I've been holding off on reviewing this series because there's so much that can be said, and maybe so little that needs to be. Even a month after completing it, I haven't been able to mold my thoughts into anything that might constitute a cohesive review. In lieu of that--a cohesive review--I'll settle on some scattered notes and observations; I'll deal with some of its parts in order to get at the whole.

First, a bit of autobiography. When I was a child, exploring the antiques-laden and somehow slightly Narnian house my grandparents lived in for most of my youth, I would always take pause at their bookshelf. (Nothing out of character there--my eye has alway gone to the books in a room before anything else.) Of particular interest was a very old-looking set of Narnia books, each with a weird and mysterious and seemingly ancient illustration by Pauline Baines on the tattered spine of its dust jacket. These books and their odd titles--The Magician's Nephew, The Horse and His Boy--seemed otherworldly, the sorts of things you might find in a wizard's library. (Little did I know that there were at least a couple of wizards' libraries within, as well.)

One summer, during my annual week's stay with the aforementioned grandparents, I pulled the first of those strange books off the shelf and began to read it. I got through four of them--The Magician's Nephew, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader--before the week was up, and was enthralled enough by the world they presented (no less strange than I had imagined) to pick up a sort of guidebook to the series from the church library and devour that as well. But then I returned home, leaving the books behind, and I began to busy myself with Rowling and Tolkien instead; it would be something like a decade before I finished what I had begun that summer.

In high school I rediscovered the Christian faith I'd been gradually abandoning, and with it the works of C.S. Lewis. In the span of two years I read and loved The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, Surprised By Joy, The Great Divorce, Till We Have Faces, and the three books of the Ransom trilogy. In college I checked A Grief Observed, The Problem of Pain, and Reflections on the Psalms off my list. Lewis had, by this point, influenced my intellectual development more than any other author, probably more than anyone I'd known in real life, and yet I still hadn't completed the series most readers know him for.

This story doesn't have a dramatic ending, and it's running a bit long anyway. Suffice to say that this winter break I did finally read through the Narnia series, and enjoyed it a great deal. (Though a part of me wishes, as it always does when I come across a children's classic I neglected in childhood, that I had first experienced the whole thing a bit younger.) I include this backstory mainly to give you some idea of the role this series, and Lewis more generally, have played in my life as a reader. Maybe it will contextualize (or even excuse, if necessary) some of the comments to follow.

I'm well aware of the prejudices and cringeworthy episodes inherent to the Narnia books. Lewis was a white, British, fairly socially conservative man who was born in the 1890s and didn't have a healthy relationship with a woman until his sixties; all that shows, as it must, in his books. In the The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle he characterizes his white, northern characters as virtuous and pure and his dark-skinned, desert-dwelling ones as oppressive, long-winded, and cruel. In most of the installments he says some not-exactly-progressive things about women and girls, and he seems less bothered than he probably should be by the prospect of arming young children and sending them cheerfully off to war. (And all this is to say nothing of the strong religious agenda, always present but never stated explicitly, which may seem a little underhanded and sneaky even to Christian readers.) In short, there are parts of most of these books that I would think twice about reading to a child, or would at least want to have a good talk with them about afterwards.

But it seems that so much of the discussion of the Narnia books these days focuses exclusively on these flaws and uncomfortable bits, and I don't think that's fair to what is, in many other regards, a remarkable series. Part of the blame may lie with the fact that the remarkable parts are next to impossible to discuss in concrete terms; I've found since joining Goodreads that it's a lot easier to talk about the bad parts of any book than the good ones. How to describe the sheer beauty, the sense of home, the almost overwhelming desire for Narnia to be real and reachable that nearly every lover of the series finds here? This certainly isn't the only fictional world to act on readers in such a way--Hogwarts or Hobbiton may have a similar effect--but as in those worlds, there's also something distinct and distinctly appealing here. What to say about their pervasive but delicious strangeness, that otherworldly sense I got even before opening the books and that has lingered with me into adulthood? A Romantic poet could hardly come up with a locale more weirdly powerful than the Wood Between the Worlds, or the subterranean realm of Underland, or the islands of the eastern seas. And finally, how does one describe the characters? The stubborn but good-hearted integrity of Lucy (it should not escape our attention that the most admirable and fully-formed human character in the series, arguably the protagonist of the whole thing, is a girl), the absurd but stirring boldness of Reepicheep, the polarizing but nonetheless endlessly alluring mystery of Aslan?

Lewis defined "joy," a concept central to much of his writing, as "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." The object of all joy is ultimately, he said, Heaven. The means by which it comes to us--the things and people and experiences that stir up this sensation within our individual hearts and minds--are different for each person. For me, this series is one of those means. Maybe that's all, after this long and rambling review, that needs to be said.