The End of the Midnight Madness: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

"Wingardium Leviosa!"

"Expelliarmus!"

"Alohomora!"

"Avada Kedavra!"

Hearing those pretend, faux-magicky-language spells shouted out by tween voices, watching them flick their substitute wands (anything from a twig to a drumstick to a chopstick to a sewing needle) with grandiose flourishes, checking out all the robes, cloaks, scarves, glasses, lightning bolts drawn onto foreheads... let's just say it takes me back.  I was there, nine years and four months ago, when the first installment of this storied seven-book, eight-movie franchise exploded onto America's silver screens.  I was standing in line (in those barbaric times before assigned seating), waiting anxiously to rush in and claim the best seats for our group of young, fresh-faced aficionados of witchcraft and wizardry.  I was watching with wonder as Harry Potter's bespectacled face first filled the screen and I was listening as John Williams's majestic score first filled my ears.  And I haven't missed one film since.

Looking out over the sea of eager fans, the old and the young, the costumed and non-costumed, those desperately trying to hold onto one last shred of dignity and those who had long ago abandoned all hope - you could tell it was the end of an era.  Now, almost 20 hours and more than $7 billion later, we were all about to take part in the last midnight showing of the last Harry Potter film EVER.  And you could tell that everyone was thinking the same thing:  IT'S FINALLY ABOUT TO END!

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Book Review: George R.R. Martin - "A Dance With Dragons"

"It has been a while between books, I know," George R.R. Martin admits in the introduction to his new novel. One can only imagine this line being delivered wearily, the response to thousands of fans clamoring for the next installment in the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. It's been six years since the previous book, and that book only featured half the main cast. Long-time readers haven't met up with certain characters in A Dance with Dragons since 2000. That was eleven years ago. Bill Clinton was president. It's been a long time. 

So it's hard to approach reading A Dance with Dragons as one would a regular book. The build-up, both from the long wait and the exposure from the HBO series, has led to increased expectations and a reader base large enough to single-handedly revive the fortune of some bookstores. It's hard for a book to live up to that sort of anticipation. Additionally, there's the personal element to consider. When I last read about some of these characters, I was fourteen years old. It's a bit jarring to pick up the new book and realize that absolutely no time has passed for these characters I left eleven years ago. 

After three immensely enjoyable books, Martin ran into a bit of problems with A Feast for Crows in 2005. The book featured only half of the main cast, and they happened to be the least interesting half. Fans missed their favorite characters, questioned the slowing pace of events, and wondered if publishing a half-book wasn't just a way to sell something while working around some sort of writers' block. Excited as I was about Dance, I was also a tad nervous. Martin's been writing these books for close to two decades. What if he's lost his touch? 

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Ghosts from Charge Shot!!!’s Past: Tattoos on the Heart

Charge Shot!!! has been around for two and a half years now - amazing, we know! - and in that time we've amassed a lot of posts. Much of our writing is in an editorial vein, simply because we don't have the time or resources to report on every news item that flies across the Interwebs. Therefore, we feel that our output has a better shelf-life than you might expect from some run-of-the-mill news blog.

This feature, Ghosts From Charge Shot!!!'s Past, aims to bring some of this stuff - both good and embarrassing - to the eyeballs of our newer readers, while taking long-time constituents on a trip down memory lane. Enjoy!

Summer is upon us. For some that means vacation, afternoons in the sun, and hot hot heat. For others that means working, cranking the air conditioner, and catching as many blockbuster movies as possible.

A Better Life is not a blockbuster movie. But Entertainment Weekly did go so far as to call it “2011’s first awards movie”. This film from About A Boy director Chris Weitz charts the relationship between a struggling Mexican gardener and his Americanized son in Los Angeles. A Better Life marks Weitz’s return to “serious” film after a vacation in blockbuster land with The Golden Compass and Twilight: New Moon, and reviews indicate that it should receive some recognition in awards season if anyone can remember it six months later.

But this Ghosts post isn’t about A Better Life. It’s about the book Tattoos from the Heart, which Chris reviewed last year. The author, Rev. Gregory Boyle, founded Homeboy Industries, a gang-member rehabilitation program in Los Angeles. Boyle, along with Homeboy Industries, helped Weitz select shooting locations and capture an authentic L.A. gang atmosphere.

Tattoos, like the program it chronicles, is meant to be inspirational. Chris had this to say about that:

“You can probably guess by now what sort of book this is. You wouldn't be wrong. Each chapter is organized by some sort of inspirational theme, as Boyle stitches together anecdotes and stories of the people he's encountered and helped (or tried to help). Many of the stories end in tears and hugs; others end in tears and funerals. Boyle peppers these anecdotes with Bible quotes and references to Scripture.

But even though Tattoos on the Heart clearly has a religious agenda, I found for the most part that the stories speak for themselves.”

I never thought we’d ever review a book like Tattoos on the Heart, but I’m glad we did. It’s a window into a specific, challenging life that few would enter if they had the choice – not that different from Chris Weitz’s A Better Life. 

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Yellowed Pages: The Wilk Are Among Us by Isidore Haiblum

Buried under piles of pulpy, yellowed copies of sci-fi and fantasy lit. Giaco reads and waits. The first Thursday of every month he’ll attempt to review an ancient relic from an ancient time (aka crappy genre fiction from the 70’s and 80’s). Stay with him as you journey into space, caves, voids and dungeons. Unfortunate side effect: from this point on you’ll smell of old books. 

Origin Story 

This month I'll be talking about another oddity I found at a dusty old used book store. Crammed into the "fantasy" section The Wilk Are Among Us beckoned to me. And judging by the cover this could, potentially, be a fantasy novel. Is that guy with the tentacles some mystical creature? Some wizard shifting shape? I had hoped so, but it was  hard, strange sci-fi all the way.

The most interesting aspect about my review of this book is that it's, in a way, an exclusive. Well, as much as you can call a review of a book from 1971 an exclusive. But I've searched far and wide and I see no reviews of this book. No one's talked about it. No one's reviewed it. I've only found one synopsis and Amazon only has two copies for sale (without even any user reviews). In a world where even a book like The Flying Sorcerers has a wikipedia page, this is a rarity. So join me as I talk for the first time online about this weird little book about aliens, tentacles and Earthlings.

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Shakespeare a Pot Smoker? [Insert Witty Weed Shakespeare Pun Here]

“To toke or not to toke?” “Doobie or not doobie?” “Is this a reefer which I see before me?”

Let’s cut to the chase: William Shakespeare may have smoked pot.

Ten years ago, South African palentologist Francis Thackeray analyzed some pipe fragments found in Shakespeare’s garden and found trace amounts of cocaine and cannabis. Though the pipe pieces are nothing but circumstantial evidence(they were in his garden and that’s all we know), the chemical findings basically hold up. Cannabis was cultivated in Britain during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and coca leaves had been imported to Europe by the Spanish from the West Indes.

Thackeray then decided to find literary evidence that Shakespeare enjoyed recreational drugs, citing the phrases “noted weed” and “compounds strange” from Sonnet 76. This is an incredible reach. Weed didn’t become slang for marijuana until the early twentieth century; it’s likely that Shakespeare was using “weed” to mean “garments” or “style” (more here). The “compounds” are verbal, not herbal, ones. A sonnet that starts “Why is my verse so barren of new pride” isn’t about drugs. It’s about finding new words to express love.

With his physical evidence circumstantial and his literary evidence circumspect, Thackeray’s turned to the body of the Bard himself for answers. He recently applied for permission from the Church of England to examine Shakespeare’s body. Thackeray told Fox News that he plans to use “laser-surface scanning” to determine gender, cause of death, and whether or not marijuana played a role in Shakespeare’s writing process.

It’s a long shot, though. The Church of England has spent centuries honoring the inscription on Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford-upon-Avon:

"Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare,/ To digg the dust encloased heare;/ Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,/ And curst be he that moves my bones."

To get his answers, Thackeray needs the Church to follow Shakespeare’s lead: just light a pipe and relaaaax, man.

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The Joy of the Summer Read

The summer sun warms your skin. The smell of salt is in the air. The ocean, that perfect natural white noise, crashes in on itself ad infinitum. You're sipping a margarita as you cool the tops of your hot feet by burying them in the sand. Everything is perfect... and you're reading a book about a serial killer who puts pieces of glass in his victims' eyes. Or maybe you're reading about a child wizard who has to kill the freak who killed his parents. Or a book about a guy uncovering major vatican secrets. Whatever the case may be you're hooked on a summer read. But why? Why are we drawn to a particular type of book while vacationing or relaxing by the pool? Summer's here, readers, we may as well dive in!

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Book Review: Paul Theroux - "The Tao of Travel"

Paul Theroux likes to travel alone. Not just on your average vacation, but on lengthy, continent-spanning trips. He has a disgust for tourists and a lot of the people he meets along the way. And while many travel books do their best to paint every foreign country in a positive, semi-exotic light, Theroux holds no punches; if he doesn't like a city, he's going to lay out exactly what he doesn't like about it. 

Such an attitude can be (and has been) mistaken for misanthropy. But while Theroux's writing can be barbed, dismissive, pessimistic and overly critical, his keen eye for detail, love of traveling, and occasional moment of bliss are what prevents his books from descending into pure vitriol. And Theroux is just as critical of himself as he is of his fellow travels and destinations. Much of the time he struggles with paradox of travel writing - how to accurately describe your own experience in a location without devolving into narcissism. 

This strange combination of cynicism and persistent curiosity is what makes Theroux one of my favorite travel writers. And because he's been writing accounts of his travels for the past thirty-five years, there's a lot of books to choose from, though this can be intimidating to the newcomer. Theroux's latest book then, The Tao of Travel, can be seen as both an introduction to the man's work, as well as a summary of his career as a travel writer. 

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Sunday Reading: Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.

Jonathan Franzen wrote a very big book called Freedom. Many people read his very big book called Freedom (including our own Chris Holden). Generally, when many people have read the very big book you’ve written, you get invitations to speak at college graduations, the admissions/alumni/whoever-decides committee thinking that your bestselling way with words will inspiring their graduating class and perhaps – who knows? – score some points with the alumni donors.

Franzen recently spoke at my alma mater, Kenyon College. Kenyon is, in fact, the alma mater of the bulk of this website’s writing staff. Kenyon’s a small school in the middle of Ohio (aka Nowhere), so we all feel little bursts of pride when national media pays attention to it. I, for one, love sharing David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water with people. Not only do I think it’s a moving statement about the importance of sympathy in our modern age, I like telling people he spoke those words at my college.

Many of us Kenyon alums are similarly growing over Franzen’s speech, recently adapted by the author into a New York Times op-ed, “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.” Franzen couldn’t have picked a better college at which to use moderate Ludditism to remark upon our culture’s guarded emotional state: only a few years ago did Kenyon students stop scowling at cell phone users walking their beloved Middle Path.

Some people may not agree with this editorial, but it’s worth reading to arrive at that conclusion. Consumer technology is so pervasive, its cultural impact so broad yet little understood, it bears philosophical exploration. Consider this quote from Franzen:

“To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.”

Franzen moves on to decry irony and encourage us toward real love, real appreciation of the world around us. Brush it off as environmentalist mumbo jumbo and you may be missing his point: we are paying a cultural cost by blindly embracing technology.

Read the piece. See if you agree. Need I remind you? He spoke at my college.

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A Classic Case of Sequelitis

“Sequelitis - A medical condition propagated by a combination of commercial success and creative ineptitude. Symptoms include bad movies and music, arrogance, denial, and desperation. In that order.” – Urban Dictionary

Ahh…sequels. We love them (sort of). We hate them (sort of). We love to hate them (when we don’t have anything better to do).

Some sequels mean well. They’re rightly born of the original intellectual property, crafted by the original creator, and closely linked to their source. Fans accept them into canon. They create wikis to explain the connections between installments. Good times are had by all.

Some sequels are evil. They’re cash grabs, products of creative bankruptcy and fiscal trepidation. They cause fans to hate they things they once adored or, at the very least, enter into blissful ignorance of a given franchise. Good times are had by no one.

I’m sure you can think of examples of both. Star Wars has entries in each category – Final Fantasy, too. If I knew more about the Harry Potter series, I’d mention those as well.

With The Hangover II boring many critics and sequels starring pirates and giant robots dominating the summer lineup, it’s easy to think that all sequels are disingenuous hackjobs. But some do deliver on the promise of their forbearers – for every three movies starring Big Momma, there’s one The Dark Knight.

Sequelitis the disease is not confined to movies and videogames. And it’s worse when the original authors aren’t even involved. Plenty of books, television shows, and other properties fall prey to it – even plays! Especially the classics.

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Yellowed Pages: The Flying Sorcerers by David Gerrold & Larry Niven

Buried under piles of pulpy, yellowed copies of sci-fi and fantasy lit. Giaco reads and waits. The first Thursday of every month he’ll attempt to review an ancient relic from an ancient time (aka crappy genre fiction from the 70’s and 80’s). Stay with him as you journey into space, caves, voids and dungeons. Unfortunate side effect: from this point on you’ll smell of old books.

Origin Story

If my first Yellowed Pages entry was about a story with a looping, nonsensical plot, and my second entry was about a story with a completely linear plot, then consider this entry into the world of old genre fiction about a story that can't, for the life of it, tell its story! The Flying Sorcerers is another book I picked up from the now-defunct sci-fi bookstore in Philadelphia Germ Books. You can sum this review up as "the one that almost broke Giaco." And you know me, I love junk! This book by sci-fi stalwart Larry Niven and Star Trek staff writer David Gerrold was too much for me! Just ask Craig, I've been moaning about it to him since page 14.

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Book Review - Carsten Jensen, "We, The Drowned"

Quick, name a famous Danish author!

Well, you get two bonus points if you somehow came up with Søren Kierkegaard, one point for Hans Christian Andersen. But most likely, the names of renowned Danish wordsmiths aren't exactly rolling off your tongue. That's okay; Denmark isn't necessarily regarded as a literary powerhouse. 

So when a book like Carsten Jensen's We, The Drowned comes along, winner of every major Danish award, lauded as the best Danish novel of the past twenty-five years, et cetera, et cetera, one can't help but take this praise with a grain of salt. But one can see why the book has received so many accolades in its native country; it feels like the great Danish novel, the summation of a national identity. It's ambitious, wide-ranging, and has already been accepted by the Danes as a modern classic. 

The novel is sort of a Patrick O'Brian meets One Hundred Years of Solitude; it focuses on the small coastal village of Marstal, whose only resource is the sea, and whose only business is the shipping industry. It follows Marstal from the First Schleswig War in 1848 (I had to look it up too) to World War II. Packed into this century are more wars, economic booms and busts, prosperity and depression, and side trips around the globe to Samoa, Newfoundland, and Portugal. There's a few recurring motifs and a loose strand of connections tying the novel together, but for the most part, We, The Drowned takes delight in avoiding an overarching narrative, preferring thematic unity to a contained plot. 

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A Novel Theory: Why Isn't Fiction Culturally Relevant?

The obituaries for various facets of the publishing world have been coming out for years. Reading is dead. No, not reading, just bookstores. Or maybe print books are dead, but e-readers will keep reading alive. No, just kidding, the novel is dead. Or maybe novels will survive while newspapers wither away and die. 

Yet despite all the doom and gloom, there's always a few books that seem to slip through the cracks and become cultural phenomena. David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel, the difficult The Pale King, garnered a lot of media attention and managed to place on the New York Times bestseller list, and last year Jonathan Franzen appeared on the cover of Time magazine, the first writer to do so in almost a decade. There's a lot of literati dancing around the edges of our cultural periphery, even if fiction writers don't necessarily occupy a central position anymore. 

But why not? Why don't novelists command the cultural clout that they used to? People still read, sure, but even the popular fiction writers of the 21st century seem to be cult figures lurking on the edges, rather than offering an authoritative commanding voice. Perhaps society has changed, and literature, like music, has become fragmented to such a degree that no one figure appeals to everybody. Or perhaps the writing has changed, and it no longer reflects society in quite the same way.

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Yellowed Pages: The Atlantic Abomination by John Brunner

Buried under piles of pulpy, yellowed copies of sci-fi and fantasy lit. Giaco reads and waits. The first Thursday of every month he’ll attempt to review an ancient relic from an ancient time (aka crappy genre fiction from the 70’s and 80’s). Stay with him as you journey into space, caves, voids and dungeons. Unfortunate side effect: from this point on you’ll smell of old books.

Origin Story
 
I found The Atlantic Abomination at one of my favorite used book stores in Philadelphia. Germ Books, now closed for business (travesty), stocked its shelves full of weird, smelly, crappy science fiction. There's something really special about going in to a specialty book shop and picking up a book based solely on its cover.

Now, look at this cover, I doubt any one of us could have passed on this gem. What we see is the Abomination himself, looking a bit like a fat blue crab/bird while terrified humans look off to the distance. This, in essence, is the whole story of The Atlantic Abomination, published in 1960. Join me as we talk cold war, aliens, mind control, and bad editing!

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Book Review: David Foster Wallace - "The Pale King"

The Pale King carries the subtitle "An Unfinished Novel." This is fair; after David Foster Wallace's tragic death in 2008, Michael Pietsch took up the difficult task of organizing the author's notes for this book, a project that Wallace had apparently been working on for years. As a result, The Pale King feels half-finished, is overly-detailed in some places, sadly lacking in detail in others, and feels like it was structured to deliberately confuse the reader.

Of course, anyone who read (or attempted to read) Wallace's previous novel, Infinite Jest, knows that these qualities are trademarks of the author's style. Add to that Wallace's own notes about the book-in-progress - he wanted to have a "tornadic" feel and indicated that the plot should be "a series of set-ups for things to happen but nothing ever happens." As a result, while the book is clearly unfinished, the result is still a thoroughly satisfying piece of literature. Wallace's style was such that reading half a book by him still feels like a complete thought. The plot may not go anywhere, but it's unclear the plot was meant to; what's important is delving into Wallace's ideas.

The Pale King is nominally about a group of eccentric workers at an IRS facility in the mid-1980s, and has been marketed as such; Little Brown even took the cute tactic of releasing the book on April 15th. But calling The Pale King a book about taxes is like calling Infinite Jest a book about a video tape; such a claim is technically true but doesn't really get at Wallace's method of writing. His true subject in this book is boredom, and The Pale King functions less as a straight-forward narrative than as a fugue on the subject - themes and subplots interact with each other and, through their conversations, form a larger whole.

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Casting for Political Correctness – Game of Thrones and Fantasy Racism

The first episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones aired just this past Sunday and already there’s controversy brewing: racism.

Our own Jordan Pedersen said nothing about this in his review, but it appears that more than a few TV critics are a little unnerved by the Dothraki, GoT’s barbarian horde. Adam Serwer, writing for the Atlantic, expressed disappointment at the casting department’s choice of “miscellaneous brown people.” TIME’s James Poniewozik wondered if “if it's possible to be racist toward a race that does not actually exist” while calling the Dothraki a “grabbag of exotic/dark/savage signifiers.”

Caveat: I have not read any George R.R. Martin, and I have yet to see Game of Thrones. But this issue is larger than one HBO series (no matter how huge the hype). Racism and other forms of prejudice crop up in fiction because it remains an unfortunate part of society, however veiled it may be.

And while the public seems generally okay with capital-l Literature, etc. exploring such topics (with a few capital-n Notable exceptions), we get nervous when they appear in our pulpier entertainments like fantasy or science-fiction.

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Artists and Critics - How Much Contact Do We Want?

There have always been publishing companies that charge a writer to publish their own work. The rise of the Kindle and other markets for ebooks have made this even easier to do. Most people refer to these companies as "vanity presses," though some of the more optimistic writers refer to themselves as "indie authors." This method is either a great way to build a fanbase, or a total scam, depending on whom you ask.

Few of these authors ever achieve anything close to mainstream success. But sometimes they stumble into fame in other ways. Most recently, self-described "author, poet and artist" Jacqueline Howett managed to create quite a bit of a stir online when she took to responding to reviews of her book, The Greek Seaman. 

A small, humble blog titled "Big Al's Books and Pals," which dedicates itself to reviewing independently published ebooks, published a review of The Greek Seaman on March 16th. Big Al gave the book two stars, but he was not necessarily mean-spirited. The review acknowledged that the book had an interesting plot that was marred by a large number of grammatical and spelling errors, rendering the story almost incomprehensible. 

You can read what happened yourself - Howett appeared in the comments section, apparently incensed that Big Al had dared to give her book two stars. She posted copies of other, more favorable reviews, and then started to attack Big Al personally, with a grasp of the English language that did nothing to combat Big Al's criticisms ("...if their were any spelling mistakes they were corrected" reads one typical Howett response). By March 28th, Howett was calling Big Al "a big rat and a snake with poisenous venom [sic]", before leaving with the final, exquisitely professional, request to "Fuck off!"

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Yellowed Pages: God of Tarot by Piers Anthony

Buried under piles of pulpy, yellowed copies of sci-fi and fantasy lit. Giaco reads and waits. The first Thursday of every month he’ll attempt to review an ancient relic from an ancient time (aka crappy genre fiction from the 70’s and 80’s). Stay with him as you journey into space, caves, voids and dungeons. Unfortunate side effect: from this point on you’ll smell of old books.

Origin Story

Oh, God of Tarot, where do I begin with you? For starters, let’s talk about where I actually picked up this book. I didn’t find it on Amazon, though it’s available there. I didn’t get it from a used bookstore. This literary prize I found in a box marked “FREE” outside a house in Center City, Philadelphia. So I more or less trash picked this first entry into Yellowed Pages. How fitting!

The cover features and handsome young man wrestling with what looks like a Chinese dragon. This dragon, it turns out, is an embodiment of temptation. This man is Brother Paul, our protagonist the warrior monk. So that should set the tone for this whole endeavor.

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Zoinks! OED update includes OMG and LOL

Time to get annoyed when your spellcheck scribbles red underneath your 21st-century vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary now includes several words popular with millennials, surely to the ire of English professors everywhere.

The latest update legitimizes initialisms (abbreviations consisting of sequential first letters from a name or expression) borne out of online interaction. That’s right, OMG and LOL are now totally viable words according to the OED. But it’s not just their useful on Twitter that earned them passage into everyone’s favorite English lexicon.

Such abbreviations are cropping up in print and everyday speech, and convenience isn’t the reason, say the OED folks:

“The intention is usually to signal an informal, gossipy mode of expression, and perhaps parody the level of unreflective enthusiasm or overstatement that can sometimes appear in online discourse, while at the same time marking oneself as an ‘insider’ au fait with the forms of expression associated with the latest technology.”

For a generation that grew up in AOL chat rooms and now groans every time their parents text them “LOL u r so funny,” this is exactly the usage of Internet initialisms. Writing for Thought Catalog last November, Leigh Alexander called for an end to online use of LOL, citing ironic use and the fact that it’s rarely ever true. Think about it. I’m more likely to type “hahaha” to friends online than LOL, unless I’m being cute or snarky.

There’s a hope (or perhaps fear) that the inclusion of OMG and LOL will open the OED floodgates for more Internet speak. Ben Hardwidge over at Bit-Tech asked OED principal editor Graeme Diamond if we’d ever see l337 in the dictionary. “It’s got a good chance, but it may not quite cross the line yet,” says Diamond. The inclusion of numbers won’t prevent it (check out 1471), but its niche usage might.

What other Internet words should we see in the OED? ROFL? idk? Butthurt?

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Opting Out of Opting Out: The Latest Round in the Google Books Saga

There's a lot of long-running legal cases currently trickling through our judicial system. The recent health care law gets the most press, but there's also the possibility of an AT&T and T-Mobile merger, which would have to be approved by the federal government. 

Google Books isn't as politically volatile as health care, nor is it as sexy as smart phones and data networks. But the recent opinion delivered by district court judge Denny Chin is perhaps just as important in the long-term. Nominally, the ruling is about Google's desire to create an all-inclusive digital library. But the conversation also touches on the United States' arcane copyright law, the supposed "freedom" of information, and the implications of a commercial company pursuing a supposedly humanitarian project. 

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Books to Movies: The Chronic... cles of Narnia

Last holiday season, I gave myself a little project, for my personal edification and enjoyment: I would read all seven books in C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series. I've been a lifelong fan of Lord of the Rings, and you can re-read the trilogy only so many times per year, so I figured I'd branch out. The Narnia books are quick and easy to get through, but time has been a premium for me lately, so I've only been able to read up through the third book: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Which is significant, because that was the third and latest Narnia movie to hit theaters.

The next step in the movie franchise is unclear. Will the fourth film in the series be The Silver Chair (the fourth book published) or The Magician's Nephew (the last book published, but the first in the chronology of Narnian myths)? SPOILER ALERT: All the familiar actors have been phased out of the story, so there's no concern with aging, as there was with Harry Potter. No one on imdb or Wikipedia has the answer, so I'm assuming the question doesn't yet exist.

My question is: How can any film studio worth its salt let this opportunity for a potential seven film series, with the stories already written and a fanbase already determined, pass them by? It would be embarrassing for everyone involved if they had to cut the project short 3/7ths of the way to the finish line. And in this age where everything's a franchise and new ideas for films are all but extinct, how can they not get to seven movies? But just how viable is a (SPOILER ALERT AGAIN) Jesus allegory in a time where the most talked-about movies (Social Network, King's Speech, The Fighter, 127 Hours) are based on recent, true stories rather than myths? That's part of what I aim to find out with this project.

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