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Tag: Narnia

Review: The Magicians, Lev Grossman

Whoa, how did I not review this yet?  I thought I had – but apparently I only thought about it, A LOT, and then forgot to do it because I was reading through the Amelia Peabody books.  (Still fun!) The Magicians is about a boy called Quentin Coldwater who is obsessed with a series of books about a fictional land, Fillory.  One day, he interviews for and gets into a school of magic, Brakebills, and he spends the next lots of years learning magic, and practicing magic, and eventually (is this spoilers?  I feel like no, because you see it…

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C.S. Lewis: Letters to Children, eds. Lyle W. Dorsett & Marjorie Lamp Mead

So my life has been in a smidgy bit of an uproar lately, for various reasons – my library card expired, for one thing, right on the day that half my books were due to get renewed!  I had no idea the expiration date was so soon; it feels like I just renewed it a few weeks ago.  And, see, I have this friendly blue library card with an elegant number that I have memorized, and it has one of the earliest extant drafts of my signature, which I had only invented recently when I got the card in 2001. …

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Booking Through Thursday

I like this one: This can be a quick one. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. So here are my fifteen books that will always stick with me, more or less in the order in which they entered my life: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte Emily Climbs, L.M .Montgomery Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card Macbeth, William Shakespeare The Chosen, Chaim Potok The Color Purple, Alice Walker Harry Potter and…

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The Child that Books Built, Francis Spufford

I read about this on Nick Hornby’s Waterstone’s “Writer’s Table” – authors pick out books that are supposed to have “shaped their writing”, and they write little reviews in a few words.  I can’t remember why I was looking at Nick Hornby’s Waterstone’s Writer’s Table – although Nick Hornby is absolutely inextricably linked in my mind to the month I spent in London in 2005.  There was a heat stroke in the second week of July, and the dorm where we were staying didn’t have air conditioning of course, and my room was on the third (American fourth) floor, so…

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The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis

I have argued with myself long and hard before giving this a “favored authors” category, because actually I don’t like C.S. Lewis as a person. I do not favor him at all. I think he was a bit of a sexist jerk, and the reason I don’t read the Chronicles of Narnia more often is that I think C.S. Lewis is a jerk and I’m always saying to myself, Well why would I want to read the books of such a jerk? And then, of course, since I’ve been reading the Narnia books since I was three (I mean, I…

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