This book has always been special to me. When I picked it up this week, I had just finished two LONG, nonfiction books—River Town and The Man from the Train. Nonfiction isn’t a genre I normally read a lot of and these books were both over 400 pages. I was burnt out. Plus, I had been consuming a lot of true crime (The Man from the Train plus a documentary on Jonestown and one on the Clutter murders). I was bummed out.

I wanted to read something for one of my reading challenges and I desperately need a short, refreshing fictional read. And as always, C.S. Lewis was there for me.

This book filled a prompt for the Popsugar Reading Challenge (A reread of a favorite book) and #Booked2019 (Winter: Reminds you of your happy place).

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TW: death and war

The Pevensie children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—are displaced to the countryside, during the bombings of London during WWII. They’re staying in the home of an eccentric professor, when Lucy discovers a magical land hidden in the back of a wardrobe, in a spare room. She makes friends with a faun named Tumnus, who tells her that Narnia, the land she found, is being held captive by the White Witch.

When the rest of the Pevensies discover Narnia, they find Tumnus’s home ransacked by the Witch. Determined to set him free, the four of them set out to find the Witch. Betrayed by one of their siblings along the way, the other race to find Aslan, the key to restoring peace to Narnia.

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This book, my dear friends, is what made me a reader. When I was about 6 years old, my dad took me into his home office and started reading The Chronicles of Narnia to me every night. The first book, The Magician’s Nephew, I remember being interesting, but sort of dark and twisty. But this book? This book brimmed with magic. Narnia was a place I desperately wanted to visit. I wanted to make friends with the characters, I wanted to bury my face in Aslan’s mane.

This book taught me that stories can radically transport us to a time and place that cannot possibly exist, but reflects the longing of our souls. I longed to be in Narnia, I just didn’t know it until my dad read the books to me.

I read that series MANY times as a kid, until I turned 12. I would sneak my dad’s hardcover copies off the shelf while he was at work and try to read as much as I could before he came home. There were his boyhood copies, and they were as special to him as they were to me.

Eventually, my parents gifted me my own collection—paperback (my favorite), but the illustrated collector’s edition. The pages are glossy and sprinkled with Pauline Baynes’s, the original illustrator, depictions of Narnia. These are the kinds of books that are so pretty you can’t bear to read them.

But this week, I pulled my copy off the shelf. I cracked the paperback spine. I grabbed a pen and a highlighter. This is my way of showing the book how much I love it, how much it means to me. I put myself onto the page, I enter Narnia though my highlighter. I call out the parts that mean something to me, bring forward the truth I see in this reading.

I remember what it’s like to journey to a place that my soul longs for.

And I think about what it will be like to share these books with my neice or with my own kids. To sit down and show them this magical place and remember this particular reading. I hope that they’ll treasure my copy as much as I treasured my dad’s.

I hope they, too, can always find the power to travel to a place outside of this world.