The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis




C.S. Lewis' most famous work of fiction.

Originally published in 1950

If you are familiar with Lewis non-fiction writings (Mere Christianity, etc.) were all that Lewis had written he would have left a wonderful legacy. However, Lewis has a large library of fictional works as well.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is my only my second piece of Lewis fiction (the other being The Screwtape Letters) and I found it to be a quick, enjoyable read. The characters are likeable but not particularly well-developed, but that is understandable considering that he intended it to be a fairy tale. How much character development is there in a fairy tale?

 Christian themes are very strong throughout the book, but the story can be read without any previous study into Christianity. If you are unsure of the themes or want to make sure that you are not missing any, I would recommend that you pick up any of the half-dozen or more companion study guides that Amazon offers. There are undoubtedly free ones online as well.

 I rate this book 4 stars out of 5

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

STAR TREK PICARD: NO MAN'S LAND: AN ORIGINAL AUDIO DRAMA (audiobook) by Kirsten Beyer and Mike Johnson

Image
Published by Simon and Schuster Audio Originals in 2022. Performed by a full cast, including Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd. Duration: 1 hour, 39 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Set immediately after the Star Trek streaming show Picard: Season One , the audiobook  No Man's Land is an adventure featuring the characters Seven of Nine and Raffi.  With the collapse of the Romulan Empire comes the rise of local Romulan warlords who are trying to assert their control over the Romulan territory and, just as important, lay claim to the Romulan brand.  A Romulan who has taken the title Emperor is conquering/leveling various planets in an attempt to establish himself as the successor to the Romulan Empire. It looks he is heading towards a planet that is secretly holding a massive collection of written materials, museum pieces, and other cultural relics of the collapsed Romulan Empire.  There is a mad scramble to remove the relics, led by an ancient, kindly professor of unknown or...
Read more

SOLDIER BOY by Michael Shaara

Image
  Published in 1982 by Pocket Books (a Timescape book) Back in the 1980's Simon and Schuster had a division called Pocket Books that specialized in paperback books. Pocket Books had an even smaller division called Timescape . Timescape published sci-fi books, including some of the earliest of the Star Trek novels so they were quite a successful line. Soldier Boy is part of that Timescape line. Michael Shaara (1928-1988) Michael Shaara won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels . Shaara had knocked out a few novels before then, but none were about the Civil War. Instead, a great deal of his writing was sci-fi. He started out selling stories to magazines in 1951. This book is a collection of 14 of those short stories. If you read this book, I recommend reading the Author's Afterword first. He wrote commentary on every story and I used those notes as an introduction to each one.  Like all short story collections, they vary in qu...
Read more

THE HINDENBURG DISASTER: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
Published in July of 2025 by Hourly History. Hourly History specializes in little histories that take about an hour to read. For me, an hour of reading about the Hindenburg is about right.  The Hindenburg Disaster is a short history that details the beginnings of zeppelins/blimps through the tragedy of the complete destruction of the German zeppelin Hindenburg in just 32 seconds in New Jersey in 1937.  Germany was a focal point for building blimps/zeppelins during World War I and before World War II. The blimps went from being potential military airships to being experimental ways to travel. One has to remember that airplanes were even more experimental way to travel. Any sort of air travel was going to be prohibitively expensive - only the richest of the rich could afford it. Blimps/zeppelins offered a stately, luxurious ride - planes were seen as a noisy and cramped and inferior alternative. This short history chronicles the struggles of the blimp/zeppelin industry during t...
Read more

THE GOLEM'S VOICE (graphic novel) by David G. Klein

Image
  Published in 2015 by Now What Media, LLC Synopsis: Set in Czechoslovakia during World War II, The Golem's Voice  is the story of a young Jewish mom and her two sons trying to escape relocation by the Nazis. This was in the time when the Nazis were still telling Jews that they were relocating them to alternate settlements rather than just taking them to work and death camps. As they are being loaded onto trains, the mom gets a bad feeling and tells her boys (Yoakim and Yakov) to just run. She does not join them because they are much faster than her and she just wants them to escape and live. Her boys run under the trains and, at first, things look good. But, soon enough, Nazi soldiers are in full pursuit and Yoakim is shot providing cover for his little brother. Yakov continues to run to the only place the knows - the Jewish ghetto neighborhood that he just came from. He hears a voice in his head calling him to the home of a long-dead rabbi named Yudah Loew . Legend has it th...
Read more

The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II by Judith M. Heimann

Image
Originally Published in 2007 An odd and interesting bit of history from the Pacific Front in World War II The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II   is a well-researched telling of the story of two sets of American fliers (one Army and one Navy) who were shot down over Borneo by the Japanese. The survivors end up living with the Dayaks, the famous headhunters of the highlands of Borneo. Borneo was largely unmapped and unknown to the West. It was, and still is, one of the remotest locations on earth. Most of Borneo's interior is like the old line, "You can't get there from here." Well, you can if you jump out of an airplane. The author, Judith Heimann doing research in Borneo The author, Heimann, does a good job of giving the reader a feel for the Dayak way of life, but the shortage of maps makes the story of the soldiers being moved from village to village for their protection a...
Read more

TYRANNY, INC.: HOW PRIVATE POWER CRUSHED AMERICAN LIBERTY - AND WHAT to DO ABOUT IT (audiobook) by Sohrab Ahmari

Image
Published in 2023 by Random House Audio. Read by the author, Sohrab Ahmari. Duration: 7 hours, 30 minutes. Unabridged. Writing about government overreach is a common theme among conservatives like Sohrab Ahmari. In Tyranny, Inc . he switches gears and writes about overreach from the private sector instead.  He talks about predatory hedge funds that purchase reasonably healthy companies, load them with debt, and then let them die. He tells the pathetic story of the decline and fall of both Sears and K-Mart, but it's happened over and over again with multiple companies. He also talks about a number of court cases, legal rulings, new laws, and relatively new interpretations of laws that have slid the balance of societal power to private corporations. He gives tons of examples like expansive Non-Disclosure Agreements, tracking software on employee's private phones because they are forced to use them for work, and hidden clauses in multi-page employment agreements that give employer...
Read more

THE GENIUS PLAGUE (audiobook) by David Walton

Image
Published by Blackstone Audio in 2017. Read by Nick Thurston Duration: 14 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. Paul Johns is an explorer specializing in fungus. He works his way out of the Amazon rain forest back to civilization and comes home to the United States with a horrible fungal infection. A person traveling with him has the same infection but she passes away. Neil Johns is Paul's brother and a brand-new employee of the National Security Agency (NSA), specializing in code-breaking and seeing patterns where no one else can. He begins to notice some strange things about Paul and some strange activity deep in the rain forest that Paul just came from... This book is a great science-based action thriller, much like the late Michael Crichton used to specialize in. It makes you think, it shows you a different way at looking at intelligence and is a heck of a romp. Throw in the likable and believable characters and some moments of real humor and the whole combination is really quite g...
Read more

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg

Image
An Impressive Amount of Research Published in 2208. According to Goldberg, the traditional left-right concept of political beliefs is incorrect. Understanding this is key to understanding Goldberg's thesis that modern liberalism is the intellectual heir to Rousseau's ideas, the French Revolution and is, at the very least, the intellectual cousin to both fascism (especially Italian Fascism) and Soviet Communism. To fully understand this you have to understand that measuring political philosophy with a one-dimensional left-right line lack the depth to measure both social and economic political philosophies. A quadrant map used to measure political beliefs will more accurately show depth of support for government involvement in economic issues, political rights and social issues. Anarchists lie at the edge of one quadrant, Libertarians a little more toward the center of that same quadrant but totalitarians lie in the opposite corner. Search the web to discover more about the gr...
Read more

DRAGONS of WINTER NIGHT: DRAGONLANCE CHRONICLES, BOOK TWO (audiobook) by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Image
Originally published in book form in 1985. Audiobook published by Audible Studios in 2013. Read by Paul Boehmer. Duration: 17 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: The war against the Dragon Queen continues. The forces of good pulled off a major victory at the end of the last novel, but now the forces of evil are looking for revenge.  Tanis, Flint, Goldmoon, Laurana, and the rest of the intrepid companions head off in search of new ways to fight the Dragon Queen's advancing armies. Or, if that fails - lead a refugee exodus. They use an ancient map from before the Cataclysm to find a legendary seaport only to find that it is no longer anywhere near the sea due to the immense destruction of the Cataclysm. As the companions try to figure out their next steps, an armada of dragons attacks the city, breathing flames from above. Dragon Army ground troops swarm into the city and the companions are split into two groups while Tanis faces the decision of a lifetime. My Review: This is a ...
Read more

BRIONNE (audiobook) by Louis L'Amour

Image
Originally published in 1968. Audiobook published in 2016 by Random House Audio. Read by Erik Singer. Duration: 4 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Major James Brionne is a Virginian and a confidante of President Ulysses S. Grant. He helped pacify the region immediately after the war, including hanging a criminal named Allard. The rest of the Allard family gang, bushwackers from the brutal Missouri theater of the Civil War, comes to Virginia to kill Brionne. They don't find Brionne, but they do find his wife and son at Brionne's plantation house. She takes out one of the Allard gang and then kills herself rather than be brutalized by them. The Allard gang never finds Brionne's son, who had hidden himself in a little cave nearby. Brionne decides he needs a massive change of scenery. He takes his son out West on a train, to a region he had explored as part of a military mission years earlier. He wants to find a place to start over with his son - Utah. But, Briolle gets t...
Read more