So, it is party time again, folks!

[wiseheart]

Each year this time, we launch my virtual birthday party, which starts on October 1 and ends on October 9 at midnight, sharp. The goals of the party are to post as many comments and collapse as many threads as possible, on as many new pages as we can. It is always great fun, as you can see if you check out the similar entries of the last few years.

This year, I'll also throw the real party at mid-time - and post the recipes of all the food that will be there for you, so that you can all participate if you want to. Virtual food has no calories.

Fandom-related discussions are as welcome as the ones about coffee or chocolate (just to name a few favourites from previous years), and, of course, pictures and recipes of birthday cakes. ;)

So, drop by, tell your story, post your pics or silly poems, ask questions you always wanted to ask and have a good time!

Soledad, in excited expectation




Oh, and by the way, to provide birthday gifts hobbit-style, I've got a revived story and a Kansas 2 update for you.

Enjoy!

Comments

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I read The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe when I was young enough I didn't realise it was Christian allegory (helped by having atheist parents & not studying the Bible at all until I was a teenager), and the rest as soon as my pocket money stretched.

I think Lewis is writing in a tradition of English children's lit that stretches back to the Victorian era, cosy fantasy (and non-fantasy) that's always rooted in the domestic, with a firm narrator's voice that doesn't shrink from directly addressing the reader (E. Nesbit is an obvious early example). It's not a tradition that I'm particularly fond of now, as an adult, but it dominated the older children's fic I read as a kid. It's entirely different from what Tolkien is doing in LotR, which was written for adults and draws on Norse myth rather than Victorian/Edwardian children's fantasy. (The Hobbit is more in the other tradition.)

I never much liked Susan because she's beautiful -- I've always had a problem with beautiful heroines.

Lewis's intention, afaik, is that Aslan is the Narnian incarnation of Jesus, which makes Aslan's rejection of Susan in The Last Battle utterly incomprehensible to me & many others -- hence the minority fanon that Aslan is actually evil.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Ah, I understand now. I'd really need to re-read the books. I never liked Aslan, really, he was too stupidly condescending, which means that he doesn't really have that much in common with Jesus.

I must admit that I never realized that Susan was beautiful. That part seems to have slipped my attention somehow.

And while I read The Hobbit as an adult for the first time, too, I loved it instantly. I still can't stomach Lewis's style, though.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Lewis's understanding of Christianity, as displayed in the Narnia series, is very different from mine, though I liked his Screwtape Letters.

I was surprised rereading Watership Down last year for my Yuletide story how much I disliked the narratorial interjections. I guess as a child I just got used to authors talking down to me. One of the reasons I loved the slightly more modern Earthsea & Diana Wynne Jones, which don't do that, at least not overtly.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

The Screwtape Letters is hilarious. They were given hand-to-hand in my teenage years, when religious literature wasn't easily awailable over here, and we discussed it endlessly with the Catholic youth group I belonged to. We also howled with laughter each time the topic came up.

When I was in novitiate, we had a meeting with the young people from other orders. One such group turned parts of the book into a performance - it was rather chilling, surprisingly enough.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

They do prove Lewis has a sense of humour, which you wouldn't guess from parts of the Narnia series.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I first read the Narnia books as a child, too, and I didn't spot the Christian allegory either. This is probably just helping your theory, though, because I also have atheist parents. Finding out they were meant to be Christian allegory diminshed the books for me, though I did still enjoy them when I re-read them all (in English for the first time) in my mid-twenties. I haven't really revisited them since.

Actually, what has inspired me towards re-reading them (but my list of books to read is so long it is not likely to happen any time soon) is reading Neil Gaiman's "The Problem of Susan", where he shows us a grown up, retired Susan. It is not a pleasant tale, and I am not sure I either like or fully understand it, but it does a good job of pointing out how unfair Aslan's rejection of Susan is.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

It's really interesting to hear non-Brits' take on the series; they feel so quintessentially English.

I don't know whether Gaiman invented the term 'the problem of Susan' in that story or was referencing an existing phrase. (Wikipedia seems to think he invented it, but I could swear I'd heard it used years earlier. He certainly popularised it.) Either way, it's a thought-provoking story.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

I read them all as a child, and saw the Christian allegory in LWW and Last Battle, but not the others. I grew up in a Quaker family, but without a lot of Christian input (except via Children's Class on Sundays when they often tried to read a bible story to us and get us to draw pictures of - which I ignored as I didn't want to draw things and mostly sat in a corner and read whatever I was reading).
I enjoyed the books, especially Horse and His Boy and Prince Caspian, but stopped reading them around 7/8 deciding that I'd grown out of them, and I don't think I reread them until around when the first film came out. It was very interesting to go back to them and see so much more of the messages and allegories.

[(Anonymous)]

Yep, those two are my favourites, too.

[(Anonymous)]

Yep, those two are my favourites, too.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Yep, those two are my favourites, too.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I stopped reading them too, perhaps a little older than that, but there was a BBC adaptation of several while I was a student (which was generally mediocre but had Tom Baker as Puddleglum), which brought them back to mind.