A recent MR request asked me which book I wished I had written and now I have a recent answer: Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia. And I'm not even a big Narnia fan (this review aside). Most of all this is a book about what it means to love another book and how deep such a love can run. It also covers the gap between children and adults, how storytelling works, what theology means in art, not to mention it gives an excellent portrait of Tolkien. Every paragraph of this book offers something of value — how many books can claim that? Bravo, and again you needn't love or even know much about C.S. Lewis.
I'll buy Laura Miller's next book, sight unseen, no matter what the topic.
Testing comments…
okay, cowen: i’ll pick this one up…
Laura Miller protests too much in this book.
She is right that Christianity is “terrifying.” But not in the way she means it.
As Tolkien said, “I am a Roman Catholic. I do not expect history to be anything but a long defeat.”
Laura Miller is glad to be off that losing track and among the crowd that expects history to be a long victory.
So far, my bets are with Tolkien.
I went to a talk by Laura Miller about this book last month. To tell you the truth, I was pretty bored. She didn’t go too much in-depth about it and stuck to over-arching statements that I could have gotten from the book’s jacket or back cover. It’s clear she knows a lot about literature, but after that talk I have no desire to read her book, even though I’m a big fan of the Narnia novels.
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