Blog 3544 – 07.18.2025

The Magician’s Nephew

Over fifty years ago (fifty two actually)a college English Literature professor suggested that I read a book because she said that the intelligently gifted (which she actually called me) had a responsibility to develop that gift and do their best to make themselves and the world better thereby. The beloved professor that her students called Sister Weaver and I had been talking in the college book store when she picked up a book by one of her favorite authors and said, “Here is someone who will stretch and challenge that big brain of yours. I dare you to read anything C.S. Lewis has ever written. I promise that you will find it hard to put it down until you finish it.”

I took that dare and in a couple of years I had read every book I could find by him even one many C.S. Lewis fans have never heard of called Letters To An American Women which is just a collection of letters that he wrote to a friend and fan Joy Davidson that he would later marry and bring to England with her son to be the inspiration of his autobiography that I also read called Surprised By Joy.

C.S. Lewis is considered by many to be one of the best Christian Apologist’s ever. His Case For Christianity is a classic treatise on the subject and many of his theology books came from radio lectures that he gave on the BBC during World War Two and as a traveling lecturer then and after the war in my England and the United States. But my favorite books by Lewis are his children’s book series The Chronicles of Narnia, a science fiction trilogy, The Ransom Trilogy, and a little allegory called The Great Divorce, that deals with the great divide between God and man not the dilution of the relationship of a married couple.

Years later after I first met Lewis in that college book store fifty years ago, I found out that he died twenty years before on my thirteenth birthday, the same day that pragmatist President John F. Kennedy died and famed atheist author Aldous Huxley. Three great men with vastly different personalities, philosophies, and points of view passed on that fateful day. The thoughts of all three of them have left their indelible impressions and imprints on my “big” brain.

When I first read Lewis’s five children’s book series a year or so after I read his books on Christianity I found them enchanting, entertaining, and enlightening. Back then the first book in the series and probably most well known was The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe. It was the first book that he wrote in the series, but book five in the series (pictured above) is actually a prequel to the first story and chronologically first it is now volume one in the series. I have trouble picking a very favorite

book of the six, my least favorite being the last, probably because I so hated to see the story end though in Lewis’s mind it never did but found the characters and us “going ever upwards and onward.”

The Magician’s Nephew or The Great Divorce are two of the Lewis books that I most recommend as an introduction to the mind of a to truly great thinker and writer.

Want to stretch that already big brain of yours? I challenge you give this little book a read. You will find it hard to put down and you may even find like me that you will want to read anything you can find by C.S. Lewis.

For some years I have no longer considered myself a Christian, but I am still very much a fan of C.S. Lewis and of all good writing from various perspectives.

Your friend, fellow reader, and traveler,

David James White