The secret of Narnia

Michael Ward

New from the world of literature: Michael Ward has detected the organizing principle behind the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis: each of the seven books evokes the mood of one of the seven medieval heavens: Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Sol, Luna, Mars, and Saturn. At first glance it makes sense. That’s why the Christian theme is a minor one and why there’s a Father Christmas but no Nativity.

He has two books that analyze the parallels between medieval cosmology and the seven volumes. There’s a more scholarly critique called Planet Narnia and a more popular book called The Narnia Code. They came out a couple of years ago so you may have heard of them. You can read about them at Planet Narnia.

Hat tip to Jeffrey D. Koonistra, the book reviewer at Analog. He gets a point deducted, though for referring to representative people of their day as Medieval Man and Twenty-first-Century Man.

Founder of Arts & Letters Daily dies

You might know of Arts & Letters Daily: it’s interesting to read. Now I find out that it was written by one person, Dennis Dutton, who has just died.

Denis Dutton, founder and editor of Arts & Letters Daily and a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has died. Born in California, Mr. Dutton received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He created Arts & Letters Daily in 1998. The Chronicle of Higher Education purchased the widely praised site in 2002.

“Denis was the creative force behind Arts & Letters Daily and wrote all the items on the page himself, even when he was on vacation,” said Phil Semas, president and editor in chief of The Chronicle. “He is nearly irreplaceable. Even so, we intend to continue Arts & Letters Daily in the spirit in which Denis created and nurtured it.”

Evan Goldstein of The Chronicle and Mr. Dutton’s longtime collaborator, Tran Huu Dung, a professor of economics at Wright State University, will continue to produce the site.

The books of MacDonald Harris

Norman Geras of Normblog regularly asks others to review a book or play that was important to them. In this article, Philip Pullman writes about the books of MacDonald Harris.

MacDonald Harris was the pseudonym of Donald Heiney (1921-1993), a naval veteran and distinguished professor of literature.

Philip Pullman says

I’m astonished, really, that such a clever and interesting writer should have vanished so completely: I’ve spoken of him to several well-read people, and none of them has heard of him. Perhaps he lacked some vital ingredient, that mysterious mana that brings commercial and critical success to many writers nowhere near as good. Perhaps it was just that he was too interested in too many kinds of life, and didn’t stick to one sort of book. Perhaps he never quite managed a single undeniable masterpiece, whose gravitational field would have pulled his other work into prominence. Besides, none of his novels has been filmed.Buy him while you can, is my advice. Here is a full list of his novels:

Private Demons (1961); Mortal Leap (1964); Trepleff (1968); Bull Fire (1973); The Balloonist (1976); Yukiko (1977); Pandora’s Galley (1979); The Treasure of Sainte Foy (1980); Herma (1981); Screenplay (1982); Tenth (1984); The Little People (1986); Glowstone (1987); Hemingway’s Suitcase (1990); Glad Rags (1991); A Portrait of My Desire (1993).

If you Google his name, you’ll find a short and interesting website about his life and work.

Book review: Wuthering Heights

Norman Geras of Normblog regularly asks others to review a book or play that was important to them. In this article, Elizabeth Baines reviews Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It’s a book that she read as a teen and then as an adult.

Norm writes:

Elizabeth Baines is a prize-winning radio playwright and the author of numerous short stories as well as two novels, The Birth Machine and Body Cuts. More recently she has become an occasional actor, and has written for the theatre, producing her own stage plays, ‘Drinks with Natalie’ and the award-winning ‘O’Leary’s Daughters’.

Elizabeth Baines on Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Which book has been most important to me? Well, how would I choose? Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, both of which, aged eleven, I bought from Woolworth’s with my saved-up pocket money and which most certainly coloured my emotional landscape and increased my (already formed) determination to write? Or George Orwell’s essays, which, when I was at university, hit me right in the eyes with a clean fresh blast of political air and ensured that in future I would be aware of the politics of whatever I wrote? But wait – wasn’t I once asked this question before, and didn’t I answer unhesitatingly, ‘Wuthering Heights‘, because this novel, with its striking structure – a narrative within a narrative, yet containing other narratives, a layering of voices and perspectives – has probably had the greatest impact on my own writing

Read on

Greg Laden’s Congo Memoirs

Greg Laden has written an account of some of his adventures while doing field work in Africa in the 1980s. You can find them at The Congo  Memoirs.

Update: link corrected

Books!

I keep finding more books in the impromptu bookstore. I bought two books by The Amazing Randi and got them signed.