Chronicles of Narnia book frustration

[ladykorana]

Warning: Slight mention of my personal dissatisfaction with organized religion is contained in this post. While it's not my intention to offend anyone, those that are particularly zealous Christians ought to skip this.

Comments

[tarotgal]

I'm proud of you for giving the books a read :-) I think my love for the series is MOSTLY because I was a child when I first read the books (3rd grade? Definitely during/by 4th grade). I immediately identified with Lucy (I can't lie either, LOL) and was sucked into the world which felt- to me- incredibly vivid and real. I loved the concept of being able to get into another world and I liked to think of the time-passage thing as a very interesting concept, rather like daydreams/my imagination. I could imagine all sorts of stuff but when I needed to stop, I was still me, sitting in my room, etc.
At times, Narnia & its surrounding lands seem more vivid to me than Middle Earth, and sometimes less. I LOVE the mythology behind it, though, and I always get pulled in by all the little details like all the different creatues and peoples and lands. More on that in next post. But, yes, I can see how compared to ME it might seem much flatter at times and less creative/fantastic.

I TOTALLY realize (having convinced friends to read the books/watch the movies) that it's a much different feeling to read the books now as an adult than as a child. And the allagory parts WOULD drive me insane as well if not for the fact that whenever I read the books, I try to pretend I have NO knowledge of the Christian mythology at all and I take the stories and world at face value. Only then am I able to appreciate the way the world was set up and the twists and turns that come along with it. Yes, every time I read/see Aslan on the stone table, Jesus pops into my head but I try to push that thought away and remind myself that it's a world that was created through deep magic and magic is just that: magic. To me, Narnia is a HELL of a lot easier to understand and believe than most anything written in the Bible. LOL But I agree with your statements entirely regarding religion(I have decided that traditional organized religion is not for me. I can't take the bigotry, the exclusionary nature, the self-righteousness, the atrocities that are so often committed in the name of one god or another, with each party so completely convinced that their way is the only right way.) My ex-boyfriend was groaning during parts of LWW when we watched it together. I, too, wish C.S.L. didn't feel the need to constantly remind us of the religious connections. So I try to separate the real world from Narnia in my mind whenever I read the books. Sorry Lewis (I'm sure he's rolling over in his grave at that) but that's just what I do. So to me, it's just a magical world that has a lot of similarities :-)

More in next post... I'm running long here...

[ladykorana]

I often wonder how I might have turned out, had I read both Narnia and LOTR when I was much younger. I read all the time as a child, but even then I tended to run in obsessive streaks, like my 'Sweet Valley High' period, my 'Clan of the Cave Bear' period, and my huge run of pre-white-people Native American novels, and it was easy for stuff to slip through the cracks that wasn't in my fandom of choice at the moment. Of course, I deliberately avoided reading LOTR after being freaked out by the spiders and orcs, and put off by Gollum in the cartoon 'The Hobbit', which amuses me to no end now. *G* But yeah, much of the Christian allegory probably goes right over the heads of young children unless their parents point it out deliberately. I regret not reading Narnia when I was younger, but I wouldn't readily trade away my experience of being completely and utterly blown away by FOTR in the theater, swept away by the story and not having a clue what to expect. I'm sad that I'll never have a mental image of 'book Legolas' untouched by movie images though...would have been interesting to see what I came up with. *G*

At this point, my favorite of the children is Peter. He's responsible, kind, noble, no nonsense, and rarely annoying or whiny like the other children can become.

I definitely do enjoy Narnia the most when I'm able to forget 'the message' and just enjoy the adventure. Most of the time, I'm able to do this, but every now and then it just becomes too much and I either end up skimming without reading closely, or just putting the book down and coming back to it when I'm in a better mood. And I agree, everything in Narnia makes way more sense (and is much less self-contradictory) than the Bible.