As Tennessee shakes off the last drops of winter (it's actually been kind of nippy at night lately! I'm shocked, shocked!), the end of the school year approaches. And you know what that means: I'm going to have oodles and oodles of extra time on my hands for the next few months [1], which in turn means that I'm going to have to find some way to occupy a lot of that free time. And binge-watching Futurama again just ain't gonna cut it.
After all the fun that my AFI project last summer turned out to be, I want to do another multi-part project here to keep me busy this summer. Only this time, I want something that won't be quite as lengthy of an undertaking and also something that deals with a different medium than film. So here's what I'm thinking: I'm going to blog through C.S. Lewis's much-loved, poorly-adapted-into-film book series The Chronicles of Narnia. [Trumpet noise! Fanfare!]
Why Narnia? Why blog through these books? A few reasons, actually:
First: There was a period of about a decade in my life when I would not have hesitated to name The Chronicles of Narnia as my favorite books of all time. During that period, I read these books a lot. They were some of the first "chapter books" I owned—my parents gave me the box set one year, either at Christmas or my birthday (can't remember), and I just took off, first listening to my dad read them out loud to me and then reading them on my own once my reading skills acclimated. I was enthralled. Blogging through the series will give me a good opportunity to articulate what I love about it.
Second: Despite my young fanaticism for the books, I actually haven't read them since sometime in high school. I figure that it will be interesting and illuminating to revisit the series with adult eyes.
Third: Narnia gets used a lot as a theological bludgeon, an appropriation that Lewis sort of invited by including not-so-hidden parallels to Christian scripture and thought. But what often gets lost in all the theological brouhaha is the fact that these books are really, really lovely from a purely artistic standpoint. At least, I think they are—maybe I'll think differently about that now than I did as an eight-year-old. I'm interested in theology, yes, but I'm also interested in how these books are lovely works of art.
Putting these three points together, I guess what I'm trying to say is that my approach to this series is one of an adult cultural critic. You could think of this project as basically one of review: what about Narnia still holds up for 24-year-old me? What doesn't? I'm very much a layman, so don't expect me to dive too deeply down the theology well (though I of course won't shy away from it if its relevant to what I'm discussing). But what you can expect is commentary—well-reasoned or not, I make no guarantees—about what makes Narnia work as literature. Literature is beautiful; what is Narnia's beauty? I'm betting it doesn't just have to do with how Aslan is basically Jesus.
I'm still a little fuzzy on how exactly this is going to take shape, but my overall thought is that I'll write one post for each book—seven in total [2]. If you followed my 100 Years...100 Movies posts last summer, you can expect my Narnia posts to be a bit more in-depth than the reviews I did there, given that I'll be focusing on a single work each time instead of two or three different ones. The posts may be laser-sharp exegesis or just a collection of random thoughts I have; I suppose it will depend on the book itself and my mood in the given week. Also, since reading books (even books as short and breezy as the Narnia novels) takes longer than watching movies, this means that the posts will be less frequent than my AFI ones were last year. I'm going to try to do one at least once every week, though.
And that's about it. I'm about halfway through my reread of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe right now (the Narnia Beautification Committee frowns upon your lion statue graffiti, Edmund), so it shouldn't be too long before I get to writing the first post, provided that end-of-semester grading, etc. doesn't dump all over my plans. I guess we'll see how the next few days go. Whenever it gets kicked off, though, I'm excited to revisit this series, and even if nobody else reads my posts, I'm sure I'll learn a lot and have a lot of fun trekking through this project.
Until next time!
Edit: Read the series now with the Table of Contents for Posts
1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
2. Prince Caspian
3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
4. The Silver Chair
5. The Horse and His Boy
6. The Magician's Nephew
7. The Last Battle
1] Well, probably. There's this whole business of trying to get a job and start a career post-grad school, but you know. Details.
2] Also, for those who care, I'm reading through them in publication order (i.e. start with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). My box set and all modern editions of the series order the books in chronological order, and I've never read them in their originally published sequence. I've heard apologists for both orderings; it should be interesting to see how the two compare.
