{"id":256,"date":"2004-12-21T23:49:21","date_gmt":"2004-12-22T04:49:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=256"},"modified":"2004-12-21T23:49:21","modified_gmt":"2004-12-22T04:49:21","slug":"narnia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=256","title":{"rendered":"Narnia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Curiously, apropos of nothing, this came up at work today, in what order should C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books be read<\/a>? I said, “Publication order–The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe<\/i> comes first.” My coworker took a different view–in her boxed set The Magician’s Nephew<\/i> comes first.<\/p>\n

Oh, the pain!<\/p>\n

Some may find it curious that, staunch atheist as I am, I have an opinion on approaching the Narnia books. Call it nostalgia. I read them when I was very young–six, if memory serves–when an animated adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe<\/i> was shown on a Chicago television station prompting my mother to buy me a set of the books. The order of the books then had Lion<\/i> first, Magician’s Nephew<\/i> sixth. It was in the mid-90s that the publishers renumbered the books, moving the chronologically-first Magician’s Nephew<\/i> to the number one spot. But just as I would never<\/i> recommend that anyone take The Silmarillion<\/i> as the entry point into Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, nor would I recommend Magician’s Nephew<\/i> as the introduction to Narnia for it removes some of the mystery to be discovered along the way.<\/p>\n

I’ve not read any Lewis in a while, not since I read the Space Trilogy in the mid-90s (and Lewis’ abandoned fourth novel in the sequence). Perhaps I should give Narnia another try, before the film of Lion<\/i> comes to theaters next fall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Curiously, apropos of nothing, this came up at work today, in what order should C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books be read? I said, “Publication order–The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes first.” My coworker took a different view–in her boxed set The Magician’s Nephew comes first. Oh, the pain! Some may find it curious that,Continue reading “Narnia”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[100],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","tag-narnia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}