Jennifer Howard

Writer, editor, journalist.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Journalism
  • Fiction
  • Contact

First Loves

September 24, 2010

What makes a story you loved as a kid stick in your mind years and decades after you encountered it? That question animates Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book, which I’m reading now. Miller, a writer and critic for Salon, revisits her childhood passion for C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and tries to sort out what made her fall in love with Narnia as an 8-year-old and how her feelings changed as she grew into a more sophisticated, more ambivalent reader. (Christian symbolism? Ack!) As her website says, “The Magician’s Book is the story of one reader’s long, tumultuous relationship with C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia.”

I don’t pick up books of literary criticism very often these days, mostly because I don’t get as many long stretches of reading time as I used to, and novels and other kinds of nonfiction tend to get bumped to the top of the stack on my nighttable. The Magician’s Book sat and sat and sat on my desk until my recent organizational binge, when I realized I should either read it or find it a new home.

I decided to read it. I’m glad I did. It’s given me back my own early love affairs with books. Like Miller, I loved the Narnia books, but there were others that thrilled me too: Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three and the rest of the Chronicles of Prydain, his retellings of Welsh myths. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Anne McCaffrey’s The Dragonriders of Pern and its sequels. (It’s a little embarrassing to cop to that.) Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. (Really. Don’t ask me to explain.) There are others. They all still have a place in my heart and, in some cases, on my shelves, though the McCaffrey books must have gone out in some long-ago purge. I’m a little sorry about that.

Anyway, Miller’s book also prompted me to get out my long-ago-loved copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and read it to my kids. They’ll have their own bookish love affairs to remember. Maybe Narnia will be one, maybe not, but I’m glad to be reminded that it will always be there for them if they want it to be.

Filed Under: Reading and Writing

Announcements

We live in the age of peak newsletters. So many good ones to choose from–but if indie publishing intrigues you, check out my dear friend Anne Trubek‘s weekly newsletter “Notes From a Small Press.” Anne’s the founder of Belt Publishing, and in “Notes” she shares what really goes into making and marketing books. It’s fascinating and well worth your time.

Latest Work

  • “What We Lose by Reading 100,000 Words a Day”

  • “Nobody’s Girl”

  • “Copy Machines in Libraries Are Going the Way of the Dodo–Slowly”

  • “Content Providers?”

  • “What Next-Gen Digital Humanities Looks Like”

About Jen

Jen Howard sitting in front of a brick wall. She is smiling.

Writer, journalist, editor, gadabout. Book- and nature lover. Washingtonian. LLC. Read more »

Latest Posts

  • Would You Let Marie Kondo Tidy Your Books?
  • Frankenreads on Camera
  • Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” Comes Alive at the Library of Congress
  • Deep Reading Is Good for You! (But It’s Harder Than It Used to Be)
  • Lullaby in Libraryland

Social Media

Tweets by @JenHoward

Follow Jen

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Creative Commons License

These works by Jennifer Howard are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Site design by Rocketkoi | Built on Genesis Framework by StudioPress