Wow, it’s funny how a week can get away from you.  Especially when you’ve got a talkative painter working on your house, and you’re working from home simultaneously.  It’s been a busy week, and people have been informing me about my Harry Potter question from last week.  The interesting thing is that they pointed out some very interesting things.  See the previous mailbag for more details of that.  We’ve also had some very exciting things happening in the way of set photos and things.

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The last two weeks have been some of the busiest weeks I’ve had since re-launching the mailbag.  Last week, in fact, was so busy that I didn’t get a chance to do the mailbag.  I usually do it on Wednesdays, but there was something important that came up last week.  You see, there was a movie that came out that has made nearly a half of a billion dollars worldwide, so far.  Being a child of the 80s, I had to see it.  Twice.  On opening day.  Yes, I am a geek, and no, I don’t recommend this movie for children to see.  But I won’t be reviewing it entirely unless I am asked to write further on it, the film is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and I loved it.  Not every minute, but I thought it was great overall.

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Academic fans of Narnia creator C.S. Lewis could come to the defence of Malvern’s gas lamps, which served as the inspiration for a famous scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  The future of the gas lamps has been raised after parish councils around Malvern were hit with unexpected top-up bills to pay for their maintenance and running.
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Andrew Skilleter is the artist behind the covers of the BBC radio editions of The Chronicles of Narnia.  He asked me to mention that he’s made available, by popular demand, a limited run of 250 of each title as special prints of his artwork.  If you missed it, we posted a story about the exhibition that is still going on, along with some of the art work, here: BBC Narnia Cover Art Exhibition UK.  The art is available to purchase at the artist’s website, here: Andrew Skelleter’s Narnia BBC Paintings.
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There’s an artist that has become quite well known for his redesigns of book covers.  Most notibly, the Harry Potter series.  Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that they’ll ever see publication, but that doesn’t mean we cannot hope that some of his designs will one day see print.  I had been watching his blog to see if he was ever going to do his take on The Chronicles of Narnia books.  Well, last weekend he posted them.  I’ve included a glimpse of one of the covers, as it is my favorite book in the series: The Last Battle.  You can see his art work on his blog (Narnia Redesign) or at his flickr account.

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This week’s mailbag features a topic that is very interesting to me: that of the relationship of J.R.R. Tolkien and his writing to C.S. Lewis and his.  Other topics include what Anna Popplewell and William Moseley are up to next, and Andrew Adamson’s past in Papua New Guinea.  I’ll see if I have the time to reach back into the mailbag archives after the five letters that I received this week.  Be sure to look through the comments from last week’s mailbag for some fascinating follow-up information as well!  Let’s get started!

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Today was the grand opening of a new part of a playground meant for children with and without disabilities.  It’s called The Lions Narnia Braille Trail.  It is a new addition which surrounds the existing playground in Kingsport, located at Warriors’ Path State Park.  The park is called Darrell’s Dream Boundless Playground, which is described as a place where children of all abilities can enjoy nature.

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Part C. S. Lewis-biography, part literary analysis, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia is, at its heart, the story of a journey. The first step came when its author, Laura Miller, was given a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by her second grade teacher. Today a well-respected writer and literary critic, Miller looks back at the spell this book cast on her and at how it shaped the reader and the person she has become.

Like all journey stories, some parts will be familiar and some will not. Most Narnia fans will be able to relate to Miller’s account of how the Chronicles of Narnia changed the way she looked at the world. They will identify with Miller’s deep desire to be Lucy, “that rare creation, a character who is good without being a prig or a bore.”

But these are side trips, not the main path in a book which promises to reclaim Narnia “for the rest of us,” this meaning readers who, like Miller, loved Narnia as young people but then felt “tricked, cheated, and betrayed” after they discovered that many Narnian themes mirrored themes found in Christianity.

Anyone not belonging to this “rest of us” group may find it hard to understand why this discovery produced so much anger and bitterness in Miller. Although she devotes most of her book to describing her rocky relationship with the Narnia books, she is never able to articulate exactly why learning that they represent C. S. Lewis’s attempt to put his most foundational beliefs into story form “horrified” her.

Would she have felt so horrified had she discovered Lewis was a Buddhist?

Read the rest at the C.S. Lewis Blog

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Amazon.com has today announced the release of their new edition of Kindle. With that announcement comes new additions to the library of books available for Kindle, including many works written by C.S. Lewis.

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In a Penguin Books survey, the White Witch tops the list of scariest characters of all time in children’s books.

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