Narnia Week: The Magicians and The Magician King

"You HAVE to read this book," Nathan said, and he put The Magicians in my hands. "It's like Harry Potter for grown-ups. But better."

Actually, I think it's more like Harry Potter meets Narnia meets The Phantom Tollbooth, for grownups. I don't even want to tell you anything about the plot, because it's so amazing, you'll want that "reading for the first time" feeling to be completely unspoiled. But to start, you have a young man, Quentin, who is about to graduate high school, and feels there is something missing, at some deep, fundamental level, from his life. When he is whisked away to take a test for a very special academy, Brakebills, his life changes in more ways than he could have imagined.

Somehow these books manage to cram in allusions and references, and never once be derivative. Lev Grossman's writing is biting, bitter but funny, and completely captivating.

Even better--in a rare trick for a sequel--is The Magician King, which continues the story of Quentin with his desire to go on a quest. This is to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader what the first book is to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe--again, very much the grown-up version. Interspersed with that quest is the harrowing story of Julie, Quentin's childhood friend who missed out on the magic of Brakebills college, but found it again on her own, darker path.

I cannot rave about these books enough. Please read them. They are darkly beautiful, captivating, frightening--everything Narnia for grown-ups should be.

Narnia Week: The Life and Faith of C.S. Lewis

The Life and Faith of C.S. Lewis: The Magic Never Ends is another one I spotted incidentally at the library, and as I have been going through a bit of a Lewis phase lately, reading his work more widely than I have in the page, I thought I'd check it out. Also it's only an hour and twenty minutes, so I didn't think it could be that much of a waste of time.

Well, it wasn't THAT much of a waste of time, though frankly, I was pretty disappointed. This movie is like... for Christians who have never heard of C.S. Lewis? I guess? I'm not really sure what they were going for here, although maybe they weren't sure, either, and that's why the video was so generally disorganized. It skipped around through time AND theme, not really settling on anything long enough to be interesting. The interviews with people who flinched away from the details of Lewis's life were actually embarrassing after Laura Miller's direct and respectful analysis of how his personal life influenced his fiction.

I wouldn't recommend this unless you are a huge Lewis fan, and if you are a huge Lewis fan, this video doesn't have anything new. There are interviews with both his stepsons, which was interesting for a moment. But every time they started to get past the basic plot of one of his book, or talk about a little more detail of his life, the video veered away into the next topic, and I'm sorry, but I just don't need you to tell me the plot of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I say this AS a Lewis fan, but honestly, the best parts of this video were the harp music in the menu, and Ben Kingsley narrating.

Narnia Week: The Magician's Book by Laura Miller

I know a lot of fairy tale lovers don't count The Chronicles of Narnia as fairy tales. I grew up loving them--my mom read them to my sister and me every couple years, until I started reading them on my own--and as I got older and read more about them, I discovered that C.S. Lewis had a passion for mythology, and intended the Chronicles as fairy tales. With that in mind, I feel it's only fair to mention them on this blog.

The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia, caught my eye one day at the library. I, personally, have gotten tired of people dismissing the Chronicles as "just a bunch of Christian symbolism." Sure, there is a good dose of that, but I don't think I enjoy them nearly so much if that were all they were.

And apparently I am not the only one who feels that way.

Laura Miller, who's agnostic, went through her rebellious teenage phase, and around that time she read an incidental citation of the Chronicles that listed them as "Christian allegory" (which, if you've looked at literary types, the chronicles are not classifiable as allegory). She felt so betrayed that she'd never seen it before that she gave them up and swore never to read them again.

Except she LOVES them. So eventually she went back and explored them for other merit.

The book isn't the most organized non-fiction I've ever read. It reads more like one of those organic, train-of-thought conversations you have with a good friend, you know what I'm talking about? Where one thing leads to another, and so you don't necessarily have an organized essay of thought, but you have a really good, enjoyable conversation. It's fairly witty, quite observant, and pulls in a lot of other fairy tales and literature, as well as giving a lot of background about Lewis, stuff like his friendship with his brother, and with Tolkien. And it talks about some of his other works as well.

The BASIC premise is: you don't have to be Christian to enjoy the Chronicles, and if you ARE Christian, you shouldn't only consider the Christian symbolism, because the books have a lot of literary merit aside from that.

So. Very interesting read, I think you'd like it.