​The world of graphic novels nowadays is more expansive and innovative than ever. Outside the big hitters from the likes of Marvel and Doctor Who, there is a whole myriad of quirky and fascinating work that seems to be getting more and more niche by the minute, so much so that it can be difficult for someone new to the genre to know what’s worth reading. However, with the new American and Canadian ice hockey season just getting underway, one series that deserves spotlighting is Ngozi Ukazu’s Check, Please!, a nostalgic and heartwarming story about a university hockey team, pies, growing up, and above all, friendship. 

​Ferenc Karinthy was a novelist, playwright, journalist and apparently water polo champion from Hungary. He died in 1992, leaving over a dozen novels behind, but it wasn’t until 2008 that his work was first translated into English. And so it was that Metropole began its march across Europe, a dystopian novel fittingly about the rapid acceleration of globalisation, the blurring of nationalities and the loss of identity. With its stark and bludgeoning writing style, it’s a reading experience as confusing and bewildering as the megacity dystopia it depicts. 

It’s a curious thing to be told by an author, who has written a book on a subject, that the truth of said subject is only ‘concealed by explaining it’. That a major branch of the world’s fourth largest religion has ‘nothing to say, nothing to teach’. Philosophies and schools of thought in the west have been much more characterised by grand abstraction and complex conceptual frameworks, authors whose ability to think is much greater than their ability to commit their thoughts to paper. Alan Watts' The Way of Zen provides a detailed historical view of the origins of Zen Buddhism and an almost artistic summary of the Zen approach to reality. Though old and many such books have come in its place since, it remains one of the best introductions to Zen in English. ​

I’ve tried to write about this book several times since I first read it back in June; every attempt I make seems to fizzle a few sentences in. I read Charlie Jane Anders’ first novel, All the Birds in the Sky, during a particularly depressing summer, and it sparked something hopeful in me that I thought I’d lost. It’s a book about talking to animals and building supercomputers, and it is beautiful and charming and kind, in as much as a book can be kind. I loved Anders’ vision, her aesthetics, her narrative voice.
 
So I had been eagerly anticipating her follow-up release, The City in the Middle of the Night, for quite some time, and after I’d read it I loved it too. I’m writing this because I want to explain why. Maybe this time I’ll even manage it. 

It’s been a year to really get you thinking, and think I did. For almost half of the year I was on furlough, leaving me with more free time on my hands than I had had in years. Time that I spent thinking and reading, and reading and thinking, and thinking about what I’d been reading – which led me to reading philosophy. I’m going to share with you a couple of the books that really stuck with me in the hopes that you can read them too and start to see philosophy, like I have, as an anchor in a choppy sea and a safe place to call home.