17 - The Magician's Nephew

The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
HarperCollins, 1955
96 pages
Date completed: December 10, 2009

So the Narnia series always bored me to death in elementary school, which is when I should have been reading it. Around the holiday season in 2005 I found a collection of the entire Chronicles of Narnia on sale at the bookstore for about $10, so I bought it because I feel like these books are a staple I missed out on. In fourth grade, my teacher read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe aloud and I remember loving it, but then I read The Horse and His Boy and loathed it and could never even make it all the way through The Magician's Nephew or Prince Caspian.

Which brings me to 2009. The week before finals. Stressed as hell. But I need something to read before bed. So I look at my bookshelf, which is half full of school books and half full of more complicated/longer novels, and my eyes rest on The Chronicles of Narnia. Bingo. The stories are about 100 pages apiece, so I can easily read them in a night (or a night and 30 minutes of a morning, which is how I read The Magician's Nephew). Also, they don't require much thought.

So The Magician's Nephew was still a little hard to get into for me, but since every 10 pages I could be like "only 90 left, only 80 left, only 70 left" et cetera, it wasn't bad at all. And once I got farther into the story, I actually really liked it. Especially the part about Aslan creating Narnia, and the lamppost/toffee tree growing, and the description of the scenery while Digory and Polly were flying to the tree of life.

Religious allegory aside, I liked it. Religious allegory included, it was cool to relate aspects of the story to Biblical stories. Really really blatantly obvious connections to the Garden of Eden and Jesus and evil temptation, but it's a children's story so I'll let that slide.

I probably won't be blogging about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe unless my opinion of it drastically changes or something, since I've already read it. So you'll probably see me in a few days with The Horse and His Boy. Since the copy I just read is part of one giant book (pictured in the "currently reading" section), I've used an image of the copy of The Magician's Nephew I have at home and received as a child.