Dear Readers,

Thanks for attending the Feb. 24^th session. How did you find the pace? Was it too slow? Too fast? As always, I will be glad to receive your comments.

In this session, we touched on a number of topics:

1. CS Lewis’ philosophy (his Christianity, his idea of “reality” and heaven and hell – a big thanks to Yoko for her report on The Great Divorce),
2. the Scandinavian mythology, properly called Norse mythology (or in Japanese 北欧神話here)
3. fauns and
4. dryads
5. and nyads (or naiads)
6. Silenus (Silenus appears as a character in a later Narnia story, Prince Caspian)
7. and Bacchus or Dionysus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus
8. allegory; famous allegorical stories in Western literature are
   1. Dante’s Divine Comedy,
   2. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress,
   3. and a modern one for children (fun and easy to read, and I warmly recommend it) called The Phantom Tollbooth (and on Amazon Japan here http://snipurl.com/uiob3 [www_amazon_co_jp] )

The next session will be Wednesday, March 10^th, 3-5 pm. Your homework is to finish reading Chapter 2, and read chapters 3-5. In the next session, we will not read all the text, but only read some excerpts. I will ask you to give short summaries of the chapters.

If you find some interesting or useful articles or books in Japanese about CS Lewis, either general ones, or ones about the Narnia or other stories, please pass them on to me.

Also, I encourage you to try and read some other works by C.S. Lewis. If his adult fiction sounds too difficult, then how about trying another Narnia story? Although the one we are now reading is the most well known, I think some of the other Narnia stories are even better and more satisfying.

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