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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: The Magicians Book, Most Recent at Top [Help]
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1. What I'm Reading: The Magician's Book


From the introduction: 

"A lot of people remember the bliss of their earliest reading with a pang; their current encounters with books offer no more than faint echoes of what they once felt. I've heard friends and strangers talk about the days when they, too, would submerge themselves in a story, surfacing only to eat and deal with the minimal daily business of childhood. They wonder why they don't get as much out of books now. If you dig deep to the roots of what makes someone a reader, you'll usually find the desire to recapture that old spell."

Maybe that's what makes a writer, too. I admit that it's hard to completely lose myself in a book these days--I'm either admiring or critiquing or learning from it. As a child, I read so deeply that my mother once had to sprinkle my head with her watering can. But when I write, and it's going well, I do feel under that spell. I also realize that I've always told myself stories---elaborate sagas in which I released Spock's inner emotional life and natural passion (I must really, really trust you guys), or terrifying tales about that loose bedroom window screen or yes, how I would meet Tumnus the Faun and have mercy on his Witch-tortured soul. I just didn't always write those stories down. (Thank God!)

Like Lucy, I have no idea whether I'm going to find the back of the wardrobe or the snowy branches of Narnia each time I sit down to work. But who can resist looking? 

You can win a signed author's copy of The Magician's Book from Laura's official site if you share a photo of a Narnia-like place. How perfect.

3 Comments on What I'm Reading: The Magician's Book, last added: 1/15/2009
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2. Laura Miller and The Magician's Book

Laura Miller is a vigorous reader; the reviews and essays she writes—for Salon.com, for New York Times, for New Yorker, those stature zones—speed forward with a sort of exhilarating fury, a faith in books and their significance, and a determination to say precisely what she means. If I haven't always agreed with her (do two people ever see eye to eye on every book?), I've always greatly admired her, and when David Foster Wallace died so tragically a few weeks ago, it was Laura's words to which I turned first; she wouldn't appease, she wouldn't heal, but she might help me understand.

Laura has a new book due out soon, The Magician's Book, and its premise intrigues. It's the story of a woman—Laura herself—who fell deeply in love with the Narnia tales as a child and grew disenchanted as a teen. Finally, she allowed her adult self a rebounded intrigue, allowed herself to return to the land of Narnia. What had C.S. Lewis done with his tales to bring this child in? How had it shaped what and how she would read later? Who else had fallen under Narnia's spell? What in the end makes for a literary reader?

http://www.magiciansbook.com/

All this past week, perhaps even more, I've been talking about The Book Thief with my friend Andra. She read it after I did, we wrote nearly each day of its power. Two nights ago, she turned its final page, and when her husband arrived home, he found her devastated, not wishing to leave the company of the characters she'd met. As I'd lived this, too, as I still have not escaped The Book Thief's spell, I understood. I recognized, in Andra, a kindred heart, a reader who, in Miller's words, pays exuberant attention.

Laura Miller has spent an entire life paying attention to books. I'm betting that we should pay attention to this one.

I'm also wondering what books have seized your heart and have changed who you've become.

5 Comments on Laura Miller and The Magician's Book, last added: 10/3/2008
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