The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

My mother gave me the 1973 Collier paperback sometime around 1992 and it was the first real novel that I had ever read cover-to-cover. I quickly devoured the tale of the Pevensie children and their departure to Narnia through an old wardrobe and was eager to have more of the story. The Narnia series subsequently became a reading adventure that my mother and I took together, making our way through all seven books in the series over the next few years. The copy of Lewis’s novel that I have listed here is not, in fact, the one I had read as a child, although this hardback (one in a set of seven and bearing the Harper-Collins fire-and-water emblem) was still a gift from my mother, though much later. I think the original may now be in a box of books that my mother kept on the shelf of her elementary-school classroom. While this volume is the second in the series, which defers to Narnia chronology, I have always preferred reading the books in publication order, perhaps because of my original encounter with Narnia in the Collier edition.

You'll notice the movie tickets on the left are from the release of the film in 2008. They serve as bookmarks.

Lewis, C.S. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Illus. Pauline Baynes. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1978.

UPDATE: Disappointment

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had derived a new motivation for posting from a book collection contest at my graduate university. I'm sorry to say that I did not win, despite being one of four eligible entrants. While this is a bit disappointing, the experience of crafting the collection was still quite rewarding and I will continue to post its contents. Thanks for reading.

Giant Treasury of Peter Rabbit - Beatrix Potter

Perhaps more appropriate to my age than Lewis Carroll had been, this book contains Beatrix Potter’s classic illustrations and storytelling. Especially notable is “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” a story about a rebellious bunny who gets into trouble when he leaves his rabbit-hole and winds up being chased through Mr. McGreggor’s garden. Though Peter eventually returns safely, he has lost his coat with its bright buttons, teaching the little bunny an important lesson. My maternal grandmother’s inscription indicates that this was a 4th birthday present in 1988.

Potter, Beatrix. Giant Treasury of Peter Rabbit. Illus. Beatrix Potter. New York: Derrydale Books, 1980.

The Best of Lewis Carroll

This book is a blue hardcover that contains John Tenniel’s classic illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Of course, the narratives within in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are all concerned with the main character’s departure from a mundane Victorian life through the fascinating and absurd landscapes of Wonderland. This is my very first book and one that perhaps represents my maternal grandmother’s literary ambitions for me from very early on. Her inscription indicates that this book was given to me on my first birthday in 1985, undoubtedly prefacing all of the literary rabbit-holes I would spend the rest of my life exploring.

Cover

Tenniel's Jabberwocky

Alice

Grandma Jane's dedication.

Carroll, Lewis. The Best of Lewis Carroll. Illus. John Tenniel and Henry Holiday. Seacaucus, NJ: Castle, 1983.

New Motivations

Wow. It has officially been over a year between postings. Part of this has to do with my son's birth last May (Schuyler Henry Eastin, an up-and-coming bibliophile, I hope). Another part has to do with the fact that I started a PhD program at UC Riverside this past Fall (I've been doing a HELL of a lot of reading and writing, just not for the blog). Another part had to do with a growing malaise about writing blogs; it had begun to feel like a chore, probably because of my tendency not to limit the length of my posts, as well as the fact that they began to read like book reports and I had lost the enthusiasm for tripping through my collection.

Fortunately this last impediment has been resolved! I recently had a profound motivation for creating content for this blog. The Special Collections at UCR runs an annual book collection contest which asks its participants to put together a small collection of books with a unifying theme and short explanations of how each book fits. This seemed very similar to what I have already been doing here but with a bit more structure and the added motivation of laurels plus a $500 prize. I just submitted my collection last week and won't know the results until late May, but I've decided that this would be the perfect forum to share my collection a bit more publicly. It only includes about thirty books (and other materials) but they represent what seems to me to be a central theme of my larger collection. I will try to post an entry every week for the rest of this year, beginning with my collection's opening essay. Enjoy:

There and Back Again: Narratives of Departure and Return, a Collection

Near the outset of the journey that will span all three books in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Frodo Baggins recalls some wisdom given to him by his uncle Bilbo, “’It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.’” (83). Though Bilbo’s words convey a sense of wariness, if we remember Bilbo’s own adventure in Tolkien’s earlier novel The Hobbit, we know that, despite the twists and turns that are inevitable when one departs from one’s own home, it is that journey that comes to define the individual. Indeed, a long literary tradition from Homer’s epics through the chivalric romances of the middle ages and even up to modern adventure and science fiction, characters develop most when the leave a place of comfort and travel through a world that offers new perspectives, perilous obstacles, and most importantly, a story to tell when they return. The same is true outside of fiction; when we depart and return we often bring back with us fascinating stories, some of which we can tell and others that we can quite literally carry with us, bound tightly within the pages of a book.

This collection contains a number of books that contain narratives of departure and return. These books tell stories of characters that stepped out of their doors, sometimes kept their feet, and sometimes did not. Sometimes these characters returned with stories to tell, but not always. But it is not only the characters in these books that have made the journeys; sometimes the books themselves have made significant journeys. This collection has developed over the course of my lifetime. Many of these books were gifts given by people who were and often still are very important to me. Others I have acquired in the courses of my own journeys. Accordingly, I have chosen to arrange these books in the order that I acquired them in an attempt to convey an overarching narrative that spans my nearly three decades of departing and returning.

Re-reading

Indeed it has been so, so very long since my last post. A number of factors have contributed to this. Over the summer, as I may have mentioned, my grandfather, the most avid reader of my blog, passed away. This has made writing somewhat more of a challenge since I have felt that my words would simply spin into more of a dark vortex than usual. Still, this was only a challenge to my motivation. The challenge to my actual ability to write was my teaching schedule. It may surprise you to know that from September to December of 2011 I read and wrote more than I ever have in my entire life! Tragically, I sense that the writing I did during that time will spend even less time in the light of day than this blog. But such is the nature of written feedback in composition courses. As wonderful as the experience was to teach on two campuses simultaneously (San Diego Christian College and my alma mater, Point Loma Nazarene University), I will never accept an offer to teach four composition courses in a single semester; as Boromir might say, "this is folly!"
Fortunately, my schedule this semester is significantly slackened, which should give me time to catch up on the good 'ol blog as well as prepare the paper that I will be delivering at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo Michigan in May. Unfortunately I can only attribute my silence so far in 2012 to a general laziness or at least a lack of momentum. Fortunately again, I have found a topic which shall hopefully kickstart a more consistent blogging schedule; I have begun to reread one of the few books for which I do so regularly, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
I could ramble for hours about how much I love this series (as you may already be aware) but I've been trying to space out my fanboy posts so far and I'd like to continue to do so (if for no other reason than to make sure that I don't lose material!). Over Christmas break I had been listening to a series by Corey Olsen, aka The Tolkien Professor and his talks drew my attention to interpretations of Tolkien's tale that I had never considered before. It doesn't take much to encourage me to re-read the series and I soon decided that it was about time to do so. Much to my pleasure, as I read I have been richly rewarded with new insights, some thanks to Dr. Olsen, and some that have simply arisen as a result of the re-reading process. This got me thinking about the concept of re-reading in general and how rarely we actually bother doing so.
I have heard numerous accounts of superfans finishing the Harry Potter series and starting again back at the beginning and this always bothered me, not the least because I firmly believe that if one is going to dedicate one's time to reading one might as well read the best material available rather than material of mediocre quality (more on this debate in a later post. This is just some of my Rowling-angst coming out). But as I consider my response to this, I realize that, based on my construction of this ethic, I cannot necessarily justify my re-reading of Tolkien. It is given, of course, that Tolkien is an infinitely more skilled and polished writer than Rowling, but the truth of the matter is: I spend far more time re-reading Tolkien than I do, say, Dickens or Malory or even Shakespeare. Of course I have been nourished on the very scholarly mantra of "to fully understand a work one must read, and re-read, and even read a third time." Yet, I always feel that I am somewhat deficient in my commitment to rereading. Some of this is because of time; perhaps the habits formed during semester-study keeps me from flipping back to the beginning of a book and starting over.
This habit is even more disturbing considering I am fully aware of the value of re-reading. The first time that I read The Scarlet Letter in high school, I couldn't stand it. When I read it again in Dr. DeSaegher's American Writers I course, Hawthorne's novel enthralled me. I had a similar experience with Heart of Darkness, but as my blog on that work has shown, subsequent readings revealed the vast imagination and intense depth of imagery that made me love Conrad's work.
Why, then, don't I read everything again? As I look at my bookshelves I realize that it is, in many ways, a trophy case. Each volume upon the wall is a land conquered, a worthy adversary vanquished, a feat accomplished. Yet what is stopping me from reading Great Expectations again? I suppose the easiest answer is also a question: "who has the time?" At the moment I would be much better off rereading Malory and Chrétien de Troyes than Dickens. After all, I have a paper to write and it most definitely has a deadline (do or die on May 11!). Should I be disturbed that I reserve more time for rereading something with less literary merit? Many avid readers who are more disciplined than me probably read works like that of Tolkien to take a break from the more serious things that they read. Me? I've had to force myself to give up watching sci-fi shows on Netflix for Lent just to force myself to do some productive reading. Hopefully this discipline forms a habit and will eventually lead to some casual and simultaneously productive re-reading (I'm thinking "The Rape of Lucrece" is a good candidate, don't you?).

Snobbery

The fall semester has begun full-force and at this point I have already begun to feel the heavy blow of paper-grading. It is truly incredible how much time and energy it takes to grade and comment on student papers, especially when the intention is to give QUALITY feedback. Taxing! But I digress.

Today's post has to do with an attitude with which I have been typically associated with in my social circles; the attitude of literary snobbery. Far too many times I have found myself sticking my nose up in the air when a new popular novel has been recommended to me since, surely, I mustn't waste my oh-so-valuable time perusing a Terry Brooks novel or, God forbid, one of those overproduced and weary schoolyard rags printed under the Hogwart's banner. But as I have been teaching I have slowly been learning to reorient my otherwise derisive and dismissive literary views. This doesn't necessarily mean that I will ever get around to picking up a J.K. Rowling novel since I still believe, albeit stubbornly, that there are far better things to spend my evenings doing (provided no one asks me to justify the hours I've clocked at failblog.org). But as a professor of composition at two colleges I think I have recently learned the value of the pedagogical perspective.

About two years ago, before I began teaching, I found an article by a crotchety literary fundamentalist by the name of Harold Bloom. I call him crotchety but in reality I share a great deal of Bloom's views concerning the definition of truly valuable literature (I have, in fact, blogged on this very subject). This article, entitled "Dumbing Down American Readers" is essentially an ivory-tower literary critic's lambastation of two of our most prominent symbols of the commodification of literature, Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. As I read this article the first time I couldn't help but grin wickedly and tap my fingers together, imagining how I might use this very same article to indoctrinate my future students. Surely, young and impressionable college students reading the harsh derision of a figure so monolithic as Harold Bloom would be incapable of resisting his bludgeoning logic as he denounced two of the most read and, ironically, worst writers of the past decade.

But after a year of teaching composition I have realized something important about the function of an instructor in a college classroom. Beyond the simple fact that my opinion matters less than the intended product of any class, which is student proficiency, I believe I have also seen the real value of my position which is to aid students in expressing ideas that are uniquely and inextricably THEIRS. This is the first semester that I have actually used the Bloom article in my classroom and, despite my wholehearted agreement with the critic, I have been careful to present the article as a point of argument and have worked to foster a forum for open agreement or disagreement with Bloom's work. I have been happily surprised to find that a great many students are already in agreement with Bloom in that American readers have been served much softer and less nourishing fare in recent years. But the great part about it is that most of these students have expressed these views and are currently developing arguments along these same lines that they can claim whole ownership of. The same can be said for the students whom have reacted just as strongly in the opposite direction and in fact, strong disagreement with Bloom's essay seems to have been a more interesting starting point for class discussion. And I'm OK with it!

I had a recent discussion with a friend who will remain nameless (apologies if you read this) and she was expressing frustration at the notion that a friend of hers had become interested in reading a work that she (my friend) loved immensely for both its aesthetic and literary value. She was certain that her friend could not appreciate the novel the way she did and as we discussed this phenomenon (tragically common among literary types) we both realized the type of elitism that this very response demonstrated. I've done the same thing plenty of times but looking at it then from a second-hand perspective I realized the separation that I had developed between my teaching attitudes and my personal ones. Of course any literary type should do their utmost to help any audience appreciate a work of literature, even if they are incapable of accessing it on the same level or sharing the author's views. But that is what makes each of us individuals; the readers and the non readers, the literary bourgeoisie and the philosophical proletariat, the elitists, the humble, and everyone in between caught up in this marvelously picaresque game of "what did you read today?"