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

We are deep in Narnia

After being sent a treasure chest of books, I picked The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe out to start reading to the children. They loved the first few chapters but we had to pause while I took one child to the capital city for a few days last month. They were both still really into the story when we started up again. Battles and weapons he likes, animals she likes. And both were excited to make connections with the Bible.

We had a stressful and intense week in late August. We survived by reading The Magician's Nephew. It was a great break to spend pre-bedtime in a magical world. The children were excited to learn the 'backstory' as they call it of Narnia. 

'That's how the lamp post got there!' Etc etc

And they were also interested to noticed connections with Bible. They were amazed at Digory not eating the apple. 

'He's like a new Adam..wait, but not Jesus.'

 So of course I had to message the owner of the books and ask to borrow the next ones. Kindly she met me in town again and handed over another 2 books!

My listeners were excited to guess clues about Aslan in The Horse and His Boy. Also commented on how Shasta is like Moses.

And now we are in book 4, the very centre of the set of 7. It's quite fun to read about castle ruins, overgrown with trees as we live near temple ruins, overgrown with jungle.

They have been looking up bits and pieces on youtube and learnt all sorts of interesting background info. We have the last 3 books with us, and school holidays this week so will probably read more.

See also other Narnia posts such as From the Dawn of Time