Laura Miller's Blog

Medieval gardens

I decided to take advantage of a spell of balmy weather to visit the Cloisters in uptown Manhattan. This museum of medieval art features several rooms that recreate period chapels and cloisters, embedding authentic architectural fragments in a neo-medieval building.

The Unicorn Tapestries are here, but I'm especially partial to the gardens, which, on the right day, can make you feel as if you've been transported to Italy. Unfortunately, March is way too early for there to be anything but...

"Lost" and Narnia

I admit that when a character called Charlotte Staples Lewis turned up on the ABC television series "Lost" last year, I was excited. The puzzle-like show is full of literary references, planted here and there, to give its most cultish fans even more mysteries to investigate. A lot of them are red herrings.

Charlotte, who spent her early girlhood on the mysterious island where most of the action is set, was later exiled to the mainland and told by her mother that she'd imagined the whole...

Beware of ghost trains

Yesterday I took Desmond and Nini to MOMA, where they seemed underwhelmed by everything except the promos for the Tim Burton exhibit (which was sold out). However, our journey uptown was not without event. Instead of the D train we were waiting for, a strange train of what looked like ordinary subway cars, minus the windows, drove without stopping through the station. I told them that this was a ghost train, taken only by ghosts.

Laura: Ghost trains don't stop at the regular stations.

Nini:

Patti Smith and Louisa May Alcott

I recently reviewed a new memoir by the rock singer and poet Patti Smith, and found in it this passage about a surprising influence in her childhood:

I drew comfort from my books. Oddly enough, it was Louisa May Alcott who provided me with a positive view of my female destiny. Jo, the tomboy of the four March sisters in Little Women writes to help support her family, struggling to make ends meet during the Civil War. She fills page after page with her rebellious scrawl, later publishing in...

A radio interview about The Magician's Book

I very much enjoyed doing an hour-long radio interview with Doug Fabrizio on the University of Utah's public radio station, KUER, on a show called Radio West. It was fantastic getting the chance to talk about Narnia in so much depth with such an informed interviewer.

The link will be retired in about 6 months, so if you'd like to listen, grab it now.

The Magician's Book makes the New Yorker's best-of list

An early Christmas treat came in the mail earlier this week, when I learned that the New Yorker selected The Magician's Book as one of it's favorite titles of 2009. (Technically, it was a 2008 book, but it came out in December and as a result missed the cut-off.) You can see the whole list here.

While I'm at it, if you'd like to hear me (plus David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times and Carol Besse, co-owner of Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky) talking about the best books of 2009 on ...

The paperback of The Magician's Book is out

I haven't posted anything here in ages, mostly because I've been writing more for Salon, where I've been doing commentary about such subjects as the viability of collective storytelling via Twitter and vanity book awards.

However, I just received a copy of the paperback of The Magician's Book, which is just as beautiful as the hardcover (yet lighter, and an excellent Christmas gift, I might add!). It includes the Q&A that I did with my Salon colleague Rebecca Traister and one of those...

E. Nesbit and A.S. Byatt

I'm currently reading A.S. Byatt's new novel, The Children's Book. It's based on the life of E. Nesbit (not, as some have claimed -- presumably out of ignorance -- Beatrix Potter), who was one of the primary influences on C.S. Lewis' Narnia books. Nesbit invented the sort of children's story where several siblings embark on a series of adventures (magical or not) free of adult interference. Edward Eager's children's novels (Half Magic, Magic by the Lake, etc.) were patterned after such...

Home-schooling the twins

Readers of The Magician's Book may be interested to read this article, by my good friend Andrew O'Hehir, who is also the father of Desmond and Nini (Corinne). Andrew and his wife Leslie are homeschooling the twins, a project they more or less backed into when they decided that the schools in their area place too much emphasis on structured, regimented learning.

Many people are curious about how home-schooling works for families who aren't pursuing it for religious reasons, and Andrew's piece ...

The comfortable reader

Every so often, I'm invited to speak to students about my work and someone asks what's the hardest part of my job. I'm not sure what answer they expect, but they always seem surprised when I say that it can be physically difficult.

Except for a bout with repetitive stress injury a few years back (brought on by bicycling in San Francisco), it's not the writing, but the reading that gets to me. A lot of sitting is never good for your body (I get a surprising amount of reading done on...