First Pages: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
First Pages/First Lines of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: As I'm finding with almost all of these successful books that I've been dissecting for our First Pages series, C.S. Lewis starts this novel out with a bit of a mystery. Four kids are being sent from home into the middle of nowhere. Of course an adventure is to be had! I'm drawn in and I can't wait to find out more about Narnia.
Do you remember any of the books you read as a kid? I do and this series was one of them. While I don't remember exactly everything that happens in this novel or this series, I can recall with clarity exactly how reading this series made me feel as a child. Full of wonder, but also something more—that maybe there was something more out there in the world. Or that my world was a larger place than I originally thought.
My in-laws gifted this series to Little Lion this past Christmas at her request. She devoured them. LL said that Granny was reading them alongside her too. And I love thinking about my in-laws sitting down with the kid version of my husband to read the very same series with him!
I really have to re-read these books as I haven't picked them up since I was a kid. They're definitely classics and precursors to my love of fantasty/sci-fi. (As a sidenote, I had a bit of a discussion with a patient this week as I was trying to describe the link between Ready, Player One with William Gibson's own classic, Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. And I was trying to describe what it was like reading Neuromancer twenty-five years ago when virtual reality was not in existence. I'm not sure he could even imagine that world. )
I still count The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as the first in the series even though they've been renumbered. To do otherwise would be a kind of blasphemy, sort of in line with calling The Phantom Menace the first Star Wars film rather than A New Hope. You can call it Episode One, but never ever the first Star Wars.
Just reading the first lines of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe transports me to an 8-10 year old Melanie, who most definitely was already a bookworm. And to warp Maya Angelou's words a bit, I don't forget how a good book made me feel.
Tell Dr. Bookworm!
Do you have fond memories of reading a certain book as a child? Which book and why? Let me know in the comments.
** Maya Angelou: I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
