I’m 56 and I just read The Chronicles of Narnia for the first time last week.
I can’t believe I missed out on that for so long.
Dear God, Clothahump.
I’m actively jealous.
I’m easily as excited over these as I was over The Lord of the Rings. I just can’t wait.
I haven’t seen anything saying that Liam Neeson was in this one.
OMG I opened this thread and I Just noticed I have a copy on * NI* Right next to me! In fact its THE cpoy of N1 that got me intrested in the whole thing and ate up the better part of 2 years as I tracked down every other weekend to the main branch of the brooklympublic libray to find the next (i would never EVER skip ahead) book I hadn’t read -I Do apoligize for the run on sentance but i haven’t seen this book in like 10 years!! anyway, I Didn’t even read more then 3 post in this thread before I noticed it. and now i’m flood with childhood memories of sitting inside on great summer days in my room or on the porch lost in Narina. OK i’m gonna go reread this book and post about it again! WOW This is cool DON’T JUDGE ME!! I don’t normaly get this excited over a book!
The “Full Credits” page on the IMDB here lists both Brian Cox and Liam Neeson as “Aslan (voice)”. Maybe they electronically combined their voices or something.
Hey, I was just about to post that! 
Combining their voices doesn’t make sense. Maybe Liam Neeson dropped out of the part early on and they replaced him with Brian Cox?
I agree with Kythereia combining their voices does not make sense, perhaps before the Stone Table and after the Stone Table?
Ah, you kids. You make me want to get my Far Trader out of drydock and travel through the Spinward Marches in search of adventure and Tech Level 14 artifacts.
As for The Chronicles of Narnia, count me in on the side of those who prefer to read them in original publication order. Revising their numbering to “chronological” order is as pointless as Frank Coppola re-editing his famous Corleone series into the pointlessly chronological The Godfather Trilogy. Ugh.
And both Sam and Han shot first.
Stranger
Regarding the order in which the books should be read, the man himself recommended the order in which they were published. In a letter to his young American reader Laurence dated 23 April 1957, Lewis wrote that ‘the series was not planned beforehand’. He notes that when he wrote The Lion he didn’t know he was going to write any more. After writing Prince Caspian as a sequel (his word), he thought the same; ditto with the third to be written, Dawn Treader.
Presumably because he was such a busy man, and wrote so quickly, and wrote them one after the other (more or less), and relied on his brother to do much of his admin work, he writes ‘I’m not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published’!
roger thornhill writes:
> Regarding the order in which the books should be read, the man himself recommended the order in which they were published.
As we’ve discussed several times whenever this comes up in a thread, it was only in one letter that Lewis agreed with the child who wrote him that re-ordering the books in chronological order would be a good idea. To me, this letter always sounded like Lewis being nice to the kid rather than telling him, “Gee, that’s really a stupid idea to re-order the books.” Lewis never told anyone else that he wanted to re-order the books. In particular, he never told the publishers that he wanted to re-order them. The person who made the decision to re-order the books was really Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson. Incidentally, it appears that Douglas and Davikd Gresham really control the Lewis estate. They inherited the estate in 1973 after Warren Lewis, C. S. Lewis’s brother, died. They sold the estate (and hence the rights to all of Lewis’s books) to a mysterious holding company in the 1970’s. Douglas Gresham claimed to be nothing but a consultant to this holding company until the late 1990’s. However, it now appears that (for who knows what mysterious purposes) the Gresham brothers merely sold the estate to a holding company that they own and control through a chain of other companies back in the 1970’s.
I think it likely that the IMDB is has just gotten some spurious information. It happens.
My mother is 54 and she confessed a few days ago that she has never read the Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, or 1984. The kids and I were stunned, but tried to gloss over it politely. There’s no point in harassing her about it; she’s just one of those people who doesn’t read. She doesn’t know what she’s missed, and I think it’s too late for her to experience it properly now, especially since she still really has no urge to try. I just think it’s terribly sad.
Clothahump, I’m so glad you enjoyed the books.
I don’t think it matters. Ultimately, Lion works much better as an opener, and loses so much of its impact if you already know exactly what’s going on. OtOH, the Magician’s Nephew isn’t nearly as interesting if you don’t know what will happen.
This isn’t that unusual, either. Authors and artists are often the very worst people for editing or arranging their work.
Well, one is never too old…but if she’ has no interest, well, then that is sad.
On the other hand, there are many, many people who just don’t like to read, or don’t like any kind of fantasy. In third grade, our homeroom teacher read from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and you never saw such a mass of squirming, note-passing, and spitball shooting. (Having already read the book the year before I told other kids how great it was; I don’t think anybody came away with the same impression.) In fourth grade, our reading teacher read John Christopher’s The
White Mountains…same deal. And you never heard such bitching as when we had to read To Kill A Mockingbird in 9th grade; complaints about Shakespeare I can understand, but Harper Lee’s prose could hardly be more accessible.
Then again, I seem to be one of the very few in my extended circle of acqaintances who thought Being John Malkovich was friggin’ brilliant. I guess everybody has different interests.
Stranger
I just don’t understand people who don’t read. I more than half wonder sometimes if I wasn’t just abandoned on Mom’s doorstep…
Anyway, I just requested that my library put a hold on the John Christopher book for me, so thanks for bringing it up.
This is laughably ignorant of C.S. Lewis…
Favorite out of context quote from TL,tW&tW:
I checked the book Letters to Children, and the quotations I give
are correct, but my rendering of Lewis’s own tentative advice regarding the order in which to read the books is the opposite of what it should be. As Wendell notes, Lewis goes with the chronological version according to Narnian time, starting with The Magician’s Nephew. His actual words (alhtough the letter from his young correspondent Laurence are not printed - Lewis was an inveterate thrower-away of letters, much to the annoyance of his biographers):
As for the idea of Lewis preferring to be nice to Laurence rather than hurt his feelings, that kind of white-lie telling really wasn’t Lewis’s style. He was, after all, a big bluff direct kind of chap. Not your typical British university don - if such a thing exists.
In a letter written the previous year (1956), Lewis thanked another young correspondent, Joan, for her “beautiful picture”. He then adds, “Unfortunately that sentence (the one I’ve just written) is what I should have had to say, out of politeness, even if it had been a horrid picture! That’s the worst (even of ‘white’) lies; when you really mean that a present is beautiful, there is nothing left to say.” Such misuse of words (what he elsewhere called verbicide) is one of his regular themes - he even devoted a whole book to it, Studies in Words.
Many of his child correspondents were regulars over a long period; in fact, both Joan and Laurence fall into this category. In a letter to Joan of around the same period (1958), Lewis is quite critical of a couple of stories she has written and sent him. (What a good man he was to respond in such candid detail to these people!) So, I don’t think one should be too hasty in suggesting that when he took the time and the effort to reply to letters, he then wrote rather the opposite of what he believed, in order that he might not hurt the child’s feelings. It just doesn’t cohere with the man as he comes down to us.
However, as he wrote in the letter to Laurence in which he addresses the ordering point, “perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone reads them.”
I was under the impression that the children who were regular correspondents of Lewis were sort of his “godchildren,” either because they were the children of friends and colleagues of his or because he knew them in some other way, like the children from London who stayed in his house during World War II. So, in criticizing their stories and such, he was merely acting in his in loco parentis role. I don’t think that he had any long correspondences with children who weren’t know to him in orther ways. Unfortunately, I’m three and a half thousand miles from my books at the moment and can’t check if this is the case. (And the reason that I’m that far away is that I’m on vacation and am presently posting from an Internet cafe in Oxford, England.) Anyway, I’m not claiming that Lewis was outright lying when he agreed with the child he was corresponding with, just that he hadn’t given the subject much thought and agreed with the kid without thinking hard about the idea.
Furthermore, there isn’t any other documentary evidence that Lewis wanted to change the order of the books. I don’t see what the fact that he hadn’t planned the series has to do with it. Most authors don’t plan the order of events in a novel they are writing, but if you asked them afterwards if they want to re-order the events in the book, they would probably just give you a strange look. Oddly, the present editions of the Narnia books don’t use a set of changes that Lewis did tell the publishers about, while they are ordered in a way that Lewis didn’t tell the publishers about. After finishing the series, Lewis wrote the publishers that he wanted them to change the names of a few minor characters in the books. For some reason, this letter either only got to the American publisher or it got ignored by the British publisher. So from that point until the mid-1990’s, there was some slight differences between the American and the British editions in the names of some minor characters. (And, incidentally, there was nothing in these small changes that was particularly appealing to American and not British tastes.) In the mid-1990’s, basically on the orders of Douglas Gresham, the ordering of the books was changed by all the publishers from the publication order to the chronological order and those few names in the American editions were changed back to the original names.
What were the name changes, do you remember?