HRSFANS.org

Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book is a lit-crit-cum-memoir of loving, losing, and making peace with the Chronicles of Narnia. (I have made my way through this book only one third at a time, with one third yet to be read on the next go-round from the library. The second third was quite difficult for me.) Miller read the Narnia books passionately, with utter absorption, between about ages 9 and 14, until she was clued in to the books’ Christian symbolism (generally regarded as fairly obvious).  At that age, Miller was even more passionately disillusioned with the Catholic Church: she felt the need to reject Narnia, feeling betrayed.  The rest of The Magician’s Book comprises the musings of Miller, with input from many other Narnia-experiencers, on why she loved the works, what there is not to love about them, and how she, well into adulthood and her own career as a literary critic, came to terms again with what ‘in one sense will always be the best book I’ve ever read’ (Lion, Witch &c.). Philip Pullman’s thinking and writing makes a more than cursory appearance, as is to be expected; Miller has previously written about Pullman specifically in connection with Lewis.

Some of Miller’s material was garnered from a Salon.com set of conversations with readers; though I’m having trouble finding links to those pages, there’s also a recent conversation with Miller posted on Salon regarding The Magician’s Book.

Early in Miller’s work I discovered C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, a delightful little volume the central suggestion of which is that the value of a book lies perhaps less in how it is written and more in how it is read. I’ll be obtaining that from the library again momentarily, and will no doubt share more.

I am thisclose to agreeing to teach again for the MIT student-run summer program for high school and middle school students, HSSP. If you’d like to do the same, or to do it with me, great!

And if you’d like to advise me on the course I am thinking of putting together, also great. I set up a Google Groups page for discussion on my curriculum. I’d love input!

The basic idea will be explorations into the process of reading and the experience of stories. I came to this idea through a recent penchant for philosophizing on reading. Speculative fiction often provides excellent metaphors for the reading experience–Narnia being an obvious example, and David Brin’s Kiln People one of my favorites. I’d like to take that as one day’s theme, and also expand/expound (or, better yet, lead discussions) on different literary forms, how we experience them and how we’re meant to experience them.

Help much appreciated! Respond here, by email, or through my Google Groups page (which I might like best because then my other friends who are willing to help can weigh in).

I stared at the computer for some time before beginning to write this.  Decompression time.  Sometimes coming out of a book really is like rising out of deep water, isn’t it—bends and all.

Today the book is Orson Scott Card’s The Worthing Saga. Other days it may be Anne Perry’s Tathea, or David Brin’s Kiln People, or Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry.

And there’s no need even to get me started on Martha Cooley’s The Archivist–I am quite sure I have already written more about it than anyone else wants to know.

Part of the agreement I made in beginning to post to this weblog was to write about what I’m reading. I suppose I’ll start by writing about how I read.

I read many works in parallel, because my tastes change with mercurial alacrity (okay, so I just wanted to use the word “alacrity”), and more importantly because I frequently want time to digest a chapter or scene in a story. (This makes me the perfect kind of reader to adore the Amazon Kindle, and indeed I do. Mine is named “The Guide, Mark II.”) My philosophy of reading holds that I owe nothing to a book merely because I begin to read it. I will quite happily discard a book after 3 pages, 100, or 300, rarely looking back. However, if I do intend to finish a book, I shoulder the (occasionally awesome) responsibility of learning the characters on their own terms, of allowing them their full measure of existence.

I loaned The Archivist to a friend who reads entirely differently from me (who once as an escape read half of War and Peace in two days, and feels compelled to finish every book he starts). The next morning he handed it back with a simple, “It was good. Let’s talk later.” His major critique of the book was that Ms. Cooley should have let the ideas percolate another 20 years or so before writing the book: it seemed a “green” undertaking to him. Although he may have a point, I still feel I too had a point when I responded, “Who are you to say that? You didn’t even give her two days.”

I have a friend who for several intense months at age 11 or so went around murmuring scenes from Lord of the Rings under her breath, imagining herself tromping along as a tenth member of the Fellowship. Another who has spoken of planning lighting schemes and camera angles as if to stage and film favorite scenes from stories. My imagination works differently. I rarely see the characters of whom I read, though I sometimes see through their eyes. I hear them speak, but it always sounds like my own voice. I feel my body move their gestures. I suppose I try personally to experience the story.

Which is more or less how, in the world of The Worthing Saga, telepathy works. If they “look into the minds” of others, the telepaths experience those others’ memories as their own. This can cause all sorts of philosophical/psychological quandaries if the “viewee” is a very different sort of person from the telepath, who has done very different things, had (to the telepath) inconceivable reactions to the stimuli of life. Twice so far in Worthing there have been conversations where one character says to another, “Your life is more real to me than mine. How did you take my life from me?” But it’s not that anyone’s life is erased—just that the overwhelming force of someone else’s strongest memories may seem more evocative than one’s own “normal” life.

The more I read, especially in good speculative fiction, the more metaphors I find for the reading experience. I think this one, from Card, will last me for a while. And of course Card is the author who wrote, in a 1991 introduction to Ender’s Game, “The ‘true’ story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. … The story is the one that you and I will construct together in your memory.” I hope all my favorite authors have such faith in me. I hope I may live up to that faith.