I told you before that I really like apocalypses. But I’m not a monster. I like creation stories too. Especially when they are as well-told as The Magician’s Nephew. A well-told tale From a technical storytelling perspective, The Magician’s Nephew is, in my opinion, the best written of the Narniad. (Narniad: a term I learned…
Of all the Chronicles, Prince Caspian turned out to be the one I’d most forgotten. Possibly because I love the 2011 movie so much (which brushed over a good portion of the book), large parts of it read like new to me. The movie leaves out the book’s most strident theme, which is what I…
“As far as the modern fantasy novel goes, [The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe] is ground zero. You’re seeing the atom being split for the first time.”
–Lev Grossman
Continue readingThe Great Narnia Re-Read of 2019: “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”
I hope you’re the sort of person who reads the right kinds of books. If so, you’ve probably read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third-published and chronologically fifth installment of The Chronicles of Narnia. With King Caspian X setting out to find what became of the seven lords who were loyal to his…
It is one thing to say that you love something. It is another to say why you love that thing. The Horse and His Boy is my favorite of the Narnia chronicles, and I was all too happy to return recently to “Narnia and Calormen and the lands in between.” (THAHB is actually the second book that I re-read, before The Last Battle, but I forgot for a minute and wrote the TLB post second.) In this post, I hope to share something of why I love this story so much and what makes this story so meaningful.
Continue readingThe Great Narnia Re-read of 2019: “The Horse and His Boy”
I love apocalypses. I love world-ending, sky-shattering, history-breaking stories. And I applaud C.S. Lewis for delivering the creation of his Narnian universe, and its end, not as tales told second-hand or as something to be puzzled out based on clues, but in actual volumes of story — something I haven’t encountered very often in other fantasy works. So let’s talk about the Narnian apocalypse, shall we?
Continue readingThe Great Narnia Re-read of 2019: “The Last Battle”
I didn’t set out to re-read all seven of the Narnia novels in less than two months. I don’t have a habit of re-reading fiction. I have re-read The Horse and His Boy a few times, but only because it is my favorite of the Narnia stories, which I read for the first time when I was 14-15 years old.
Continue readingThe Great Narnia Re-read of 2019: “The Silver Chair”