What's Elizabeth Reading? ... Lewis

I am so behind it is mildly embarrassing. I'm contemplating making this blog my New Year's Resolution. We'll see if that happens. I might just make it my resolution to graduate college with my BA and get a job all while keeping my sanity. That's enough of a goal for one person, right?

I have a deep love for C.S. Lewis and have loved him since I first read Mere Christianity. My older brother gave me a copy of the book for Christmas this year, by the way. I was and still am really excited. I love that book. Anyway, if it came down to it, I might say that C.S. Lewis is my favorite author, but you'd have to understand what I mean by that. I absolutely adore Charles Dickens's writing, but the guy had an affair that lasted years, as far as I remember. Not the coolest guy. Jane Austen always promises a wonderful read, but she talked her sister out of marrying the man she loved (again, if I remember right), so that's rather hypocritical. Okay, it's not hypocritical if you only consult Sense and Sensibility, but that book's ending was a major downer. There isn't a contemporary author who has snagged my attention and adoration yet, unless you count Shane Koyczan, but he's not an author. He's a spoken-word poet. So what I'm saying, then, is that I love C.S. Lewis because not only was he a genius, but he also was a good person. I mean, the man personally replied to every letter he got from a child. It can't get much better than that.

I once said C.S. Lewis is one dead person I would be honored to have over for dinner. When my friend responded with something about having a corpse over for dinner, I said I'd still be honored to have it in the room, but would probably want it to stay in the coffin, because I'm pretty sure having a corpse sit next to you at the dinner table would disturb your appetite.

It was with sadness that I stopped being in denial over the fact that I had never read The Chronicles of Narnia, despite my love for Lewis. With some free time on my hands resulting from the end of the semester, I set out to read the entire series. It took me about a week., much less time than I thought it would take. The reasons are twofold: One, before I started reading, I didn't realize they would be such an easy read. Two, my older brother kept bugging me about how slowly I was reading them. There's no motivation quite like trying to escape harassment.

End result: the books only confirmed my adoration of Lewis. They were children's books after the old fashion, like Alice in Wonderland or The Little Prince, where imagination is explored and children are praised for their ability to believe. This being C.S. Lewis, of course, the books had Christian themes. For Christians out there considering reading these books for yourself or to your children, know that they helped to illustrate the love of God like little else I have ever read.

But you don't have to have the Bible memorized, or even read, to get the story. As the poet Jane Hirschfield once told me, a story or poem should be easily comprehensible for anyone reading it, but there could be deeper meaning beneath for those who wish to sit and think about it. The Narnia books are like that.

One other thing I loved about these books was how they were narrated. Reading The Chronicles of Narnia didn't feel like reading a book; rather, it felt like I, as a person instead of an audience, was being told a story. Before this, I hadn't realized there was much of a difference. The difference is that instead of falling headlong into the story and becoming oblivious to the world around me, I felt like the story was being told as if Lewis was sitting in an armchair by the fire, talking as a grandpa would to his grandchildren.

Here are some fun and blatant examples to show what the narrator did that I loved. The parentheses are in the text itself:

"He had no wife and lived in a very large house with a housekeeper called Mrs. Macready and three servants. (Their names were Ivy, Margaret and Betty, but they do not come into the story much.)"

 "The whole crowd of liberated statues surged back into the courtyard. And it was then that someone (Tumnus, I think) first said . . ."

This one came after some dialogue by a beaver:

"This was bad grammar, of course, but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia - in our world, they usually don't talk at all."

His narration was, for me, endearing. Yes, it pulled me out of the story, but it didn't do it so much that it was annoying. I'm sure that Lewis did it on purpose; acknowledgement of the real world and the reader's life actually made the book more believable.