I am reading The Chronicle of Narnia these days. I admit that I like Tolkein's style better than C.S.Lewis's. But it seems that this series could have been more popular until the success of The Lord of the Ring movies. The movie version (1978 and 2005) is not that impressive as Peter Jackson's masterpiece. I am a big fan of LOTR movies, but the Chinese translation of Tolkein's story is so bad that I could not even concentrated on the writing at all, especially for the poetry part, just a disaster. This time Matt lends me this book because he thinks I am too idle these days. He read it when he was still a little boy. Most American read it and give good comments on it. Matt said something about the reading order last time, but I didn't pay much attention until I found the same information online. I am so shameful about that. My teacher and classmates, even my young roommates like the book too. So I decided to read through the whole series this time. Since I am ignoring Matt's words, I read the book in the chronicle order.(I just scares my roommate because she did not notice I was sitting in the armchair writing something when she entered the door, I almost gave her a heart attack!I am so terribly sorry about that...)
        Ok, my reading starts out with The Magician's Nephew, which was written pretty late in 1956. C.S.Lewis used it as a footnote to explain what happens in other earlier books he had written before, how Aslan creates the world and how the evil crawls in, kind of like Genesis. It is so lucky that I finally find some books not too deep and pretending to be philosophical, without too much connotations at all. It is definitely for the kids not for the scholars, even though my professor Charles like this a lot. I personally think C.S.Lewis is a better writer when comparing to his critical articles. I am completely attracted to his world, so quiet but full of energetic whispering from different remote world. I really like when he writes down this part, it is so fantastic:
      "Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt it was also older than us: a sun that is near the end of its life, wearing of looking down upon our world."
       I think Lewis is really a good painter with his worlds, and good editors of different movements of the plots. That is why it is so adaptable to a movie. Unfortunately the movie is not as success as LOTR, which is darker and harder to understand. But I find I kind of lose my appetite for the darker one when I am older, and my taste for children's books and tv shows recover a lot. Or it is perhaps it is Matt's book, I feel I am obligated to read them all. Who knows? I like it a lot, in a word. I guess it is more like a forest waiting ahead, while LOTR is like a deep cave for you to dig. I don't know for sure, we'll see.