Splash du Jour: Thursday

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.
-- Anne Lamott --

Have a great Thursday!

Papa Bear Is Gone.

From as early on as I can remember remembering anything memorable, I loved words. And loved reading words.
In elementary school, grade two to be exact, I began recording in a little notebook all of the titles of the books I had read. I also wrote a little review of each. Sort of like “This one, real good” or “This one, not so good.” And I would record how many pages the book contained!
At Christmas I would add up all the pages and then tell people.
Stuff like that. Of course, my mother saw this literary journal of mine. She knew I was reading all the time, while normal kids were playing outside.
Well, one day she brought the book to the parent-teacher interview, and she showed my Grade Two teacher, Mrs Okrainetz. [Doesn’t she just sound mean? Like a real cackling broomstick-rider?]
Mrs Okrainetz basically told my mom that I was lying to her, that there was no possible way that I could have read all of those books.
When my mom told me this, I cried. Because the thing is, I was not lying.
All of this preamble is just to establish the fact that when I was a kid, I read every book I could get my hands on. Literally. When I ran out of library books I would take down a volume of The World Book Encyclopedia, and look at it for hours.
I remember loving those books about Clifford, the big red dog. Curious George, too. Winnie-The-Pooh. Pippy Longstocking. Paddington Bear. [I loved Paddington Bear.] Then I read tons of the Enid Blyton books, The Fabulous Five series. And The Hardy Boys. And very early on, probably at what was then a real foundational level, I fell for the Babar elephants, and... The Berenstain Bears.

Surely everyone reading this has read the Berenstain Bears. Or has read the Berenstain Bears to a son or daughter perhaps. Their little meaningful adventures make the latter-day Care Bears and Smurfs look, well... asinine!
The Berenstain Bears were created by Stan and Jan Berenstain, who began drawing together when they met at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art in 1941. Along with Theodor Geisel (better known as Dr Suess) the couple developed the series with the goal of teaching children to read while entertaining them with great stories and wonderful artwork.
The first Bear book, entitled The Big Honey Hunt, was published in 1962. From that point onward, Stan and Jan never ceased writing and illustrating the series, publishing more than 250 books in the next four decades.

Sadly, Stan Berenstain passed away on Saturday, Nov.26th, in Pennsylvania. He was 82 years old. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his two sons. A private memorial service was scheduled for today.
And so it is that I sit here at Starbucks tonight, in the Chapters bookstore. I’m drinking a cup of coffee, and musing over the fact that I am almost exactly as old as their first book. [I was born in ’63.] And I am thinking that I am thankful for the contribution that the Berenstains made in that little segment of my own childhood history. The moments I spent with their books.
Tonight, half a lifetime later, I am sitting in a place that has a little shelf devoted to the Berenstains, over in the Kid’s section. I sauntered over there and retrieved a few, just now. As I leaf through them, I wonder which of these, if any, were an entry in my notebook journal of long ago....

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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

"In one sense it could even be said that, letter-by-letter, word-by-word, page-by-page, book after book, I have been successively implanting in the man I was the characters I created. I believe that without them I wouldn't be the person I am today; without them maybe my life wouldn't have succeeded in becoming more than an inexact sketch, a promise that like so many others remained only a promise, the existence of someone who maybe might have been but in the end could not manage to be."
-- Jose Saramago, from his Nobel Lecture, 1998 –

Have a great Wednesday!

The Way We Were...

Do you ever just sit around and flip through old photo-albums of past girlfriends?
I do.
That’s what I am doing right now, sitting at this Starbucks, after work. On the way out the door this morning I took this one photo album I have. It’s the best one. At a whim, I just threw it in my backpack.
So I am now here, sipping good coffee, and walking through the corridors of time.

I sure have gone out with some fine fine girls. Sometimes, for more than a month, even.
There’s ______ [name witheld]. We really had great times, I’m telling you. But it all ended due to irreconcilable differences. I wanted to read books all the time. She wanted to do all kinds of other stuff.
Then here’s one of ______ [name witheld]. The first thing we ever did together was have a snowball fight, after being introduced to each other by mutual friends earlier in the evening. I pelted her with a few beauties, but then man, she nearly killed me with a direct hit, right on the shnozz. I fell for her smile, and her incredible aim. I love a girl with good aim.
All of these pictures really take me back.
But then I turned the page.... and oh my!
There she was.
That’s her picture, right there at the top of this blog.

So she’s got a bit of a nose, yes... [you learn to work around it] but seriously now, I’m revealing to you here the love of my life and I will not take kindly to any untoward remarks about her rather unique....... appearance!
As soon as I saw this picture again, it was like I heard the opening strains of that ancient Streisand song.... you know the one.... “Memories. Like the corners of my mind. Misty water-colored memories......”

I look away, but the music does not stop.

“Scattered pictures, of the smiles we left behind........”
Admittedly, it was a very brief affair. But all the same, I am left here this evening, filled with thoughts of the way we were.....

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all of my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say “This is it,” had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed. All that such watching and waiting ever could find would be either an image (Asgard, the Western Garden, or what not) or a quiver in the diaphragm. I should never have to bother again about these images or sensations. I knew now that they were merely the mental track left by the passage of Joy – not the wave but the wave’s imprint on the sand. The inherent dialectic of desire itself had in a way already shown me this; for all images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in the last resort, “It is not I, I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?”
-- C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, chap.14, para.11 –

Today is C.S. Lewis’s birthday! He is 107.
Happy Birthday Jack!

Have a great Tuesday, ye all!

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Early Christmas Advice.

Here we go, I am going to help you get a bit of your Christmas shopping out of the way.
Here is the scenario.
See, I know that you are perplexed about which two books to buy someone very near and dear to you. So all I am doing tonight is easing the burden a bit.
Have they ever read any Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul?
Oh, if they haven’t they really should.
Seriously.
There’s only about 26 shopping days left!
So... the first book you are going to go out and buy is called A House For Mr Biswas.

This book was a selection in a reading group I once was a part of, and we were unanimous in our enjoyment of it. It was our highest rated of all the books we had read over an eighteen month period, and remains as one of my all-time favorite novels.
It is set in postcolonial Trinidad, and is filled with the wonderful idioms of Trinidadian English.
Mr Biswas' expectations and dreams are not all that grandiose (or so it would seem). I mean, all the poor guy wants is a house of his own, some dignity and privacy... some distance between his own family and the irritations of his in-laws, the pushy, domineering Tulsis.
But all of his efforts seem to meet with calamity. Time after time, through events hilarious, but at times, downright sad, we learn to love to pity Mr Biswas.
We follow him through a plethora of jobs, from sign painter and plantation overseer [Mr Biswas miserable] to hilariously inventive and ever-optimistic journalist [Mr Biswas happy].
We continue to hope his ship will come in, and we stay with him throughout his entire life as son, husband, father, and family man until his final triumph... a very peculiar house of his own.

The strength of the book is in how Naipaul uses humor to portray the un-funny struggle that people in impoverished circumstances face when trying to reach even modest goals.
As such, Mr Biswas' world is presented as realistically bleak as ever, in a novel that isn't.
A poignant book, maybe even flawless.
Then, the second book you are buying, is Miguel Street.

There's no two ways about it... this book is funny. Witty. Endlessly sarcastic. There I am, reading it in the park, and laughing out loud in certain parts, like a bit of a loonie!
At one point, the author calls what he's doing here "sketches". That's exactly what it is... connected vignettes. Observations of the lives that make up Miguel Street, a street in Port of Spain, Trinidad. It is all set down and seen through the eyes of a young, fatherless boy.
It is written with such a clear eye that it seems autobiographical, and here on Miguel Street we see the germ or the kernel of many of the characters that Naipaul would develop further in A House For Mr Biswas which he published two years after this one.
Ah, it is too good. The language, the idioms, the vernacular here are priceless... 1940's Trinidad bursts into view.
A little book with big laughs!
Get these two books for someone you really like. For Christmas.

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Splash du Jour: Monday

“For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are the ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food.”
-- Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird –

Have a great Monday!

A Shelf of Lewisness.

A while ago, (I cannot recall exactly when it was) I mentioned that I would bloggify a photo of the specific area of my bookshelves devoted to the work of C.S. Lewis.
Here is the picture.
I’ve scaled it down considerably to fit on this page, and some detail is thereby lost, but every book is written by Lewis or else is written about Lewis.
And I have pretty much read them all, several times over, in most cases. I even have a few more, which do not fit on the shelf... you could say that my apartment is rather generously littered with Lewisness.
The little framed picture next to the Narnias is a neat little conversation starter.
“Oh, is this your grandfather?”
“Yes, in a way I suppose you could say that he is....”
Then, from there, I launch into a soliloquy of what C.S. Lewis means to me.

COMING SOON: A retrospective of all of the Starbucks artwork, adorning my walls.

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A Garden of Roses

I was going to keep this poem to myself until Valentine’s Day, but no, I'll send it forth today.
Ahhh.... spoken like a true schizophrenic!
I send it out, hoping that most of my readers cannot relate whatsoever to the first three verses and can totally identify with the fourth.

A Garden of Roses

Leaving once fragrant paths only magnifies
their differences. Neither can count the dreams
They no longer share, and there
the moist flower fades and dies.

Now they starve, where once a feast
was served. And forgetting that love is weakness
Unyielding… the one wielding
the most power, loves the least.

Too common is this marriage of thorns.
All said and done is rubbed raw and stripped of life;
No moisture… drought, strife
reign here, where love is scorned.

But to meet two lovers as one, that care…
Ah, here is a walk through a garden of roses;
Smell the earth, for there is birth
and rain here… yet all too rare.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2005

Kass.

The Beginning of Wisdom, by Leon R. Kass.
After two decades of studying the Bible and consulting books about the Bible, I can honestly say that I have never read anything as lucid, informative, thorough, illuminating, and critically relevant as Kass's book on Genesis.
It is unlike any other commentary I am aware of, in that, rather than being set up as a standard verse-by-verse exposition, it follows the ideas and the storyline of Genesis in a coherent, chronological format.
Nothing is omitted from discussion, or avoided, every verse is treated, but always in a way that lends itself to a greater understanding of the integrated whole of Genesis.
Kass's expert interaction with the text is a result of his twenty years of teaching a seminar on Genesis, and his commitment to the premise that "to discover the meaning, a text must be studied in its own terms." (p.14).What we need is "a disinterested and philosophic pursuit of the truth" (p.2). By "disinterested" Kass means a pursuit without an agenda, without a bias (without prior assumptions, religious or otherwise) and by "philosophic", he simply means "wisdom-seeking".
And by "truth", well, to me that is one of the great things about the book... the author believes that there IS such a thing as truth, and wisdom, for that matter. A seemingly rare position to hold, among today's modern academia. It may be an approach that does not work for every reader, but it works for me.
He says that there are three methodological assumptions on how to read Genesis. The first is to read thoroughly skeptically, in which case the reader would most likely want to quit reading after just a few pages. Secondly, entirely by faith, by which the reader already believes everything even prior to reading the first few pages. Thirdly, the way of "thoughtful engagement", by which the reader suspends his/her disbelief and has an earnest desire to simply let the text speak for itself. Much as we would do with other literary works, even novels. This third method is the one Kass advocates as being his own, and encourages all readers to adopt. In doing so, he presents an assessment of Genesis that is quite different from what I may have heard in my own seminary education, but it is one that I regret not having adopted sooner. For I have learned more in reading this book, than in all of my previous years of formal instruction.
If the Bible characters existed at all, well, here we see them as they really were... not just Bible Superheros, not infallible demi-gods (as they are often portrayed) but as real live people who made as many bad judgements as good, and were not always as pious or Godly as we readily assume. Aside from all of this, the book is readable. By that, I mean, it is not pedantically smudgy nor needlessly polysyllabic. It is clear, it is so wonderfully readable and clear-headed, and laced with footnotes, often describing how the source of his findings came not from himself, but from his students and colleagues.
He states his purpose clearly. "First, to demonstrate by example a wisdom-seeking approach to the Bible that attempts to understand the text in its own terms yet tries to show how such an understanding may address us in our current situation of moral and spiritual neediness. Second, to recover in their full power the stories of Genesis as tales to live with, as stories illuminating some of the most important and enduring questions of human existence. Third, to make at least plausible the power of the Biblical approach and response to these questions, with its emphasis on righteousness, holiness, and reverence for the divine." (p.13).
Does the book succeed, regarding these goals?
Yes.
Is there a better book on understanding Genesis available today?
No. Not that I am aware of.

Splash du Jour: Friday

Have a great Friday!

regret: a poem.

I wrote the following poem a couple of years ago.
I experienced it about a decade before that.
I feel it, still.

regret

poor fish
gasping for water
not meant to be out here in the sun
hearing this gibberish (others so happy about your mistake).

poor fish
gills flaring… hoping.
are you thinking of the damn hook?
one eye in the dirt, one in the blue, blue sky.
you flip, you toss, but ah, the wrong way
up the bank and down, down (laughter)
dirtier now for all the effort
a bit further from your cool home
and more dead.

ah fish
i too have gasped like this.


© Ciprianowords Inc. 2005

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Have a great Thursday!

Some Penises of Things.

Please forgive me for totally switching gears here, from talking about C.S. Lewis for several consecutive days to now, today, talking about...... well....
See, I am here at Chapters and it just happens that they are having one of these “meet-the-author” events right now. It is still in progress actually.
This evening it is Ira Basen & Jane Farrow, two of the four compilers (authors) of the updated, new and improved Book of Lists: The Original Compendium of Curious Information. Canadian Edition.
So, mostly because they were causing such a racket, I left off my reading of Anne Lamott and sauntered over and listened for a while.
They were very engaging, these two. They spoke a bit about their research techniques and then they fielded questions from the audience. At one point I picked up a copy of the book from a nearby display, and thumbed through it.
There were sections involving literature and politics and other topics of interest to me, but I chose instead to turn to the ANIMALS chapter and for quite while there I was, engrossed, flipping around.
All of it is interesting stuff, but this one page really umm... grabbed my attention.
It contained the following list:

Average Erect Penis Lengths For 10 Species

1. Humpback whale -> 10 feet (3 m)
2. Elephant -> 5-6 feet (1.5 – 1.8 m)
3. Bull -> 3 feet (1 m)
4. Stallion -> 2.5 feet (76 cm)
5. Rhinoceros -> 2 feet (60 cm)
6. Pig -> 18-20 inches (46-50 cm)
7. Man -> 6 inches (15 cm)
8. Gorilla -> 2 inches (5 cm)
9. Cat -> 3.4 inch (2 cm)
10. Mosquito -> 1/100th inch (0.25 mm)

Note: The Argentine Lake Duck averages 16 inches from head to foot. However, its erect penis size is 17 inches.
_____________

My first eract... I mean, reaction was sort of like, “Seven Beards of Zeus! What is the deal with this humpback dude?”
Like seriously, is that even necessary?
10 feet?
10 FEET?
I’ll tell you one thing. He’s not going to be hiding that by wearing baggy trousers!
No siree!
That is large!
Exactly what sort of gal is this guy dating? What’s her story?

Hopefully no vessel loaded with Viagra upsets on the Atlantic or Pacific! Can you imagine herds of humpbacks eating their way through these shipwrecked crates?
Think of the water displacement!
The next day’s papers would read “Scientists Stymied over Sudden Shift in Shoreline! Overnight, the world’s ocean levels have risen ten feet!”
But shipwreck or no shipwreck, let’s face it, these whales are swimming around and peeing (and whatnot else) through their massive culverts all day long!
And we wonder why the ocean is so salty?

Time and tact do not permit me to go on and discuss my initial impressions of the terrestrial beasts on the list, of which I myself am but a humble member.
However, reading about the elephants has forever altered my innocently-held childhood belief that the flying ears were the biggest thing on Dumbo!

I went back to my corner.
I put the List book down and went back to my own book and coffee. I picked up Anne Lamott again.
By one of those strange twists of coincidence, the name of the Lamott book is Bird by Bird.
So I thought once again of that incredible Argentine Lake Duck, and I wondered, “How does he pull that off?”
[No double entendre doubly intended, I swear it!]

[Still want more?]

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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

A wardrobe that belonged to the Lewis family is now in the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, where anyone can visit it.
Lewis’s writing desk and a vast collection of personal letters and other memorabilia, such as a pen, pipe and a well-worn tea mug, are also there.
The wardrobe is seven feet tall and four feet wide and is filled with period-style coats, including one that belonged to Lewis’s brother, Warren.

There is a sign on the wardrobe door:
“Enter at your own risk. The Wade Center assumes no responsibility for persons who disappear or who are lost in the wardrobe.”

It makes me wish I knew someone in Illinois so that I could be taken on a tour of this place one day....

Have a great Wednesday!

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Surprised By Joy.

For a large portion of my afternoon at work I have been thinking about C.S. Lewis.
Distracted, even.
Now I am drinking coffee at Starbucks.
Still thinking, but way less distracted.
I recall reading Surprised By Joy, which is an essential book if one is going to begin to understand the one-sixth of Lewis that was above water (so to say).
This is the firsthand account of how C.S. Lewis passed from Atheism through to Theism, and onward to Christianity. It was an arduous process. Lewis says in the Preface that he knew of no autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not by far the most interesting. As such, the entire first half of his own consists of a detailed recollection of childhood and adolescence. The second half is devoted to tracing his adult intellectual interests and particularly to recounting the thought processes which led him in his thirtieth year to a profound conversion experience.
Lewis said, "How far the story matters to anyone but myself depends on the degree to which others have experienced what I call 'joy'."
By "joy" he was referring to his concept of "sehnsucht", a German word that came closest to the sense of yearning or longing that Lewis felt throughout his life, from as early on as six years old.
Sehnsucht is an experience difficult to define... it is a longing for an object which is never fully given, coupled with a sense of alienation or displacement from what is desired. Perhaps another way of describing it could be to say that it is a ceaseless yearning which always points beyond itself. It is this elusive nature of sehnsucht that Lewis had in mind when he (in typical brevity) coined the phrase "our best havings are wantings."
It is not something one goes in deliberate search of. In fact, Lewis said that seeking sehnsucht for its own sake was the surest way to never experience it. Yet occasionally it was found in an unbidden way. The “finding” is elusive. And it finds you.
The (usually recurrent) experience consists of the sense of a fleeting joy and the sad realization that one is yet separated from what is desired. Yet, it is more than this... it is ceaseless longing, it is causeless melancholy, it is ecstatic wonder. It is nostalgia. The hush of the deep mystery of man's finitude and creatureliness coupled with a sense of numinous mystery. Otherness.
I myself have experienced it umpteen times, and yet cannot describe it in a transferable way. My own clumsy definition would be something like this: It is the incomprehensible momentarily made known, with the proviso that one cannot carry it away, prolong it, or even reproduce it.
"Effort, and expectation, and desire / And something evermore about to be." -- Wordsworth --

At any rate, sehnsucht or "joy" was such a crucial element in the development of Lewis that we find it here in the title of his life story, and the "surprise" for him was in the gradual realization that joy (as such) was not foreign, contrary to, unaddressed by, or otherwise opposed to theism.
In fact, Lewis began to see that the most religious of writers (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil, Spenser, Milton, Sir Thomas Browne, Herbert, Donne, Chesterton, MacDonald) were those in whom he found the most kinship in this respect, while those who did not "suffer from religion" (Shaw, Gibbon, Voltaire, Wells, John Stuart Mill) seemed as nourishing as old dishwater. This latter troupe, with whom Lewis himself should have most identified, (for he himself was an atheist at the time) could not speak to him at the level which meant the most to him. The level of joy. Only these others, that former bunch, seemed to know of it!
He concluded: "A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading."
In other words, even the pursuit of certain forms of literature could inadvertently lead one to the surprising realization that those doors you’d become so fond of leaning against had been all the while supported by the framework of theism!
I think that this was the “surprise” for Lewis. Not so much the “joy” or the “sehnsucht” itself, (for he had been experiencing it since he was a child) but the acceptance of the fact that highly intelligent theists (believers in God) knew of it as well.
Joy and God were not in opposition to one another.

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

In just a few weeks time, when the movie The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is playing in the theatres, thousands... perhaps millions of people will be introduced for the first time to the magic of C.S. Lewis.
Many others of us have known him for years and years. From the moment I discovered his scholarly theological writings and his wonderfully imaginative fiction, I have been devoted to C.S. Lewis.
I think of him especially today, because November 22nd, 2005, is the 42nd anniversary of his death.
On this day in 1963, the same day that President Kennedy was assassinated, C.S. Lewis, or “Jack” as he was affectionately known, passed away at his home in Oxford, England.
The final picture of Lewis must come from his beloved brother, Warnie.
In his memoir, he wrote:

Once again – as in the earliest days – we could turn for comfort only to each other. The wheel had come full circle: once again we were together in the little end room at home, shutting out from our talk the ever-present knowledge that the holidays were ending, that a new term fraught with unknown possibilities awaited us both.
Jack faced the prospect bravely and calmly. ‘I have done all I wanted to do, and I’m ready to go,’ he said to me one evening. Only once did he show any regret or reluctance: this was when I told him that the morning’s mail included an invitation to deliver the Romanes lecture. An expression of sadness passed over his face, and there was moment’s silence: then ‘Send them a very polite refusal.’
Friday, 22 November 1963, began much as other days: there was breakfast, then letters and the crossword puzzle. After lunch he fell asleep in his chair: I suggested that he would be more comfortable in bed, and he went there. At four I took in his tea and found him drowsy but comfortable. Our words then were the last: at five-thirty I heard a crash and ran in, to find him lying unconscious at the foot of the bed. He ceased to breathe some three or four minutes later.

On his brother’s tombstone Warnie had cut those words which were found on the Shakespearian calendar the day their mother died – ‘Men must endure their going hence.’

Mr. Lewis, I named my firstborn after you. [Jack, the cat].
You are not forgotten today, or ever, really.

Have a great Tuesday, world!

Get Your Narnias in Order!

I love seeing all of the Chronicles of Narnia displays in the Chapters bookstore.
I can see one from here where I am sitting in the Starbucks, drinking my own body weight in coffee. Everyone is gearing up for the Yuletide release of the movie The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
The marketing gods have awoken, if they have ever slumbered at all.
As I sippeth upon caffeine, I would like to take a few minutes to address a certain Narnian issue, regarding chronology.
For decades now, there has been quite a disagreement over how the seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia should be read. The controversy originates over the discrepancy between when the books were written, and when they were published.

C.S. Lewis wrote the books in this order:

1. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe -> 1948.
2. Prince Caspian -> 1949
3. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” -> 1950
4. The Horse and His Boy, -> 1950
5. The Silver Chair -> 1951
6. The Last Battle -> 1953
7. The Magician’s Nephew -> 1954

The books were published in this order:

1. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe -> 1950
2. Prince Caspian -> 1951
3. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” -> 1952
4. The Silver Chair -> 1953
5. The Horse and His Boy -> 1954
6. The Magician’s Nephew -> 1955
7. The Last Battle -> 1956

Hence, how ought one to read them? In what order?
My own ancient Collier 7-Volume boxed set follows this second sequence, above.
However, neither of these two lists is a correct chronological ordering for the Chronicles.
And for some light on the topic, I turn to a letter that C.S. Lewis once wrote to some British kid.

April 23rd. 1957
Dear Laurence:
I think I agree with your order for reading the books more than with your mother’s.* The series was not planned beforehand, as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion, [the Witch, and the Wardrobe] I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P.[rince Caspian] as a sequel and still didn’t think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage [of the “Dawn Treader”] I felt quite sure it would be the last. But I found I was wrong.
* Laurence’s mother felt that the seven books should be read in the order in which they were published, since she assumed this sequence was intentional. Laurence, however, believed that the stories should be read chronologically according to Narnian time.
Lewis agreed.

What follows is the true chronological way in which the books should be read, according to both Laurence, and Lewis.
You will see that the order is quite significantly different than either of the other two lists.

1. The Magician’s Nephew
2. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
3. The Horse and His Boy
4. Prince Caspian
5. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
6. The Silver Chair
7. The Last Battle

HarperCollins has finally gotten it right, in the new boxed set of Narnias shown here, and displayed in pretty much every corner and aisleway of this store.
I’ve read the entire series three times and will surely read it again, it is so amazingly good.

I close with another incredibly delightful letter that Lewis wrote to some other British kid.

May 7th, 1954
Dear Joan:
As for doing more Narnian books than 7, isn’t it better to stop when people are still asking for more than to go on till they are tired?

Love from,
yours,
C.S. Lewis

Splash du Jour: Monday

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
-- e.e. cummings –

Promise me one thing.
Promise me that you will have a damn good laugh today!
And I don’t mean a wee chortle or part of a snicker and half a guffaw and all that jazz, I mean a rip-roaring laugh. A minimum of one stitch-splitting crackup!

It’s Monday, after all. What could be more hilarious than that?
Have a great one!

Heaven: LOCATED!

NEWS FLASH.

Headline in today's Bookpuddle Times.

"Heaven Finally Located -> And It's Full of Books"

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