same luxuriant story-telling qualities. It's engrossing, beautiful, thought-provoking. First (or second) contact, an alien world, cultural disruption, God.

If most SF is made of cotton, this is silk. I got the feeling she used her best characters in the first book, and it's a matter of taste probably whether or not you feel after two books you'd have liked the issues resolved or like in the Sparrow,  left open. (I won't say which happens). A great book, like its predecessor sitting easily near the top of the pile of best SF books I've ever read. A pity (for SF) that a writer of such talent went onto other things...

Deep Jungle by Fred Pearce: beautiful science writing about a big issue of our time

This book manages to be both a beautiful coffee-table book and an insightful, well-written exploration of the rainforest, taking a machete to the simplistic diagnoses we find in the popular press. Fred Pearce, environment correspondent for New Scientist, has done some proper science writing here. 

So the book is full of surprises. 

1. Wind back the clock a thousand years, and jungles were the home of sophisticated civilisations. This is not just true of modern-day tourist honeypots like Ankor Wat or the Mayans. Nigeria's jungles hosted cities and empires; so did the Amazon. Fred Pearce cites linguistic studies, the beginnings of jungle archeology, and the nature of the soil and the  trees planted, to show that people were working this land, despite the Western world not knowing about them. 

2. These civilisations  collapsed, perhaps because of the encounter with Europeans and their diseases. Remnants went off into the forest. So the standard Western model of the jungle -- 'pristine' rainforest and 'stone-age tribes untouched since the dawn of civilisation' -- is wrong. People have gardened, or farmed, or still better, stewarded, the jungle for centuries, and with rather more success than we managed in the 20th century.

3. Much of what is going on today thanks to the chain-saw and the hunt for ever-more-scarce bush-meat is economically rational for the people doing it.

4. Many of the suggested solutions to deforestation haven't worked. Selling traditional remedies to drug corporations is good, even vital for the future of humanity, but has tended not to benefit indigenous people, or stop rainforest destruction. National parks are hard to enforce. Even when jungle products are found that can only be produced on site, they have been victims to sudden boom and bust: everyone starts growing them, the price drops, everyone loses. 

5. Fred Pearce does find some case studies that encourage optimism. He reports on Cameroonian cocoa farmers who plant their trees in the jungle, rather than clearing it. They also plant other fruit trees. In another model, a Central African government, I forget which, supports agriculture on the edges of a national park, to relieve the economic pressures. He even suggests that under some circumstances, drilling for oil in the rainforest can save the rainforest by improving the economy for everyone. 

All these case studies point to a somewhat heretical conclusion, which Pearce doesn't quite enforce in the book. One way of saying it is that you have to consider people as well as chainsaws or bushmeat. Concentrate on a single issue, bushmeat for example, and you're doomed, as many well-meaning charities have discovered.  The other way of saying it is this: rainforests need people to manage them. Remember the old joke of the vicar talking to a gardener: 'What a wonderful thing you and God have created,' says the vicar. The gardener thinks for a moment and then replies, 'Yes, and you should see what a mess it was when God had it to himself.' Humans are destroying the rainforest, bad people and good people together, but in the end we are also its only hope. 

This book is slightly dated, published 2006, and a little too affected by the economic crash in Indonesia in the early 2000s: you wonder what has happened since. It's also repetitious in places; you will be often told there are only 15,000 Orang Utangs in the wild, living in Borneo and Sumatra. But you can pick it up for a penny on Amazon and it will adorn any naked coffee-tables you have about the place and help us all think through this major issue of our times. Super book.

Mary Doria Russell: The Sparrow

This is a gem.

It's a novel first, a science-fiction novel second: in other words, it has rich characters, a compelling plot, and leaves you with much to think about. The SF element is done seamlessly well with good hard science and coherent thinking about another world and how it might work.

The plot is all about a Jesuit mission to another culture, what happened there, and how it affected the hero, a Jesuit priest and translator. I suspect Mary Doria Russell gave her story an SF context only because on earth, most of the strange tribes have already been encountered, if not by Jesuits then by their Protestant missionary cousins, or by Western pagan neo-colonialists (aka loggers and drillers).

Underlying the whole tale all are deep questions about God, about faith, redemption, surrender and devotion.
It really is a wonderful book, and shows perhaps how hollow much of the rest of the SF universe really is. (Not that that stops me enjoying it: it's just that this book is so much richer.)

It rightly won prizes. This is the only SF book I would recommend my wife should ever read. It's a wonderful novel, not to be missed.

Mary Doria Russell: The Sparrow

This is a gem.

It's a novel first, a science-fiction novel second: in other words, it has rich characters, a compelling plot, and leaves you with much to think about. The SF element is done seamlessly well with good hard science and coherent thinking about another world and how it might work.

The plot is all about a Jesuit mission to another culture, what happened there, and how it affected the hero, a Jesuit priest and translator. I suspect Mary Doria Russell gave her story an SF context only because on earth, most of the strange tribes have already been encountered, if not by Jesuits then by their Protestant missionary cousins, or by Western pagan neo-colonialists (aka loggers and drillers).

Underlying the whole tale all are deep questions about God, about faith, redemption, surrender and devotion.
It really is a wonderful book, and shows perhaps how hollow much of the rest of the SF universe really is. (Not that that stops me enjoying it: it's just that this book is so much richer.)

It rightly won prizes. This is the only SF book I would recommend my wife should ever read. It's a wonderful novel, not to be missed.

The Story of Christianity by David Bentley-Hart

The Story of Christianity: An Illustrated History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith by David Bentley Hart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A happy mix between the church histories that overdo the lavish at the expense of the comprehensive, and those that overdo the comprehensive at the expense of your eyesight. David Bentley Hart appears to have read everyone, from all the Gnostics, through Nietzsche, to the Russian devotional mystics, and that, and his own Eastern Orthodox faith means that his church history isn't skewed just to the Western (heard of St Herman of Alaska? Me neither). I found hardly a misstep in the book. His hobby of unravelling the myths and fairy tales that New Atheists tell to their children at bedtime (for a fuller account of which, see his 'Atheist Delusions') informs some of his chapters, notably those about the early modern period. My favourite of all the church histories I have read. Get someone to give you this book for Christmas.

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Anthony Flew: there is (now) a God

There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Enjoyable, brief ramble from the former to the probably final state of philosopher Antony Flew's thinking, particularly about God, and including how he changed his mind from atheism to Deism. It is bookended by a lengthy introduction and an appendix by the actual writer of the book, Roy Abraham Varghese, and another by the biblical scholar of the hour, Tom, or NT, Wright. Flew took care to write, and personally sign, his own introduction.

Here's a quote, cue unreasoned, buttock-clenching joy from theists and wailing and gnashing of teeth from his former atheist pals:

I must stress that my discovery of the Divine has proceeded on a purely natural level, without any reference to supernatural phenomena. It has been an exercise in what is traditionally called natural theology. It has no connection with any of the revealed religions. Nor do I claim to have had any personal experience that may be called supernatural or miraculous. In short, my discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith. (p93)

The 'pilgrimage of reason' soundbite could not be more perfectly chosen to delight and infuriate in equal measure.

The book is a good read. The Internet is also a good read, seeing some atheists build a case against the book using the same kind of tactics usually employed by cigarette companies, traffic lawyers, climate-change deniers or creationists, on the lines of 'the old boy lost it, very sad, and was bundled into the back of a van by evangelicals and forced to sign a script someone else had written for him.'

Actually, the book is clear that Flew became a Deist, and never stopped personally rejecting all the received religions. He didn't believe in an afterlife. He thought Christianity was the best available religion, but he didn't claim to embrace it, despite the admittedly gorgeous scholarship of N T Wright. All this is in the book. It's nice to find good and honest atheist commentators who recognize this, and who agree with the broadsheet obituaries of Flew, not least in the New York Times which put some journalistic resource into investigating the circumstances of the book. Flew had his marbles and after a lifetime of brilliant atheist philosophical discourse, took to believing that the universe was created by an infinite, immutable, omnipotent, First Cause. Flew's widow agreed that that was his position. The jeers and hoots coming from the Theist side may be in bad taste, but perhaps we should be allowed our little moment of fun. Remember, we also have to put up with Creationists and Republicans, and sometimes even have to call them 'brother'.

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Eliza Grizwold: The Tenth Parallel

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Accept no substitutes to a writer who travels to wild places and talks to people. Eliza Griswold (what a wonderful name, like something out of Dickens or Harry Potter) explores in her book the peoples of latitude ten degrees north of the equator. She concentrates on the human geography, the conflict between the desert and the sown, the aristocratic nomad and the dirt-digging farmer, and-- which is her real purpose -- between Islam and Christianity.

She's either fearless, or crazy, in her pursuit of former terrorists and other dodgy characters, as well as of the people who are perhaps just the collateral damage in this turbulent region-- the two Muslims who were to be caned for suspected adultery, who just wanted to marry so they would not be shamed, for example. She meets plenty of missionaries and zealots on both sides. On the way she is led to Christ by Franklin Graham, Billy's son, an experience that was evidently more satisfying to him than it was to her. Halfway round the world she meets a former mujahideen trying a new career selling beauty products. And on and on.


Eliza Griswold resists cynicism, stereotyping and the urge to fit what she is seeing into some coherent analysis.. The perhaps-overlooked daughter of a radical, liberal bishop, her very puzzled poking around in this confusion is to me almost a vital sign of a living faith. I loved the contrast she sees between her own nail-chewed hands with the worthily worn ones of her mother. This is doubt as the penumbra of bright belief; the opposite of faith is apathy and cynicism, not this.

. I only have one little caveat which is that her library-work isn't always quite as excellent as her reportage. Her footnotes sometimes lead us to other popular accounts, not authoritative sources, and there's the odd place where she's surely oversimplifying: 'Under the Roman Empire, the practice of Christianity was punishable by death until 313, when the Roman emperor Constantine officially legalized it.' (p 78).


What fun it would be to have such a fascinating person, and such a fine writer, round for dinner. Failing that, read this lovely book, after which you will know more, and understand less, about the people at the join between Islam and Christianity , an area mightily unwritten about and largely unknown to the Weatern world.


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Siddhartha Mukerjee: The Emperor of All Maladies

Best read when neither you nor anyone close to you has cancer, and so you can enjoy the story dispassionately, this is really good read. If only it were fiction. It's a biography of an enemy, its first appearances, its identification, and then the millennia-long human quest to find ways to kill it -- a story of knife-attacks, poisoning, irradiation, prevention, and now the subtle mapping of proteins and pathways in the cell, and the design of exquisitely shaped molecules to block them.

It's also a human story of politics, hubris, self-experimentation, and luck, all lashed into a froth by the deadly urgency of the task.

The author, himself a cancer doctor who clearly rides the rough road alongside his patients, left me with two conclusions.

First, like driving terrorists out of a city, cancer is being pushed back, block by block, though with many casualties. Survival rates increased by one percent per year for many years from the mid-1990s. No magic bullet here, then, just the patient accumulation of fine medicine.

Second, though, cancer does what living things do: multiply, mutate, adapt, innovate, fight on, refuse to die. Its strengths are life's strengths. In cancer, it's as if our own life-force slips its bonds and turns on us. Surveying current medical horizons, this book suggests that we may largely conquer cancer in the sense that perhaps one day few people will die young of it; but it will conquer us in that, in old age, even when everything else can be healed, it will be waiting for us.

My only criticism? One gets the impression that only in the United States has anyone fought cancer at all, with that collectivity of wusses known as 'Europe' just throwing in some not-much-needed logistical help now and again -- rather like the Iraq war.

Pulitzer prizes (unlike, in my view, many other prizes) are a reliable indicator of a good book. This super book puts all the dread things we see when people enter cancer wards--the chemo, the surgery, the remissions --into their proper places within a coherent, constantly interesting and rather gripping account.

Arthur C Clarke: The Fountains of Paradise

All Arthur C Clarke's books have the same underlying theme (though in some books it is underlying more deeply than others). The theme is 'Science, not religion, is the true locus for transcendence and wonder'. This theme is explicit in The Fountains of Paradise when a great mechanical elevator to the stars supplants an ancient religious stronghold and one chapter ends with this memorable summary of the religious point of view: 'the billions of words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries.'

I think this is Clarke's most personal book. Set in the fictional land of Taprabone, which is about 90% Sri Lanka according to the author, it's rich and vivid with detail about the land that he adopted as his home. It also comes as near as Clarke ever came to describing his personal life, the transcendent joy he felt while diving, weightless, adrift from all his worries; the being carried around the house by his personal staff. (Clarke suffered from polio and was wheelchair-bound for many years.)

Clarke is not at is best when describing politics and world affairs in his envisioned 22nd century. He is at his brilliant best when he is describing people in their battles with the laws of physics, and with envisioning alien life. This book starts in his weaker area but ends in his strongest. I think Rendezvous with Rama was better; but this is one of his best, and certainly his most revealing.

China Mieville: Kraken

Kraken by China Mieville

If science fiction was purring happily forward through the disciplined and physics-rich imaginations of, say, a Stephen Baxter or an Alastair Reynolds, then China Mieville has grabbed the steering wheel and done something with the car that I didn't even know you could. This--the first of his I've read-- is an astonishing, exhilarating book.

Sometimes a writer comes along who does something so drastic to an area of fiction that it is never the same again. I imagine Tolkein did it with fantasy; Terry Pratchett did it again when fantasy was already becoming too autistic and too generic. Douglas Adams blasted a hole into the kind of SF that made human progress the new religion: his machines didn't work, his ultimate dreams descended into farce and technology was an annoyance.

Kraken is best described as urban fantasy, and it takes us into a London-behind-London of warring cults, angels, sentient bits of Unix, Trekkies working magic, fire that devours backwards in time, and distinctly odd branches of the Metropolitan Police. Oh, and the many-legged bottled giant squid of the title. It's hardly science fiction, though Mieville's other books have three times won the prize that honours that arch-materialist Arthur C Clarke, who was himself, of course, a genre-changer by adding robust physics to the space stories from pulp magazines. Mieville's is a world where scepticism has pushed religion out of the front door, only to find the supernatural crawling, flying and oozing back in through every wall and floorboard.

A couple of caveats. The protagonists seem to have the kind of invulnerability more often bestowed on the likes of Indiana Jones or Harry Potter, which takes the edge off the supposedly ancient and all-conquering powers with whom they fight. And while Mieville's sparse, slightly wild writing is a delight, I got weary of the endless streams of f-words with which he populates his characters' dialogue.

Once you recover from the shock of realising what Mieville is doing, you find a compelling plot like a set of Russian dolls, plenty of a suspense and a satisfying ending.

A brilliant book, a literary Tungusta, which I absolutely loved.

Tom Wright on the future

Suprised by Hope by N.T. Wright

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book examines Christian hope for the future. The former Bishop of Durham robustly defends the bodily resurrection and from it works out a useful and useable theology. He emphasizes 'life after life after death', a new heavens and earth to which Jesus returns, and helpfully criticizes the fuzzy and low-res views of heaven and hell that most of us Christians default to. A renewed Universe in actual bodies is our future, and there's continuity with the present earth as well discontinuity with it. This has consequences for how we live now: nothing we do here is wasted. In justice, in beauty, in evangelism, in everything, we can build for the coming Kingdom.



This is a remarkable, radical, and eye-opening restatement of Christian hope, post-modern in the sense of criticizing modernism, and it makes me go back to the Bible to find out if what he is saying is true. Mostly I found him persuasive, and his fresh statement has many consequences. A simple gospel is one: A new Lord, Christ, has been installed in the world. His new rule is already among us. You can join in or not. What are you going to do?



As well as inaugurating a new creation, Wright claims the resurrection inaugurates a new way of knowing. Thomas starts by asking 'show me the evidence' but after encountering the risen Christ says 'My lord and my God'. Wright calls this 'an epistomology of love': science and history can get us a long way, but the resurrection breaks out of these categories of knowing and demands a new one. It's heady stuff, to my mind building upon the work of Leslie Newbiggin. Taken to heart, I can see it revitalizing the Christian message.



The downsides of this book?

The editors at SPCK appear to have gone AWOL and could have usefully been employed crossing out unnecessary sub-clauses, querying the odd tone of intellectual arrogance, and delousing the MS of tics like 'This won't do' and 'No, it's not' which grate when repeated as often as they are. It's a shame: Wright is brilliant, original, relevant and groundbreaking; he has written 50 books; but no-one has the editorial cojones to tell him he could write a lot better than he does. The more excited he gets, the more he over-writes and the worse it is to read.



But it's still worth it.



A smaller niggle is, unusually for such a carefully researched book, Wright makes the unverifiable statement that half of the human race is alive today. There is a lively debate about how many people have ever lived, and the estimates I see guess around 100 billion; so only 7% of the total population are alive today. In any case the book would be better without unthought-out asides like this.



Still. This is a landmark book that I think will change the way I think and act. Praise God for it.



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Diarmaid MacCullogh: A history of Christianity

MacCullogh's 1000-page offering is a story of the essential humanity of the church. He traces three thousand years of growth -- uncovering both Hebrew and Greek roots -- and inspects every forking branch, almost every leaf, the sorry and the sublime. His company is clear-eyed, coherent, at times waspish, at times even reverend as he describes with humanity the human extremes of skulduggery and saintliness.

His preference for the moderate left wing of the critical spectrum may bug conservatives, but they should stick with this book. Unlike many scholars, he knows the limitations of his subject and is capable of being sceptical about even his own scepticism. He rightly recognises the Resurrection as a singularity at the heart of the Christian story. Like the black hole assumed to be at the centre of the Milky Way, the whole Christian galaxy rotates around this single point; yet he knows this mysterious place cannot be explored with any tool in his historian's box.

McCullogh is a professed unbeliever in the truth of the Christian account; yet he describes it with wit and warmth, as well as a watchmaker's love of detail. He claims not to believe in Christ, yet can't leave alone the story of his followers, which he recognises is a story not all explicable to human minds. The beguiling result is a chequered story viewed in dappled light. A humane sceptic who can appreciate farce and isn't fazed by mystery is good company. My favourite, and for me the definitive, story-so-far of the Christian movement.

Banksy: Wall and Piece

Changed my view of graffiti.

The prodigal who didn't quite make it home

Rembrandt's Parable of the Prodigal Son  has the returnee resting his young, shaved head on his father's chest while the father's great rich cloak covers him -- an anguished baby, sleeping at last.  Marilynne Robinson's returning prodigal comes home to his father, is welcomed and loved, wants to love back, tries to love back, but never yet settles his head on his father's breast.

We try to love -- we fail to love -- we lose hope of ever loving -- yet in the trying and failing and losing hope love itself arrives: a hesitant presence. Nothing happens in this book: two letters, plenty of meals, a lot of gardening, a couple of visits to church, some games of scrabble.Yet breathing gets a little hard in the final few pages.

The OED

My family didn't get this at all when I enthusiastically shared how I now had access to the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the definitive guide to the largest language in the known universe, and it hides behind a paywall. But I found I can access it for free by using my library card -- our local library subscribes to it.

So now when I want to look up:

hi-hat

or

scrip

as I needed to two days ago or discover whether the word 'luck' is derived from the word 'Lucifer,' I can. (It isn't).

It's like getting the keys to the linguistic universe. What a resource. What a discovery. So why do my family look at me so strangely?