Updates and Links

It’s been a fairly blah week in my corner of the world: the weather is awful, it’s freezing cold, and I definitely don’t feel as though I’m on holiday.  I’ve been trying to track down the second half of Arrow to watch and review, but that’s proving to be quite a challenge, and my creative juices are running low in regards to any original fiction I may or may not be trying to concoct (you’d think a gender-flipped take on Beauty and the Beast set in a manor house built on a time nexus would write itself, but it really doesn’t).

Oh, and to top things off – we’ve just had a power cut. Things suddenly went black just as Elementary was wrapping up, and we’ve had no lights or electricity since. I’m currently writing this on battery power.

But THIS caught my attention when it popped up on my Tumblr dash this morning: a Narnian readalong that starts on July 12^th and carries on into August. The idea is to read all seven books in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia series and subsequently share various thoughts, metas, GIFs, artwork and so on with whoever else is involved in the project.

Believe it or not, I based my Master of Arts degree on The Chronicles of Narnia, as part of a contrast/compare with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (specifically on how both authors utilized the Fall of Man to shape the theological backbone of each saga), and I haven’t read the books since.

Much like Philipa Boyens, who I recall bemoaning the loss of any enjoyment in reading The Lord of the Rings after such a close study of it for so many years in writing the screenplay for the film trilogy, I felt over-saturated by Narnia after finishing up my thesis.

Oddly enough, I wouldn’t say that they were ever formative books of my youth, as though I came to them at a very early age, they were never my absolute, number one, eclipses-all-others type reading material. But I do have very vivid memories of experiencing each one for the first time, of the “light-bulb” moments I got when their interconnected nature became apparent (a consequence of reading them out of order across the course of several years), and the vague sense of awe when the Christian subtext became impossible to ignore.

So I think enough time has passed for me to re-read the books with fresh(er) eyes, so I’m going to fully commit to this project. So in the coming weeks you can expect a lot of cross-over between this blog and my Tumblr, as well as reviews and metas and other Narnia-related thoughts.

I'm ready

BTW, if you want to read my thesis, you can find it on-line HERE. I started reading it and quickly scurried away in embarrassment (hey, it’s been a few years now) but I’m not going to miss the chance to plug it considering it’s probably only been read by six people – two of whom were my supervisors.