Elijah David

In an attempt to demonstrate that I do actually (on occasion) read things that aren't science fiction and/or fantasy of some kind, today's Top 10 is a list of books outside those genres. As always, these are in no particular order. Planet Narnia by Michael Ward Planet Narnia  is an analysis of the Narnia series, along with portions of C. S. Lewis' other works like his poetry and the Cosmic/Ransom Trilogy, exploring Lewis' fascination with medieval cosmology. Ward theorizes that Lewis' construction of the Narnia books builds each story around one of the seven heavens of the middle ages; in the medieval understanding of the unvierse, each heaven is the sphere of a planet (Venus, Mars, Mercury, the Sun, the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn). While I doubted the validity of Ward's thesis before I read the book, he quickly convinced me this theory had merit. This book not only gave me a fresh understanding of some of my favorite books, it also stirred a desire t...

Sorry for the long empty space there. School, while being inspirational, doesn't always leave me with enough time to type out these musings. My subject for today could take up several posts, but I'm going to keep it brief. This semester, I read John Granger's How Harry Cast His Spell , a book on the alchemical and Christian imagery and symbolism in the Harry Potter books. In the last few weeks, I've been reading Michael Ward's book Planet Narnia , in which he examines the use of medieval cosmology (specifically the seven planets) in the Narniad. Both of these books have sparked my imagination and introduced me to systems of symbols and images that I hadn't encountered in such detail, if at all, before. One of Ward's sentences particularly grabbed my attention: "Imaginative writers are allowed—indeed, expected— to adopt symbol systems..."* By symbol system Ward seems to mean an overarching groups of symbols which pervade an author's works, rem...