I agree ! It is very strange that this book is overlooked.
I actually enjoyed this book more then "The lion the witch and the wardrobe " ! I did not know about this book until I had finished the series.
When I found it I was so excited !
Finaly , I got to learn about where everything had come from :)
I think people over look "The last Battle " as well. If you are not a Christian I could see this book being very unfulfiling. It is my favorite of the whole series with "magicians nephew " and "The voyage of the Dawn Treader" coming in next :)

The book is listed as the first in the series, but it's actually the 6th book CS Lewis wrote. That's why people generally "skip over it," and hopefully not for any other reason. Supposedly Walter Hooper (Lewis' executor after he died) mixed them all up. I feel like I'd be somewhat confused had I read it first, though it seems like it could work (it did for you).

So, sorry to butt in, I just thought I'd add my two cents. Glad to find another person who enjoyed it :).

I always tell people to read the books in the order they were written, at least the first time through, and especially not to read the Magician's Nephew before reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

(SPOILER - DO NOT READ PAST THIS POINT IF YOU HAVE NOT READ ANY NARNIAN BOOKS)

When Lucy peers into the wardrobe for the first time, the reader should be peering in with her, not thinking "Aha, this is the wardrobe that Digory made from the fallen apple tree grown from the seeds of the Narnian apple of youth that he gave his mother."
When the animals tell the Pevensies of the mysterious, feared, beloved, long-awaited Aslan, his identity should be as much of a mystery to the reader, so that the anticipation can build in the way that the book was written. When Edmund meets the White Witch, the reader sees her for the first time, and does not say "Oh, yes, old Jadis of Charn." The lamp-post at Lantern Waste is an oddity, with no explanation - a mystery.
If the reader knows Digory Kirke has already been to Narnia, then old Professor Digory Kirke's interest and apparent credulity of Lucy's tale is not as surprising, especially if the reader knows that the professor knows that the wardrobe is made of Narnian applewood.
CS Lewis himself wrote about surprise and surprisingness in stories. You can only have real surprise on the first time through when you read a story. If the author was good at his craft, you may still enjoy the "surprisingness" on subsequent readings, but that is a different thing, with a different flavor, and the surprises in the Chronicles of Narnia are so good, I think, that it's a shame to waste them by reading the books out of the order in which Lewis himself discovered them in his mind. Walter Hooper based his statement that Lewis liked the "chronological order" on a letter in which lewis was responding to a child who wrote that he preferred to read the stories in that order (the letter is published in "CS Lewis, Letters to Children"). Lewis very politely wrote back that the boy was probably quite right and that it was a very sensible order to read them in and that he liked it himself. I believe Lewis was simply being polite and agreeable, because he himself never ordered his publishers to re-arrange the order of the books, and if I remember right that change wasn't made until the late eighties or early nineties, not in the early sixties when Lewis died. I remember thinking how foolish the publishers were to tinker with the series when they first did so (by the way, I don't think much of how some versions put the "cast of characters" right there on the first page either...let a person read the story for themselves). It all reminds me very much of a poem by GK Chesterton called "Commercial Candour." (The back of the cover will tell you the plot). It's like telling people the final score and showing them the highlight reel before the game begins.

Commercial Candour
(On the outside of a sensational novel is printed the statement: ‘The back of the cover will tell you the plot.’)

Our fathers to creed and tradition were tied,
They opened a book to see what was inside,
And of various methods they deemed not the worst
Was to find the first chapter and look at it first.
And so from the first to the second they passed,
Till in servile routine they arrived at the last.
But a literate age, unbenighted by creed,
Can find on two boards all it wishes to read;
For the front of the cover shows somebody shot
And the back of the cover will tell you the plot.

Between, that the book may be handily padded,
Some pages of mere printed matter are added,
Expanding the theme, which in case of great need
The curious reader might very well read
With the zest that is lent to a game worth the winning,
By knowing the end when you start the beginning;
While our barbarous sires, who would read every word
With a morbid desire to find out what occurred
Went drearily drudging through Dickens and Scott.
But the back of the cover will tell you the plot.

The wild village folk in earth’s earliest prime
Could often sit still for an hour at a time
And hear a blind beggar, nor did the tale pall
Because Hector must fight before Hector could fall:
Nor was Scheherazade required, at the worst,
To tell her tales backwards and finish them first;
And the minstrels who sang about battle and banners
Found the rude camp-fire crowd had some notion of manners.
Till Forster (who pelted the people like crooks,
The Irish with buckshot, the English with books),
Established the great educational scheme
Of compulsory schooling, that glorious theme.
Some learnt how to read, and the others forgot,
And the back of the cover will tell you the plot.

O Genius of Business! O marvellous brain,
Come in place of the priests and the warriors to reign!
O Will to Get On that makes everything go -
O Hustle! O Pep! O Publicity! O!
Shall I spend three-and-sixpence to purchase the book,
Which we all can pick up on the bookstall and look?
Well, it may appear strange, but I think I shall not,
For the back of the cover will tell you the plot.

- from New Poems (1932).

Thank you for your input! You have some very good points there, and I appreciate you sharing them with me. I had not thought of it that way, and I think I do somewhat agree with you. Perhaps it would be best to read them in the order in which they were written the first time, for the reasons you mentioned, but I would say, afterwards, that I would always want to read them in chronological order. I think that is a matter of preference. I like to read things in the order in which they happen, and to connect the dots, so to speak.

I like to read them in chronological order too. But Andrew does bring up a good point.

My dad watched the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe but had big questions, the questions that most people have. How did a lamppost get in Narnia? Who was the Professor? And so on.

I do think it would be a pity to ruin all the mystery of the The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by reading the Magician's Nephew first. But it would be good if it was read right after, so as to clear up and mysteries that can't be solved by the other books.

I agree, after one has read the stories, they can be revisited again and again, and in any order - I do the same with the Space Trilogy, sometimes I'm in a Perelandra mood and sometimes I want to read about some Malacandran Sorns...

This is, as others have noted, book 6, not book 1. It is a terrible shame that people today don't know this, because it ruins some of the best moments in ALL of the books. It's like knowing ahead of time who is going to die on a TV show, or knowing what the secret plot twist is in a movie before you see it for the first time. This is a GREAT book, but it is only really great if you've already read the TRUE first 5 books, so you can appreciate what is really happening and how it affects everything to come. I am lucky that I read these books before the publisher started messing with things after Lewis died. I will make sure that my kids read them in the right order, too. And yes, they will watch Star Wars Episode 4 first...to do anything else is an insult.

Much of The Magician's Nephew was written to help explain what is going to happen in The Last Battle, and so it deserves its place as book 6.

Any series that has one of these "origins" volumes needs to keep it in the proper context. Imagine reading the Pern series and staring with Dragonsdawn and humans coming in off of a spaceship and genetically engineering everything that we have seen so far in the series, as written. It kills the magic.

Thanks for all the great comments! I can definitely see the advantages to both sides of the coin now, and I appreciate your help in pointing them out.

I agree with both Andrew and Ben on this one...it's a shame that the books are no longer listed in the order as Lewis wrote them as it takes away some of the 'magic' from the stories. I tell everyone to read them in publication order.

Laura wrote: "I agree with both Andrew and Ben on this one...it's a shame that the books are no longer listed in the order as Lewis wrote them as it takes away some of the 'magic' from the stories. I tell every..."

agreed! the magic is in the mystery and the "ah ha!" of the puzzle pieces coming together. I can only read them in written order.

I have to agree with others that the lion the witch and the wardrobe is the TRUE first book. If you read the info on wikipedia it better explains this. Book series are not always written in chronological order. Look at the star wars series. Also, having just reread the first 3 TRUE books of this series: lion/witch, prince caspian, voyage of dawn treader in the last couple weeks, and just started rereading silver chair (as per the numbering on the covers of my OLD edition), this order makes the most sense. There are quite a few references in these books to the previous ones and if you read then out of the original order, much of these references would make no sense. Reading lewis's info in wikipedia cleared all this up for me as I was confused by the number order here that was different. Unless the editor took out these references to the other books (which would be a shame to mess with the original), I just can't see how these books would make as much sense reading them in the re-ordered order. It just seems so wrong to mess with the author's original order.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was the first book of Narnia C.S. Lewis wrote and was the first book in the series for decades until a few years ago when some schmuck decided to simplify the story to death by putting it in chronological rather than narrative order.

I feel the same way as the original comment.

I agree with Andrew and Ben...The Magician's Nephew is a fine book, but I strongly feel you need to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe FIRST. At LEAST that one, if not all 5. I personally was not a big fan of it, but I am certainly still glad I read it.

The reason why people skip the Magicians Nephew is because The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the first book in the series.

I totally feel the same way. When I saw the movie The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe, it was really confusing. But when I read the Magician's Nephew the whole thing made sense and just kind of made the story come together for me.

Jst about to read it, hope its wonderful!