Showing posts with label C.S. Lewis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label C.S. Lewis. Show all posts

Monday, September 4, 2006

The final Narnia book published 50 years ago today

First posted 6/24/2020.

The Chronicles of Narnia Series

C.S. Lewis

First Publication: October 16, 1950 to September 4, 1956

Category: youth fantasy novel

Sales: 120 million (all 7 books)

Accolades for the Entire Sieres (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Books:

“The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of fantasy novels…originally published in London between 1950 and 1956.” WK It “is considered a classic of children’s literature” WK and has been translated in 47 languages. WK It “has been adapted for radio, television, the stage, and film.” WK

“The series is set in the fictional realm of Narnia, a fantasy world of magic, mythical beasts, and talking animals. It narrates the adventures of various children who play central roles in the unfolding history of the Narnian world. Except in The Horse and His Boy, the protaganists are all children from the real world who are magically transported to Narnia, where they are sometimes called upon by the lion Aslan to protect Narnia from evil. The books span the entire history of Narnia, from its creation in The Magician’s Nephew to its eventual destruction in The Last Battle.” WK

The books were not written or published in chronological order of the events that happened in the books. Chronoligically, The Magician’s Nephew happens first and The Horse and His Boy happens toward the latter end of the time frame covered in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When Wardrobe was the first to be be published in 1950, Lewis had already completed Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Horse and His Boy. WK

The books in the series are:

  • The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (October 16, 1950)
  • Prince Caspian (October 15, 1951)
  • The Voyage of Dawn Treader (September 15, 1952)
  • The Silver Chair (September 7, 1953)
  • The Horse and His Boy (September 6, 1954)
  • The Magician’s Nephew (May 2, 1955)
  • The Last Battle (September 4, 1956)
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Saturday, December 31, 2005

Time Magazine: Top 100 All-Time Novels

First posted 6/10/2020.

From LincolnLibraries.org: “In 2005, Time® magazine’s literary critics, Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo selected what they considered to be the top 100 English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005 (1923 being the year Time® began publishing). As usual, with any “top 100” list, these were their subjective choices, and obviously do not reflect the views of any other reader. However, their list inarguably includes numerous works of influential English-languge literature.”

Note: the original list was unranked, presented alphabetically by book titles. The rankings here are based on GoodReads.com.

  1. Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
  2. George Orwell 1984 (1949)
  3. J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55)
  4. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
  5. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
  6. C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950)
  7. William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
  8. George Orwell Animal Farm (1954)
  9. Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
  10. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

  11. Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
  12. Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
  13. Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955)
  14. Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
  15. Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962)
  16. Judy Blume Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (1972)
  17. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen (1986)
  18. Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go (2005)
  19. Ian McEwan Atonement (2001)
  20. Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)

  21. Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)
  22. Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
  23. Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
  24. Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
  25. Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
  26. A.S. Byatt Possession (1990)
  27. Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (1939)
  28. E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924)
  29. Robert Graves I, Claudius (1934)
  30. Zora Neal Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

  31. William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  32. Robert Penn Warren All the King’s Men (1946)
  33. Margaret Atwood The Blind Assassin (2000)
  34. Richard Wright Native Son (1940)
  35. Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927)
  36. E.L. Doctorow Ragtime (1975)
  37. John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)
  38. Carson McCullers The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
  39. William Faulkner Light in August (1932)
  40. William Burroughs Naked Lunch (1959)

  41. John Le Carré The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
  42. Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian (1985)
  43. Don DeLillo White Noise (1985)
  44. David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest (1995)
  45. Neal Stephenson Snow Crash (1992)
  46. Richard Yates Revolutionary Road (1961)
  47. Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited (1945)
  48. Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981)
  49. Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1960)
  50. Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

  51. Thornton Wilder The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1928)
  52. William Gibson Neuromancer (1984)
  53. Jonathan Franzen The Corrections (2001)
  54. Philip Roth American Pastoral (1998)
  55. Graham Greene The Power and the Glory (1939)
  56. Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
  57. Philip Roth Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
  58. Jean Rhys Wide Saragosso Sea (1966)
  59. Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
  60. Dashiell Hammett Red Harvest (1929)

  61. John Updike Rabbit, Run (1960)
  62. Zadie Smith White Teeth (2000)
  63. Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano (1947)
  64. Jerzy Kosinski The Painted Bird (1976)
  65. James Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
  66. V.S. Naipaul A House for Mr. Biswas (1961)
  67. Joan Didion Play It As It Lays (1970)
  68. Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim (1954)
  69. Philip K. Dick Ubik (1969)
  70. Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

  71. Graham Greene The Heart of the Matter (1948)
  72. Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire (1962)
  73. Walker Percy The Moviegoer (1961)
  74. William Styron The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968)
  75. Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer (1934)
  76. John O’Hara Appointment in Samarra (1934)
  77. Martin Amis Money: A Suicide Note (1984)
  78. James Dickey Deliverance (1970)
  79. Nathanael West The Day of the Locust (1939)
  80. Marilynn Robinson Housekeeping (1981)

  81. Christina Stead The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
  82. John Barth The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
  83. Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
  84. Saul Bellow Herzog (1964)
  85. Flann O’Brien At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
  86. Henry Roth Call It Sleep (1935)
  87. Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky (1949)
  88. Evelyn Waugh A Handful of Dust (1934)
  89. Richard Ford The Sportswriter (1986)
  90. Christopher Isherwood The Berlin Stories (1945)

  91. James Agee A Death in the Family (1958)
  92. William Gaddis The Recognitions (1955)
  93. Robert Stone Dog Soldiers (1975)
  94. Bernard Malamud The Assistant (1957)
  95. Henry Green Loving (1945)
  96. Iris Murdoch Under the Net (1954)
  97. Anthony Powell A Dance to the Music of Time (1975)
  98. Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy (1925)
  99. John Cheever Falconer (1977)
  100. Elizabeth Bowen The Death of the Heart (1938)
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Monday, October 16, 2000

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe published 50 years ago today

First posted 6/11/2020; updated 7/6/2020.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

C.S. Lewis

First Publication: October 16, 1950

Category: fantasy children’s novel

Sales: 85 million

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book:

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the first in a series of seven children’s fantasy novels known as The Chronicles of Narnia. WK C.S. Lewis “wrote the book for, and dedicated it to, his goddaughter Lucy Barfield. She was the daughter of Owen Barfield, Lewis’ friend, teacher, adviser, and trustee.” WK

“Shortly before the Second World War many children were evacuated from London to the English countryside to escape bomber attacks on London by Nazi Germany.” WK In 1939, three girls came to live at Lewis’ home. He gained a new appreciation for children and he started a story about four siblings who had to leave London because of the air raids and live with a relative of their mother.” WK

“The novel uses Christian iconography in Aslan's dramatic sacrifice and resurrection. Edmund's transition from self-interested schoolboy to heroic young man is also resonantly spiritual.” TG

Most of the story “is set in Narnia, a land of talking animals and mythical creatures that one White Witch has ruled for 100 years of deep winter.” WK After the youngest of the four children visits Narnia “via the magic of a wardrobe in a spare room” WK she is accompanied by her siblings on “her third visit, which verifies her fantastic claims.” WK “The siblings seem fit to fulfill an old prophecy” WK and “when almost all hope is lost, the return of the Great Lion, Aslan, signals a great change…and a great sacrifice.” AZ

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