@jo

A View Master

The original View Master

A Reel

Oh, Thooose were the view masters you talking about?  

They required no batteries and were simple for even a fairly young child to use. One just moved a small handle manually on the side and this would move the reel on to the next photo. We would get lost in story-telling via those little treasures.

Yes, but with whom? Yes, I remember those circular slides, but those I did vaguely remember coming in contact with, were random pictures or tourist-type pictures. I never knew they could be associated with stories I read, like Heidi, as @narnian78 mentioned. I'd forgotten even the name of the gizmo on the links you provided, that ran them.  

@waggawerewolf27 

Some of the reels like Heidi had real people in them, but others like A Christmas Carol and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea had people that were artificially created so that they looked appealing to a child.  I guess the creators of the reels thought that the artificial characters worked well enough to tell the story. The pictures were three dimensional so that you could see depth in them, which made them better than most cartoons. But they weren’t always real, although they were rather attractive in appearance.  The pictures of the national parks and wildlife were actually of real places and wild animals.

Does anyone else here have this book, The Longing for a Form, edited by Peter J. Schakel?  Dr. Schakel was one of my professors in college. In addition there is one essay by another of my former professors at Hope College, Dr. Charles Huttar.  The book is mainly a collection of essays about C. S. Lewis and his works of literature. It would be quite useful for a C. S. Lewis course. It is available here on Amazon, although I found my copy on eBay for a few dollars less.

https://www.amazon.com/Longing-Form-Fiction-Secondary-Studies/dp/1556355882

It is a little expensive for a paperback, but I think it was well worth getting and reading.  Plus two of the people that I once knew were involved in the writing of the book.  🙂

I recently finished rereading a book I first encountered in my early teens: Shadow Spinner by Susan Fletcher, which is about a maid of Sheherazade from Arabian Nights/1001 Nights. I was glad to see it mostly held up to my fond memories.

We had another book store which went out of business in our area. Unfortunately it was a Christian bookstore which lasted only five years. It is very sad that a Christian bookstore cannot survive in a town where there are so many churches.  I think some of the cause is that many people shop online for books and similar items. Often websites offer lower prices so you cannot blame people for shopping there. Still, one cannot help feeling very sad about the closing.  🙁

https://rivergrandrapids.com/holland-bookstore-closure/

Posted by: @narnian78

We had another book store which went out of business in our area. ...

Still, one cannot help feeling very sad about the closing.

So true! There are many things I do not care for in regards to online everything being so dominant: closing physical bookstores is definitely one of them. NarniaWeb and our own family chat are two of the very few things I give thumbs up to in this online/digital era. People seem to be becoming more and more isolated as they spend times with their screens, rather than in community. Call me an old fogey   , but I am very concerned about the effect of social media and A.I. on our humanity.

In fact, I have just begun reading Abdu Murray's excellent and alarming factual book on the huge negatives of A.I. on our society, Fake ID: How AI and [banned topic, so will not divulge here] ... are collapsing reality—and what to do about it (February, 2026). Abdu in no way totally dismisses A.I., saying that there can be good there, but is at the same cautioning his readers against much that is wrong with it. Citing many sources, his book is gripping and scary too, as we look to the present and future of artificial intelligence, and how it impacts our lives. The danger with someone who is entranced with A.I., and not discerning, is that he/she can lose perspective on what is real. Abdu has called this (taken from a speaker he heard) the collapse of reality.

I have plunged into the 500 page Heaven book by Randy Alcorn (2004). What a read. It is the study from Scripture on the eternal destiny of Christ-followers. I can hardly put it down. Blessèd assurance in every way.

I just finished a short re-read, but 'tis one of the most powerful and disturbing little books I have ever known ... The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Knowing how this horrifying tale finishes, I quite dreaded getting to the end, hoping that somehow something would change, even though I knew it would not. I could feel myself literally start shaking as

In a very different vein, a re-read of Miss Buncle is in order soon. What a delightful story!

A book that has been sitting in the large biography section of our personal library for a long time is Silent Night: the story of the World War 1 Christmas Truce by Stanley Weintraub (2001). I have yet  to read it, and am determined to do so soon. I think it was years ago that @ValiantArcher recommended it (??).

Another book that my husband recently finished for the first time, and of which I would like a re-read is To the Golden Shore: the life of Adoniram Judson by Courtenay Anderson (1956). A 500 page tome, it is the fascinating tale of a man, in all his frailty and weaknesses, who was one of the first Protestant missionaries to Burma (now Myanmar), and hugely impacted the future of Christian missions.

So many wonderful books to delve into!  

Anyone here read or own this book?  Apparently the author wrote her own Narnia stories when she was a little girl . I see nothing wrong with that unless she tried to make money off from them. 

https://www.amazon.com/Spare-Oom-War-Drobe/dp/1917665040

I’m glad that one of her favorite authors was C. S. Lewis when she was a child. The book looks so interesting!  🙂

@narnian78 I saw that book a few years ago and leafed through it — I can't remember exactly why, but I was unimpressed and I didn't buy the book. The author obviously loved Narnia as a child, but as an adult she takes a more sceptical, if not quite cynical, view. The only very specific thing I remember is her going on about the unfairness (as she now sees it) of Aslan’s punishment of Aravis in return for the whipping that her step-mother's slave received. I can't remember the exact details — I just remembered getting the clear impression that this author really doesn't "get" Aslan. That put me right off and I didn't want to read further. But that's just me, and you might get a completely different impression from reading the book. 

@courtenay 

I’m sorry that you had a negative experience with the book. Whether or not she understands Aslan is not for me to judge. It is possible that I might disagree with part of the author’s views, but the book might be still worth reading.  I bought the book a few months ago and haven’t read every chapter. I might have a different opinion of the author, but I am waiting until I have read the entire book to make up my mind.

Posted by: @narnian78

Whether or not she understands Aslan is not for me to judge.

Perhaps I should clarify what I meant here — I wasn't thinking in terms of "this author doesn't know Jesus and therefore is not saved" or anything like that. I simply meant that from some disparaging things the author said about Aslan as a character, I got the clear impression that she hadn't seen anything profoundly deep and meaningful in him, in the way Lewis intended his readers to (whether or not they realised immediately who he is meant to be). I could of course be misjudging there, as I haven't read the whole book.

I might add I've even occasionally read things from Christian commentators who find Aslan and the Chronicles are not to their taste for whatever reasons, so again, this isn't a comment on anyone's faith or lack of it. It's just that for me personally, if someone writing about Narnia doesn't find Aslan to be a deeply inspiring character, it's pretty much a given that I won't agree with very much in that writer's interpretation of Narnia. That's all.  

@courtenay 

Just out of curiosity did you read The Longing for a Form edited by Peter Schakel?  I don’t know if you like scholarly books, but I had mentioned that one earlier in the thread.  Dr. Schakel and Dr. Huttar, two of my former professors contributed to it. I wondered if you read it and if you did, what did you think of it?  I’m not even sure if it is available in the UK. 

@narnian78 No, I haven't read it. I don't mind scholarly books if they're readable — I had to tackle a lot of them while I was at university — but I haven't ever seen that one. 

Has anyone here read this book?  Please let me know what you think of it if you have read it.  I assume that it is about Christian meaning in the books because that is in the title. And I am assuming that the author, Jonathan Rogers, is a Christian because it seems like that is the point of view he appears to be taking.

https://www.amazon.com/World-According-Narnia-Jonathan-Rogers/dp/0988963272

That Katherine Langrish book sounds interesting. I have read the Jonathan Rogers book, and I think it's very good. 

I've given up on War and Peace.  It has some really powerful scenes in it, but it takes forever to get to them and when I do, I almost find them anticlimactic after waiting so long. This may be a rare case where I prefer to watch adaptations of a classic work of literature to actually reading it. Someday I may try to finish it when I'm more in the mood. I stopped because I realized I was reading it more to be done with it than because it was giving me much pleasure. That's not a good sign.

In the interest of reading that gives me pleasure, I reread William J. Brooke's trilogy A Telling of the Tales, Untold Tales and Teller of Tales recently. While some of the fracturing of fairy tales in them is pretty old hat by now, the prose is succulent. It's a shame the books aren't better known. Doesn't this description of an antagonistic prince in one of them perfectly describe Rabadash? 

He hated anything that was beautiful that he could not possess.

Has anyone here read C. S. Lewis’s diary All My Road Before Me?  If you have please tell me what you think of it. The writing in it is before Lewis became a Christian so I recommend tolerance knowing that his views changed later in life. 

https://www.amazon.com/All-My-Road-Before-1922-1927/dp/0062643584

This book Of Other Worlds I have owned since I was in college. I have a much older edition than the book shown on Amazon.  It is interesting to read Lewis’ views on how children’s stories should be written.  The essays and stories are in the same book, which is quite unusual, but it is quite a variety of material. Did you like the book and the essays and stories in it?  

https://www.amazon.com/Other-Worlds-Essays-Stories/dp/0062643541

Do you like the newer editions of C. S. Lewis’ books?  I have replaced some of the older paperbacks with new editions because they are in better condition and have larger, more readable print, and also they are more attractive volumes. I have kept my hardcovers because they may someday be valuable as vintage items, and therefore mean more to me. They are beautiful books. 🙂