Collected Miscellany

Like so many, a big part of my becoming a devoted reader at a young age was the magical books of fantasy writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.  I jumped from these “classics” to many others (magical worlds like the humorous  Xanth and the adventurous Pern).  And I still read fantasy; even young adult fantasy like Harry Potter and the explosion of works that followed in the wake of that phenomenon.

So when The Magicians by Lev Grossman was released it seemed a must read.  Here is the publishers blurb:

Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he’s still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery.

He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. Something is missing, though. Magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he dreamed it would. After graduation he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin’s fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined. His childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.

I read the book in August but haven’t had a chance to put my thoughts down.  What follows is an attempt to rectify that.

What Lev Grossman attempts to do in The Magicians is both bring this shared love of childhood fantasy adventures into a more adult-like world but also ask the question: “What if something like Narnia really existed?”  These two concepts make up the bulk of the book but they do not always work together.

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Laura Miller had a problem.  When she was young she was absolutely captivated and enthralled with the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis.  Given a copy of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by a school teacher she dove in an entered a new world.  Things would never be the same.

But eventually she grew older and began to find out things about Lewis and Narnia that changed her relationship with the series: the Christian underpinnings of the story, Lewis’s world view and political opinions, etc.  But as she pursued a career as a literary critic she decided to return to these books and she found there was still much about them that she loved.

The road that had once seemed to lead to free and open country had in reality doubled back to church.  Now I was trying to explain why my damning adolescent assessment of Chronicles wasn’t entirely sufficient, either.  As an adult, I’d discovered that I could follow Lewis pretty far without feeling obliged to return to Christianity, and that the old sensations of freedom, of wilderness in Narnia, remained.

She sets out to make sense of this journey.  The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia is her answer in book form.

I guess you would have to put Magician’s Book into the category of creative non-fiction.  Good thing too, because otherwise it would be hard to categorize.  Part memoir, literary criticism, biography, and current events reporting it frequently slides between childhood memories, academic criticism, Freudian analysis, personal opinion, and interviews with other authors.

Sometimes this manages to flow and hold together in a coherent way and at others the transitions are a little rough.  I found the sections dealing with Lewis’s faith and politics were the least convincing – but perhaps that is my bias – but the book as a whole remains an insightful and engaging look at Lewis and Narnia.

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Well, actually just a little to this particular corner of it.  Most of the time the content on this site seems entirely random and haphazard.  All too often it actually is.  Little planning or forethought goes into it and that effects the quality.  As part of a sort of New Year’s Resolution I discussed bringing some focus to this site by reading more from a particular author and on particular subjects.  And that idea is about to come to fruition.

The first focus, or theme if you will, of this year is myths and fables.  The idea is to explore in both fiction and non, the idea and practice of myths, fables, and stories.  Now, I am not an academic and don’t plan on presenting an online seminar or anything. It just means my reading, and thus my reviews, will be tied together by this thread.  Not all of it necessarily, but a chunk of it.

Just to give you a taste of what is coming, here are some of the books that will be reviewed and discussed in the coming days and weeks:

• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
• The Magician’s Book: a Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia by Laura Miller
• The Narnian by Alan Jacobs
• A number of books from Cannongate Myth Series
• A number of young adult fantasy books.

I hope to be able to have the time and energy to write about all of this in a way that presents a semi-coherent theme.  Not by explicitly tying them all together but simply by allowing you to see the similar ideas and threads that naturally connect them.

I also have planned some reading on intellectuals I have long admired and studied.  Two in particular I will be reading on this year are William F. Buckley and George F. Kennan.  So stay tuned for that as well.

I hope this process will help me focus my writing and at the same time make reading this site more enjoyable and interesting.  Maybe the miscellany will be a little more collected that way.