Magic Reading Room

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• by
  • mamajill
  on Sep. 6, 2008 at 8:38 AM

• I bought the book "Give Yourself to the Rain" for my son by Margaret Wise Brown (who wrote Goodnight Moon) and we really love it! It is a book of poems- some are better than others, but the one poem called "Give Yourself to the Rain" is our favorite. Lots of moon and nature stuff throughout!!

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• 
• by
  • Guaranteed
  on Sep. 10, 2008 at 12:34 AM

• I just picked up a book at a yard sale. I just thought the artwork was cute, but when we got home and I read it, I realized that it would be a great addition to this reading list! It seems like a good read for early grade school kids. It's called The Happy Hedgehog. It subtley teaches the importance of slowing down to appreciate life, being happy with who you are, and having an understanding of the natural world and natural healing.
  

                                                    
  

  
  

• 
• by
  • mamajill
  on Sep. 10, 2008 at 3:30 PM

•  Fantasy and Magic for Older Readers
  Starhawk’s Favorite Authors

  When I was a child, our local library had one corner devoted to what were called “Modern Fairy Tales.” That was the section I haunted, and I read books about magic over and over again, which is probably a strong factor in my growing up to become a Witch. Here are some of my personal favorites from childhood and later, with some commentary from my perpective today.

  Frances Hodgson Burnett—The Secret Garden (this is my (Jill)'s favorite book )is now a popular movie, so this author has been introduced to a new generation of children. my personal favorite of hers, however, was The Little Princess. This somewhat masochistic tale of a young girl who loses her father, her wealth and her status gripped the imaginations of me and my (also fatherless) close friends, and we used to play for hours, exchanging the roles of brave Sara Crewe and mean Miss Minchin. Don’t do a Marxist class analysis on this one!

  Susan Cooper—The Dark is Rising series, Athenum Press, 1970’s. These books are a great introduction to magic and to a lot of Celtic lore and mythology. I wish she didn’t so absolutely identify light with good and dark with evil, and occasionaly her use of ancient lore and texts twists them away from their true meanings. However, they are great reading! The titles, in order, are: Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King; Silver on the Tree.

  I recently ran across a Fundamentalist book of propaganda warning of the imminent Pagan takeover of the minds and hearts of America’s children, in which excerpts from The Dark is Rising were compared line by line with excerpts from The Spiral Dance, evidently to show that what seemed like innocent fantasy was really part of the great Witchcraft conspiracy. Considering that Cooper’s book was published in 1973, and The Spiral Dance not until ’79, I couldn’t quite understand how this influence was supposed to have occurred unless we were truly experts at time manipulation, but it made me take a close look at the series and yes, she does include in it a lot of intuitive knowledge about how magic works. (Alas, if there were a Great Pagan conspiracy, we’d probably have to hire a few Fundamentalists to effectively organize it for us!)

  Edward Eager—This is one author I can recommend without reservation. American, his books are set mostly in the Fifties/early Sixties—but two, Magic and Magic by the Lake, are set earlier, in the Twenties. Time travel is often a theme. He takes ordinary children and brings in unruly magic which often has to be thwarted in order to work. Intelligent, charming, and funny, he teaches a lot about spellworking.

  C.S. Lewis—His Narnia series is a classic, and as a child I read and reread the books. After about my tenth reading of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, I suddenly realized it was a Christian allegory. This didn’t disturb me, and given that the Christianity is cloaked in magical worlds, talking animals, myths come to life, I wouldn’t worry too much about that aspect. However, what disturbs me more, today, is that the evil force in Narnia is identified with the Witch, and the good magic all comes from men. Lewis is very much an Englishman of his time and class, and his books are very moralistic—not necessarily always a bad thing. Also, for those of you raising your boys to be in touch with feelings and unashamed of emotion, the books are clear that crying is babyish and barely acceptable for girls, let alone boys. This could make for good discussions about differing cultures and values; it might even be a useful counterbalance for some of the Pagan children I know to be exposed to the idea that discipline and restraint can have value.

  Eleanor Farjeon—Her book The Little White Horse is a wonderful magical allegory about the transformation of evil. Sweet, funny and delightful, its only flaw is the almost inevitable association of dark with bad and white with good. Available in paperback.

  Edith Nesbitt (Bland)—a classic writer from the turn of the century, her books are so magical and so well-written that I would love to wholeheartedly recommend them. However, she too is very much a writer of her time and class. As a young child reading them, it never occurred to me that my people would have been among the below-stairs housemaids or worse, the greasy moneylenders that appear in her stories. I simply identified with the upper-middle-class children (albeit usually on the verge of impoverishment) about whom she writes. I could even ignore her slighting references to Jews as something quaint and out-of-date. Today, however, I cannot ignore her casual use of racial epithets and unreservedly recommend these books without suggesting some discussion and preparation. The House of Arden, however, is epithet-free and contains a portrait of a village Witch who is a healer and wise woman. If you can find a copy, buy it!

  J.R.R. Tolkien—Yes, like the rest of the baby boomers, I spent a lot of my late adolescence submerged in TheLord of the Rings. Great stories, voluminous knowledge of Celtic and Saxon lore and languages, a wonderful vision of the Otherworld of the elves, and a created world so complex and real we want to believe in it. I’m always grateful I read his books before I became a feminist and noted the dearth of women characters. Ah well!

  Aside from Eager, all these authors are English. My brother and I have commented that our early reading seems to have strongly influenced our development. Raised in a warm, loud, sometimes hysterical Jewish household where yelling was the normal mode of communication and complaining a strong, cultural trait, we somehow aquired a veneer of the values of the playing fields of Eton. Whether this did us good or harm, I really can’t say, and whether these books will still speak to Pagan children in the Nineties remains to be seen, but they are still all works I enjoy rereading. Let us hope that as our tradition grows, books will be written that reflect our values more completely but are still as engaging as these classics.

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• 
• by
  • TessaBianca
  on Oct. 24, 2008 at 1:51 PM

• My favorite young people books with a pagan spin are the Wise Child series by Monica Furlong. It is suggested for grades 6-8 but I find that slightly younger and even older children will like these books. Heck, I even go back and reread them now and again. These are the books that as a 4th grader really got me thinking about spiritual beliefs. I remember wishing there really were a religion where we can honor earth, work with the elements and listen to our hearts AND our minds. Imagine my joy when I found out that there IS a religion like that! One great part about these is that the magic used is not fantastical flashes of light andpoofs of smoke...it's much closer to what we know to be the 'real thing'. I hope you will give these books a try. Most libraries have them. If you do, please drop me a line and tell me what you think :)

  Check out the first book here ~>http://www.amazon.com/Wise-Child-Monica-Furlong/dp/0394825985/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224869903&sr=8-1

  You can even read a few pages. The other books are called Juniper and Colman.

  

  Liberal Religion on the Gulf Coast www.gcuuf.org

  

• 
• by
  • Reni-Witch-Baby
  on Nov. 13, 2008 at 7:06 PM

• this is the book list that carries us through the majority of the winter...
  

  • Wiccacraft for Families by Margie McArthur
  • Circle Round by Starhawk, Diane Baker, and Anne Hill
  • The Winter Child by Wendy Froud & Terri Windling
  • The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
  • What Makes Day and Night by Franklyn M. Branley
  • What Will the Weather Be? by Lynda DeWitt
  • Weather Words and What They Mean by Gail Gibbons
  • Frozen Noses by Jan Carr
  • I Am Snow by Jean Marzollo
  • Clifford the Big Red Dog: Winter Ice Is Nice! adapted by Bob Barkly
  • White Snow, Bright Snow by Alvin Tresselt
  • The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
  • Owl Moon by Jane Yolen

  i'm fairly certain there are more books, but there are books everywhere (too many books - not enough shelves, at least not yet...). there are also books about traditional and cultural holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Chinese New Year, Groundhog Day).

  

  
  

• 
• by
  • yvette1
  on Apr. 28, 2009 at 5:04 PM

• thank you so much for the book recommendations. I already went online at the library and placed a few on hold for my 5 year old to read
  

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