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[rivka]

Last night I picked up a new chapter book to read to Alex. "Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy."

We read four chapters before bed, stopping - with difficulty - at the end of Edmund's first trip to Narnia and his meeting with the White Witch.

This morning, after breakfast, Alex picked up the book and asked me to read the next chapter. At various points I tried to suggest that we stop. When we finished chapter twelve, just before "Deep Magic From the Dawn of Time," I let her know that if we read any further we wouldn't be able to stop until the end of the book. She wanted to keep going. With some difficulty, I extracted myself long enough to shower. Then we plunged back into it.

We finished the book a few minutes ago. Solidly, since breakfast time, we worked through 140 pages of dense, exciting, scary fantasy. When Aslan died - I debated putting a spoiler warning here, but come on - she sobbed and writhed on the couch in misery. I promised that it would have a happy ending and read inexorably on. Michael came in and held her while I read.

We spent some time afterward reviewing the plot. She kept coming back to the same couple of questions - why did the Witch want to kill Edmund? Why did she kill Aslan? I think it was less that she didn't understand the book and more that she was grappling with the Problem of Evil.

"That was such a saaaaad book!" she complained. "Can we read the second one?"

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

(Which is "the second one" in your ordering? Since, er, that's it, in mine).

Oh, dear.

Original publication order was:
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Horse and His Boy
The Magician's Nephew
The Last Battle

In recent years, they've been repackaged in chronological order, based on a chance mention in one of C.S. Lewis's letters that he'd thought of revising them to be ordered that way. I think that was a terrible idea. It makes much more emotional sense to get the origin story of The Magician's Nephew after you are already deeply familiar with, and in love with, Narnia.

We're reading my own old books, which are properly numbered in publication order.

[ailbhe]

Ah, my copies were my older sisters', from before 1984, and TMN is labelled 1, though I didn't read it first. I read them all out of order as I found them in the house, when I was six (the year I made my First Holy communion). TLTWTW was definitely the most frightening.

Rob read them without ever realising they had Christian undertones.

I can't wait to see what Alex thinks of Reepicheep in Dawn Treader.