Reading Wednesday

[troisoiseaux]

Recently read

Finished The French Revolution by Ian Davidson, which was... fine? Fine/meh cusp? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I found myself wishing for more depth and a slightly less self-righteous tone, but credit where credit's due to Davidson for looking at the impact of the Revolution outside of Paris— I learned new information about both the war in Europe and the uprisings/ civil war elsewhere in France.

Read C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I feel like I must have read as a kid (I may have only seen the 2005 movie?) and Prince Caspian, which I definitely didn't. Overall, I enjoyed both - especially Lewis' scene-setting/descriptions of Narnia - although hoo boy This Whole Thing Smacks of Gender (and also Imperialism, and Christian Allegory).

Currently reading

Currently reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I'm enjoying somewhat less, because I'm not sure which is more grating, Eustace Scrubb or whatever point C.S. Lewis was trying to make here, which I suspect is a 1950s version of complaining about liberal snowflakes...?

Continuing to make progress on Anna Karenina, although I'm definitely missing the historical context necessary to make sense of Levin's whole peasant land-reform thing.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

his own bad feelings about his experiences in traditional (horrible, Dickensian) boarding schools

I think we get a little bit of that in both The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (with the line about how Lucy's magical healing potion not only heals Edmund's wounds from the final battle but "he looks more like himself than he had since before he went to that awful school" or something) and Prince Caspian (when Aslan and Bacchus are running around freeing Narnia, they liberate both a girls' school and a young teacher at a boys' school) as well.

I've had a sneaking suspicion that Eustace is a little bit a self-insert.

...huh.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, exactly. Schools are inevitably horrible in the Narnia books; Lewis seems to believe that school is so axiomatically awful that progressive schools can't possibly be any different, and so the fact that they supposedly ARE different is grounds for suspicion in itself.

[troisoiseaux]

The inside of C.S. Lewis' head feels like an exhausting place to be.

[oursin]

One almost feels he would have sympathised with Pink Floyd!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG1fgCHvDNQ:
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey, teachers, leave them kids alone
All in all it's just another brick in the wall
All in all you're just another brick in the wall

[legionseagle]

I tried to use that in a school assembly. It got shot down rather quickly.