My understanding (which there may be evidence for among things Lewis said or wrote, but which I’m not going to go searching for now, so I may be wrong), is that Lewis meant for Susan’s issue to be a desire to be grown-up and worldly, in a way that Lewis himself experienced at that age. It’s an unfortunate accident that he chose to ascribe this to a female character, and to describe it in ways that make people think it was primarily about sexuality.
Probably many people would agree. The space books are all different enough from one another that I can easily imagine people liking only one or two of them.
It’s not clear what was Lewis’s preferred order. IIUC, the notion that Lewis preferred chronological order is primarily based on a letter that some kid wrote to him suggesting it, and Lewis responded something like, “Yeah, that’s a good idea, kid.”
Another vote for Dawn Treader, because, yeah, heroic, adventurous journey, Reepicheep, and it’s the only Narnia book where we go back to RE-meet someone. Meeting Caspian again, albeit a little older, increases my attachment to both Dawn Treader and Prince Caspian (which I don’t share the collective dislike for)… and to a tiny, sad extent, Silver Chair, which I also very much liked.
From there, you probably have Wardrobe and Horse, followed by The Last Battle, which is largely a slog except for the ending. My least favorite was Magician’s Nephew, which was intellectually interesting from a worldbuilding standpoint, but emotionally unengaging for me.
What’s more, even the shallow desires she had, could have been fulfilled, had she not strayed. She’s literally had the experience of being the unambiguously most desired woman in the world, and how many people in our world can claim that? And that reality is what she’s throwing away, to pursue a chance at the illusion of the same.
And I’ll third the recommendation for Til We Have Faces, by the way. It starts with a depiction of a society cursed by a goddess, and it’s ambiguous whether the goddess even exists… but the curse she’s inflicted is most certainly real. It’s really less about the divine, and more about how humans deal with the concept of the divine.
These arguments work if you treat her as a person with her own volition. I object to the way she is written. Lewis turns Queen Susan into, in his own words, a ‘rather silly, conceited young woman’. There’s no getting away from the fact that the Narnia books are misogynist and racist. And I say this as someone who, for the most part, loves them and is happy to introduce his son and daughter to them.
I read them in approximately publication order, and I don’t have a favorite. I always enjoyed the way the author tied them together as he wrote them. But I confess I missed the Christian parallels as a child; something that is obvious to me as an adult.
My favorites are The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Magician’s Nephew, but I have to give special consideration to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for having the most wonderful opening line:
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
Definitely. Be aware, though, they’re very much a product of their times. Downright racist in some areas (those rascally Calormorenes are an Arab analog). The series is also very Christian, though more focused on the underlying themes of Christianity than the actual history/practice. As a long-time, but fairly mellow, atheist, I wasn’t bothered by it.
On the topic of adults enjoying children’s books, more from Lewis himself. From The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, this is Lewis’s dedication, addressed to his god-daughter Lucy Barfield, who was 14 at the time:
“My Dear Lucy,
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say but I shall still be
Yes and no, especially on the misogyny. I read them as a child in the 1970s, and looking back, I think part of my massive love of them comes from most of the books actually have female protagonists and/or strong female characters (both good and bad). That’s not really common in books from that era; in contrast, Tolkein’s books have pretty much zero women.
I never really got any racism from them, either. Sure, there are other nations like the Calormenes that are enemies of Narnia, but the books make it quite clear that it’s the nations that are enemies, not the peoples. There are both good and evil Calormenes, just as there are good and evil Narnians.
I didn’t read classic fantasy until my 20s, so I only read stuff that friends recommended as adult fiction.
I took the Narnia books with me when I worked at a camp one summer. Those and some sci-fi short stories (mostly Bradbury and Asimov) got me through three months of secluded wilderness.
I voted for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It really is “a great read”. I made sure to read it to my kids as a gateway drug to Tolkein, LeGuin and later, Gaiman (oh, and S. Morgenstern!)
But I just listened to the audiobooks* and was surprised at how much I enjoyed The Horse And His Boy. I’m ashamed to say it was mostly because of the horse (and his critiques of the humans, e.g. falling over way too much by foolishly trying to walk on their hind legs).
*This and the others in that set were on sale on iTunes (but no longer)… read by Kenneth Branagh, Lynn Redgrave, Michael York, Patrick Stewart and other great voices. I see there’s a BBC4 full-cast set as well…