February 21, 2005

• The ascii ones are excellent
• great post, quid! I loved these books. And I'm glad I checked out the "explore" link - I didn't know there's a movie in the works.
• Oooh. Nice. I loved these books (and the old BBC adaptations of them). So much better than Tolkien *ducks*
• I looooved this. Until someone said "You know it's all Christian Symbolism, right?" *sigh*
• Wooooooooooooowwww. Wide-eyed ). This is so amazing. And way better than Tolkien - there are like characters, right, and they say stuff that sounds (almost) real ;) Actually, I wouldn't bother to debate it - Narnia just has this childhood magic that Tolkien will never have for me, and it's nothing more than reading one at age 8 and the other at age 19. I picked up the symbolism (I was at bible camp at the time), but it only really annoys me in the Last Battle, where it is especially egregious, and I already despise Revelations. But the only thing is that I had this image of Narnia in my head, but it got twisted (compared to what is actually written). The sea was always to the south for me (funnily enough, looking just like the shore of Lake Ontario, to the south of where I lived), and the lamppost to the north. The shore line actually bent perpendicularly in my mind, so that the sea was to the south, Archenland in the mountains to the southwest, and Calormen then south of that (with an eastern shore). But then, of course, that doesn't work very well with the Silver Chair (which I saw as happening to the north east) - that's one of the reasons I rarely try to map it. Sometimes I just get the feeling that where Tolkien started with a map, Narnia is just a bit unmappable, more like the Discworld.
• That said, I'm not especially looking forward to the movies. The BBC adaptations annoyed me (didn't like Lucy, and she's the lynchpin), but once I saw a cartoon. I haven't seen it since I was 7, so it may be crap. But at the time I thought it was amazing (it was the reason I read the books). I love Fantasy movies, but at the same time, once you've really loved a certain book or series, you probably will never really be satisfied (not even with Jackson's - though his adaptation is amazing, I will never like it the way I like fantasy films without a book, or which I saw before reading it). I liked James and the Giant Peach, because I hadn't really read it much, but didn't really like the film of Matilda (which had touched me as a book more). Actually, I should make an exception - I love E.M. Forster, and I love the Merchant-Ivory adaptations. Maybe it's because I read and saw at the same time, but it's also that they really seemed to have internalised the themes and feel of the books, especially for Maurice (I think I've read and seen it respectively about three or four times by now, and still love both).
• Phenomenal, quidnunc. Makes me want to read the books again, as though I had time. (Say, does anyone happen to have a link to good maps of Proust's Combray? Crayon or ASCII would be fine...)
• Thank you Quidnunc. You made me smile.
• maps of Proust's Combray Something like this?
• I could never form a working mental map of Narnia, either. Each book painted a completely different landscape in my mind. I suspected the symbolism was Christian the first time I read them way back in sixth grade, but it never bugged me when this was confirmed. At least it was well done Christian symbolism. No idea who did the old cartoon of LWW, but I remember enjoying it and thinking it was true to the book. Wouldn't mind seeing it again.
• Wait a cotton-picking minute ... Narnia is Christian?! *"Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe!", comincio quidnunc con la voce chioccia ...*
• Hey, if all Christian writers were half as interesting as C.S.Lewis, I might spend more time listening to what they have to say.
• Clearly not, quidnunc. Didn't you know that Jack Chick says we should burn our C.S. Lewis books for being occult? At least in the original version of Dark Dungeons.
• Good - I had a bit of a crush on Jadis, the last queen of Charn!
• Jadis always seemed a bit high maintenance to me.