The Magician's Nephew - C.S. Lewis.
I re-read this for the first time since childood (we're talking pre-teens here) and it was great. A lot of fun ideas and clever writing going on. I will certainly be finishing the series.
A.
You should have started with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Since you've read them before I guess it's not that big a deal, but still.
Glad you enjoyed this so much though! I love Narnia.
This is the order the box set I had when I was a kid came in. I didn't even know that there was another order until much later. This is what Lewis has to say:
I think I agree with your [chronological] order for reading the books more than with your mother's. The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last, but I found I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them. I’m not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published.
And I always loved The Magician's Nephew.
Yes, I read that Lewis quote, too, but I also read this in the Wiki article after it:
"
However most scholars disagree with Harper Collins' decision and find the chronological order to be the least faithful to Lewis's intentions[3]. Scholars and readers who appreciate the original order believe that Lewis was simply being gracious to his youthful correspondent and that he could have changed the books' order in his lifetime had he so desired.[5] They maintain that much of the magic of Narnia comes from the way the world is gradually presented in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. They believe that the mysterious wardrobe, as a narrative device, is a much better introduction to Narnia than The Magician's Nephew — where the word "Narnia" appears in the first paragraph as something already familiar to the reader. Moreover, they say, it is clear from the texts themselves that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was intended to be read first. When Aslan is first mentioned in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, the narrator says that "None of the children knew who Aslan was, any more than you do" — which is nonsensical if one has already read The Magician's Nephew.[6] Other similar textual examples are also cited.[7]"
If you read them when you were a kid as they were re-ordered by Harper Collins', of course, there's not much you can do about that now. I didn't read them them way, so I'm sure that has a lot to do with my preference.
However, I do like the idea of reading them in the order that Lewis imagined them. And he imagined
LWW first.
Also, I think it's much more interesting to dive into the Narnian world as it's fully formed rather than beginning from its beginnings. Think, for example, how awesome something like
The Matrix is when we are just thrown into that world. We get the history of it later with Neo, but there's an immense rush and gratification for a viewer when your mind is brimming with questions, questions that are gradually answered later once you've already experienced the world a little bit.
And don't think I'm dissing the
Magician's Nephew! I love that book. I love all of them.