Sir Peter Mouse, Gollywog, and others with strange names. On a sheet of lined paper, in his funny half-capital-letter, half-cursive handwriting, Jack listed all of them under the title Dramatis Personae.

“This may sound silly, but do you think you choose these life-changing books, or do they choose you?” I am muddling my words, mixing up what I mean. “Maybe you choose what is already interesting to you or . . .”

He can’t find anything else to say, so he closes his eyes to imagine the man who wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He sees C. S. Lewis walking at the edge of a river on a small island behind Magdalen College. A lion is hiding in the far woods, and the man’s heart is filling with a truth that years and years later he pours onto paper—anoth

He closes his eyes and sees the stories, words weaving over and around each other, fashioning a

I look at the cover, a thick maroon leather binding with gilt design: Phantastes: A Faerie Romance. What, if anything, could possibly be inside these pages that would inspire a man to nearly, or actually, change the course of his life? I sit at a desk scarred with scratches where a gooseneck lamp drops a circle of light. I open the book and begin t

Dark wood surrounds me. In the alcoves, sunlight falls like yellow dust. Stacks of books smell of aged paper and hushed voices sound as if they might know secrets. The furniture is so old and so solid I wonder if it has been there for all time. I wander until I find myself at a wooden circulation desk, asking a woman in tortoiseshell glasses and br

“We rearrange elements that God has provided. Writing a book is much less like creating than it is like planting a garden—we are only entering as one cause into a causal stream that works, so to speak, its own way.”

mope along High Street, then head toward my rooms at Somerville when I stop mid-step. A chill of something other than the weather runs along my arms and heart as I pause in front of the Bodleian Library. It radiates. Warm light spills from its windows onto the icy sidewalks. Christmas lights have been strung unevenly along the pathways and seem to

They talked into the night, walking round about that river island until well into the early morning when Jack saw light—not of a rising sun, but of a spiritual conviction. He finally understood what his friends had wanted to show him, what he could see only in the middle of the night while the birch trees swayed in the wind alongside the river. All