It's mildly embarrassing that I've lived almost 32 years and I've only read one book from the Narnia series. Well, I guess I've read two now, but I feel like I should have read those a long time ago. As an adult, it's difficult to even rate this book fairly because the adult version of myself wants to be all critical and make comments about how this isn't Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, but it's not supposed to be. And that's fine with me.

Is this the first book in the series! Is it the sixth? Does it even matter? I'm reading it first because I conducted a very thorough investigation into the series and determined that my plan to read them this way is the right way to read them. However, my very scientific thorough analysis also concluded that this book can be read later and no one really cares and it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Just read the series is all I'm saying, although I haven't even read the series myself so that may be moderately premature on my part.

It was neat to read about the origins of Narnia. Whoa... did I just say "neat"? That was an accident. Lemme get back to words I actually use in real life.

It was awesome to read about the origins of Narnia. The lamp post and the witch and whatnot. Aslan. That was just autocorrected to Asian so that was funny. I don't have any reason to believe he is an Asian lion, but I again haven't read the entire series yet so that could be explored in future novels where Aslan spends his childhood as a small lion cub in Beijing before creating Narnia later in life. I don't think that's accurate though.

Lewis really writes an engaging fantasy tale that is surprising full of beautiful descriptions rather than nonstop action. I appreciate the world building in the book which I found pretty detailed for a children's book. I also like that I don't really know some of the characters well, but feel like the less important ones are gonna be showing up later on down the road.

I'm excited to continue this trek through Narnia. My kids don't give a flip about it so I'm gonna be on my own. Maybe when their older they will have a longer attention span and a better appreciation of great books. Dad's gonna keep rolling in the meantime.