Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia:
"The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. A first love teaches you how to be with another human being by choice, rather than out of the imperative of blood ties. If we are lucky, our first love shows us how to negotiate the paradox of entering into a union with someone who remains fundamentally unknowable. First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.
"The meeting of author and reader has a similar soul-shaping potential. The author who can make a world for a reader–make him believe that the people, places, and events he describes are, if anything, truer than his real, immediate surroundings–that author is someone with a mighty power indeed. Who can forget the first time they experienced this sensation? Who can doubt that every literary encounter they have afterward must somehow be colored by it? If we weight the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children’s books suddenly turn up very high on the list."
Gwenda: I got a copy of this book in the mail, and it looks pretty good. I’ve only had a chance to get a little way into it, but Miller’s take on Lewis is in the same ballpark as my own. She’s seems a very good writer.