From the Dawn of Time Until the Last Battle

On reading Narnia out loud to my children

I've never read such a long book series in such a short amount of time and all out loud. 

It's been our school work, our holiday fun, our sick day comfort, and our escape from current stresses. That s why it's a shorter amount of time than usual, it's not like we read it only on the occasional evening.

I'm surprised by the simple, plain words Lewis uses to describe the natural world. Even though he doesn't use flowery words his sentences conjure up flowers and more. 

(Maybe because I spend time in a jungle, around bodies of water, at various times of day these images are easy for me to imagine? Bike rides in Angkor Park, at dawn, dusk, and all times in between.)

I'm also surprised by the complicated sentences. If he were writing for today's lazy smartphone readers it would be a big hurdle to getting his story into the reader's minds. 

He often starts a sentence with one idea (usually it seems, an action one of the characters is in the middle of doing) and then he adds an extra clause in brackets, before getting to the end of the idea, or explaining the final bit of action that makes the very first part if the sentence makes sense. 

Quite fun to read aloud. 

Would not work for skimming in your head. 

You would forget the start of the sentence before you got to

 the end.

Before we started I was thinking to find/make a study guide, or something to use the books as Bible lessons. But the whole thing with stories is they teach us in their own way, I thought it better not to spoon-feed but let them discover. And it has been like that! Both of our children have been noticing things and are often excited to share with us.

See also We are deep in Narnia