Book #93: The Magician's Book

Title: The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
Author: Laura Miller

I can't tell you how long it took me to finish The Magician's Book. I bought it early in the spring, when Miller appeared on RadioWest here in Salt Lake City, and I felt intrigued enough by Miller's interactions with C. S. Lewis's Narnia books to download it to my phone (it was before I had the Kindle). I read the first chapter, and the book wasn't what I expected. I'd thought it was going to be a memoir, guided mainly by Miller's personal experiences in Narnia, and I loved the idea of reading a book about how a single literary series could shape a childhood. In the early chapters, I got some of that. Miller wrote about how a teacher influenced her to start reading, and how she read the books over and over from the time she was about eight until she reached her early teens. Then, when she was an adult, she got wind of the Christian symbolism in the books and felt betrayed, but gradually came back to appreciating them. I thought that was enough for an entire story. But apparently Miller didn't, and the book quickly morphed into a study of Lewis's life and influences, and in later chapters, segued over to Tolkien and his friendship with Lewis and how the Narnia books differed from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Frankly, if I'd known I was buying a bio of C. S. Lewis, I would have bought Surprised by Joy instead. At least that's a memoir. This book felt like it didn't know what it was-- was it a memoir of Miller's experience, a bio of Lewis or scholarly articles about Lewis and Tolkien? I was never sure. I can appreciate genre-busting at times, but it didn't really work here. If I had taken the book out of the library, I would have returned it after several chapters. But I paid $10 for this book, so I was determined to get my money's worth. As it was, I skimmed the last few chapters, which seemed to go on forever. If you want to read about Narnia, go to the primary source.