Bookish Thoughts

On January 4th, I realized that there were over two months of winter left. With the holidays behind me and heaps of cold, dreary weather to look forward to, I found myself breathing a sigh of relief. "Always winter, never Christmas" doesn't sound so bad, I thought to myself. And I immediately became curious if it were possible to ascribe a grief narrative to the White Witch. She is, after all, the last surviving person of her entire world. Before I knew it, I had re-read the entirety of The Magician's Nephew . Which, no, isn't the first book in the series according to most. But it has Jadis' backstory, which is what I was interested in. It turns out that there isn't a lot of nuance to Jadis, which isn't the most surprising thing in the world. Narnia is both a children's book and a religious allegory. Sympathetic, nuanced villains don't really fit. Jadis destroyed her world because she was evil. She killed her own sister with the magical equival...

I came to Narnia later than I probably should have, though there was no one to blame for that but myself. I'd been gifted the series twice before I finally got around to reading them sometime in middle school. And even then I was so lacking in a religious upbringing that the religious allegory went right over my head. I only barely understood why the humans might be referred to as Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve. After learning a bit more about the relationship between these books and Christianity, I decided to give the series another read. But that was derailed when I came across Harry Potter. I always sort of meant to revisit Narnia, but it never happened. And then we had a March snow day during which I was only half longing for Spring, and I decided it was the perfect time to pick up The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and experience the long, cold winter giving way to Spring at last. Several things surprised me on this re-read. The first was how short the ...