Comments | dragonkin: "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

dragonkin

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

Jan 17, 2008 11:42

-- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis

(It's the first line of the book and I love it because it's so rude without being actually mean).

So over the break I started reading C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia. I finished the final book in the series yesterday, and here are my thoughts.
I can't honestly remember if I'd read The Lion, the ( Read more... )

chronicles of narnia, mythology, metaphors, books

Comments 3

brazen_heart January 19 2008, 07:27:28 UTC

Thoughts about Narnia? Hmm. I really think the best order of reading is in published order, but I almost always think that's the best way of reading books. Either way makes it easy to stop reading right before The Last Battle, and I always encourage this. Ugh, I hate that book so much. I despised it when I read it when I was younger, and currently it's the only book I haven't been able to re-read. HAAAAAATE. It just has no redeeming characteristics to it at all. Well, I guess it has one. It seems to have prevented any derivative works from popping up, which is a relief.

On the other hand, I adore The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy. Re-read those books until they almost fell apart ♥ Reepicheep and Eustace were my favorite characters in the whole series, and I loved the Calormene stuff. It was so much more interesting than bloody Narnia, and their way of story-telling was so much fun to read. Plus THahB has very little world-hopping stuff, which makes it an easier read now when I've gotten sick of ( ... )

dragonkin January 19 2008, 22:11:21 UTC

I agree about reading in publication order. According to a few websites, Lewis really didn't plan ahead past whichever book he was working on. I think reading them chronologically makes them seemed rather forced. Especially since the parallels in TMN back to TLTWATW (truly awful acronym)are so intentional, they would seem really heavy-handed if read first. The Last Battle was really... tired. It's hard to care about Narnia or most of the characters in it at that point, and it seems like Lewis feels the same way. I'm glad that it wraps everything up, but that's about all it did for me ( ... )

brazen_heart January 20 2008, 06:00:33 UTC

I read it in chronological order, when I was in... oh, 4th grade or so? Somewhere around there. I didn't enjoy TMN or TLTWATW at all, but when I read it later in published order I enjoyed it a lot more.

I never saw any racism in THaHB when I was younger, and I still have a hard time seeing it =___= I-I kind of felt like a bad person for liking THaHB when I realized people thought it was racist, but I got over that. Mostly.

I liked Voyage because it had Reepicheep and Eustace and dragons and stars. It wasn't "let's face down some evil person"! It was "hey let's go exploring and see what we find"! Argh, now I want to re-read it but my copy has all the pages falling out of it =__= Maybe I'll read it very carefully.

I liked Edmund, but not as much as Eustace. Lucy I always disliked because she was too perfect, and Peter was almost as bad. I don't think I had much of an opinion about Susan, except that it always seemed so unfair that she was left behind at the end of The Last Battle. Giving me yet another reason to dislike ( ... )