SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Buddy read for 2024 Forum on Formative Spec-Fic.

Paired with A Snake Falls to Earth - discussion (May)

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Some bibliographic information for those unfamiliar with C.S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Narnia/":

"The Chronicles of Narnia," can be read in any order, but two are usually debated as being "the best." The publishers like to number the books by internal chronology, and this is followed by all of the omnibus editions with which I am familiar. (I reviewed one of them here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...)

The commonly offered alternative is publication order, which looks rather random.

On the whole, I think that internal chronology is probably the best, with, e.g., The Horse and His Boy following The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, instead of being stuck in much later. However, I make an exception for The Magician’s Nephew, which comes first in that order, instead of near the end by writing and publication date.

I would read it after "Lion.." Immediately after would be fine, but definitely before the final volume, The Last Battle

This is because "Magician's Nephew" is very much a conscious prequel, not a sequel, and there are passages in it which assume knowledge of "The Lion..." I would read it second, or at least later, because I know from early experience that the novice will be puzzled by those references.

Decades ago, before the paperback editions, my local library was missing a copy of "The Lion..." (and some other volumes). and by necessity I read "Magician's Nephew" as a standalone. I was left rather frustrated until some of the missing volumes were finally re-ordered.

By the way, there is a textual problem with "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." Lewis made a couple of changes of names for the first American edition, which I think were improvements. These were lost when the American publishers went over to the British first-edition texts. This can create some confusion when people are discussing it, and there are different printings involved.

(There were also some changes in the early American editions of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I think were clearly improvements. For details, see Paul F. Ford's Companion to Narnia, Revised Edition: A Complete Guide to the Magical World of C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia by Paul F. Ford, which prints the relevant passages in their revised forms. I reviewed it here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...

Thank you for all that information! It's relevant. Especially the reading order you suggest.

So: Lion, then Nephew, then Horse, and etc. makes a lot of sense to me.

I've read the series three times and won't again, btw.

I read the one: The Chronicles of Narnia Complete 7-Book Collection: The Classic Fantasy Adventure Series

and the order is

Magician's Nephew
The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe
The Horse and his Boy
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Last Battle
Boxen

Boxen does not seem to fit the rest of the books at all

and now that I'm older, I can really see the religious aspects of these books. As a child in the 50s-60s they were good reading, but now I see the sexism, racism and religious leanings of them

Boxen is a collection of Lewis' childhood writings. It is nice to have it available, but its only connection with Narnia is the use of talking animals.

A Kindle edition of Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, by Owen Barfield, is now on sale at $1.99.

The book had a major influence on C.S. Lewis, and, rather remarkably, on Tolkien, despite being Barfield being a non-philologist who tried to investigate the nature of language. He even mythologized its thesis in a paragraph in The Hobbit (although he later cancelled the idea as there expressed in his later revising of the Silmarillion material).

https://www.amazon.com/Poetic-Diction...

The book is not easy going, and its echoes are not so clear in Narnia as they are in The Hobbit, but it was part of Lewis's "mental furniture" for most of his adult life. He dedicated to Barfield, as "the best of my unofficial teachers," his first academic work, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition.

Barfield was also the author of a 1926 children's fantasy, The Silver Trumpet, which is presently very hard to obtain, although there are plans for a new edition. I have never had the chance to compare it to the Narnia books.

Available at $2.99 is a collection of essays on Barfield, Re-Weaving the Rainbow: The Thought of Owen Barfield, edited by David Lavery (the only one of two projected volumes to be published before his death).

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

I forgot, when I was arguing for beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and following it with The Magician’s Nephew, instead of the reverse, that this was the order Lewis originally planned. (I was reminded of this in Paul Ford’s excellent Companion to Narnia.)

Lewis dropped the draft of MN, possibly because he didn’t like the way it was developing, and wrote Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia, instead. He did not go back to the abandoned book until almost the end of his work on Narnia: in fact it was completed after The Last Battle, although they were published in the reverse order.

The first book on The Chronicles of Narnia,” which was read and approved by Lewis himself, was the late Kathryn Lindskoog’s The Lion of Judah in Never-Never land: The Theology of C. S. Lewis Expressed in his Fantasies for Children. This is still available in Kindle, but it is also part of Lindskoog’s Journey into Narnia: A revision and expansion of The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land, which is at about about the same price. The expansion is a second part, “Exploring the Narnia Chronicles,” a book-by-book guide, by internal chronology. I would strongly suggest getting “Journey” instead of “The Lion.” If you want the Kindle edition. The hard copy of “Journey” is considerably more expensive. There are also used copies of “The Lion” likely to be available.

Thanks, Ian, for the info on secondary works!

Getting started (until or unless there is another, dedicated, thread).

Despite being an alternate-world fantasy, "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," is set in a specific moment in time: the opening of World War II, with families in Britain being dispersed by wartime work, military or other government service, or industrial, and evacuation of children to the countryside in anticipation of bombing raids on the cities. It was already history by the time the book was published, and may have been beyond the experience of its youngest early readers.

Some of the setting may be lost on more recent readers. A few years ago, someone on, I think, Amazon, complained that the text had been modernized, by inserting a mention of "Wireless." I explained as patiently as I could that this did not refer to computers and WiFi: "the wireless" is (was?) standard British English for what Americans would call "the radio." since it doesn't have wire connections to the signal, as against a telephone (or telegraph).