Wednesday, January 27, 2010
A Small Detour...
I may have accidentally interrupted my 10/10/10 reading to reread the Narnia books. I started with Prince Caspian, since I have read the first three books more times than I can count, and the last four not nearly so many; I am now in the middle of The Silver Chair and will probably go ahead and finish the last book before I get back to The Lacuna (which I am enjoying, but is easy for me to get distracted from).
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Why shouldn't they count? I decided that as long as I kept to the ones I don't really remember as well, then it counts. Also, I'm glad you are reading The Silver Chair bc I just finished it and I feel the need to chat about it.
I don't know what category they would go into... but I just finished The Last Battle today. I can't believe how much I'd forgotten about those books! It was literally like I was reading them for the first time at some parts, particularly in the last book and in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The Silver Chair I remembered better for some reason. But I realized that I had kind of a mixed up idea of some aspects of the series. For example... Susan is the worst! When they made the Narnia movies I was annoyed with her character because she was so much less nice than how I remembered her, but it turns out she really was a snot the whole time, and is even worse at the end of the series. That was disappointing, and I wonder why I had such a different idea of her in my head. Oh well. Anyway, the books are amazing and it was so wonderful to read them again and get to remember how I loved them all through my childhood. They just don't lose their charm no matter how old I get.
Funny you mention that about Susan. In the essays I was reading about the books, they mention her character and it gave me a different outlook. Although I want to read The Last Battle again because I forget a lot of that one. I didn't remember disliking Susan, but she wasn't my favorite in the movies and Lucy was always my favorite in the books. But some of the writers mention how she is just an example of (and I'm putting this in more LDS-friendly terms) putting worldly things first and most of them mention that they are sure she would "repent" in the end and let herself truly remember Narnia. That kind of made me like her despite the snottiness. She just got to be the example.
That's totally possible, of course, because you never know what anyone will be like as they grow up.
It was really disappointing for me because I'd always remembered her as the mature and kind one--don't they name her Queen Susan the Gentle after all, or something like that?--but it turns out that she was actually fighting things all along the way, even worse than Edmund did. (Of course I didn't read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe this time, so my memories are coming more from the movie--which I just watched last weekend--than the book.) But even in Prince Caspian, she's the one who doesn't believe Lucy when she says she saw Aslan, and no one else believes at first either but they come around eventually and Susan doesn't. And then, when you get to The Last Battle, Peter and Edmund and Lucy all come back and Susan doesn't because she is "no longer a friend of Narnia," which I thought was very sad. It just makes me wonder why I always remembered her so differently.
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