Wednesday, February 20, 2008

At least the flu is good for one thing

So, Joanna, forgive me - I don't have 2 sick babies to take care of while I had the flu and Brian was pretty much well while I was sick.... I am always buying classic books when I find them cheap at Barnes & Nobles when we make our big trips to Anchorage. For some reason when I am standing there surrounded by wonderful books for $6.95 each, I suddenly develop a burning desire to read the great classics of the literary world, to recreate the great gardens of the world in your own yard, yoga-tai chi-aran knitting-all about the world of leprechauns or all about the world of fairies {very similar worlds I found}, how to draw or to learn to cook _________ ( insert : pastry, greek, 783 italian dinners with only 3 ingredients, ancient Chinese {which actually started with a live chicken and 3 chapters of what you could do with all the parts that came off the live chicken - way too graphic for me to actually try}, french, every day breads for all occasions, etc., etc., )

Then I get them home from the big city and think , "WHAT was I thinking?? Reading makes my head hurt." and then they get put on my shelf to look pretty with all the other books I bought the last 12 times I went to the city.

So, to make a short story way too long, at church, people are always quoting C.S.Lewis. For some reason, I have always thought that C. S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll are the same person and so I thought that the guy who wrote Alice in Wonderland was the famous religious author. and then last year, we watched a Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe and we really liked it and i thought, well maybe there is more to this alice in Wonderland guy after all (I had tried to read alice when I was a child and as most do, found it to be terrifying, so had no desire to go there again). I had heard that they were making another one of the Narnia books into a movie and since we liked the first one, I was interested in learning about the second one.

Now those of you you are fans of the Narnia chronicles from your childhood will think it weird that I have never read them at all, but I just was never exposed to them. Anyway, last fall, Barnes & nobles had the complete Narnia chronicles on sale in one volume for $9.95 and I figured, HEY, a classic like that is a bargain at twice the price, so I brought it home.

The first thing I realized when I looked at it was that C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll are not the same person, so that made me feel better, but still, it is a really big, heavy book and holding big heavy books hurts my upper torso and lots of times, reading makes my head hurt. so it sat by my chair gathering dust until last week when I had the flu.

and I'm thinking, HEY, my head hurts anyway, and is going to hurt anyway, I might as well do some reading. So I picked up the Narnia book and didn't put it down again, basically, until I was done. I did go to sleep at night, which I usually dont do when I am into a really good book, but since I did actually have the flu, I did have to rest. Plus I found myself wanting to think about each book and the symbolisms in it, so I read it more slowly that I usually do.

So the point of my post is: if you haven't read the Narnia chronicles from start to finish, I heartily recommend them. They probably would have been too intense for me as a child - I could never stand when animals got hurt or died and so I probably would have been a mess if I had read them at that time. But I'm older now and I didn't cry once. I was very proud of myself. Please read them if you get a chance. Love, the newly literate -- Charlotte

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think church might be a little more exciting if people would start quoting Alice in Wonderland & Narnia in church. Maybe a few more people should be confused! And FYI, Ben was laughing so hard he was almost crying when he read your last post on our blog.