Chronicle and Timelines

Shoryl and I are going to see Prince Caspian tonight.  In digging around for information on the movie*, I came across a "correction" of an Associated Press article.  I'm paraphrasing here, but basically it said that the AP had incorrectly identified Prince Caspian as the second book in the Chronicles of Narnia.  It was the second book published, but once more were written, became the fourth one chronologically.

 

This has been bugging me for a long, long time.  I have a very rigid belief about how one reads series.  As a fantasy reader, you almost have to have at least something of a method of approach, since the chances that you're reading a stand-alone fantasy are vanishingly slim.  Usually, we series readers putter along happily, devouring one book after another.  When you're reading an author that's current, you snatch them up as they're published.  Or, if you're reading a series that hinges upon knowing what came before, you read them in the order the author tells you to - also generally as they're published.

 

But what if you're reading a series made up of self-contained stories in a shared universe? What order do you read them in?  Mercedes Lackey, for instance, bounces back and forth in time with her Valdemar series.  Terry Pratchett - while he generally moves linearly through time - writes wholly "finish this book and the main plot is resolved" completed works with Discworld.

 

And CS Lewis wrote Chronicles of Narnia.  While they share both a universe and a timeline, I'm up-in-arms about how they should be read.  Fantastic Fiction gives me the following reading order:

 

1. The Magician's Nephew (1955)
2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
3. The Horse and his Boy (1954)
4. Prince Caspian (1951)
5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
6. The Silver Chair (1953)
7. The Last Battle (1956)

 

Hold it.  Stop, stop, STOP! 

 

I had a gorgeous boxed set of the Narnia books when I was young.  They're long gone now, probably in the great storage area debacle of which we will not speak.  And I'm really regretting that now.  Because the books in my set looked like this:

 

1.  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

2.  Prince Caspian

3.  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

4.  The Silver Chair

5.  The Horse and His Boy

6.  The Magician's Nephew

7.  The Last Battle

 

Publication order. That's the way I read them, loved them.  Did you know you literally can't buy a set numbered like that anymore?  Trust me, I've looked. 

 

This is the way I read any series: Valdemar, Discworld, Narnia.  As a writer myself, I know that the author doesn't know the whole story when they put pen to paper for the first book.  Oh, maybe they know the big points, but the particulars?  Nah.  The story was (generally) written as it was published, and that's how they're supposed to be read.  Further, reading them in chronological order may reveal things to you that you just don't want to know.  Reading The Magician's Nephew before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe takes all the wonder out of Lucy's discovery of the wardrobe, and takes away the whole mystery of Narnia itself.  The Horse and His Boy is only tragic in the beginning if you've read enough of the stories to know how things are supposed to work.

 

And reading the Storm Winds trilogy before you read the Herald-Mage trilogy would cause you to not understand precisely why there aren't Herald-Mages anymore.  You see?  You just can't mess with an author's intentions like that.  You won't have the enjoyment of the stories as the author wanted to present them to you.

 

So tonight I'm going to go watch the movie Disney made of the second Narnia book.  And hopefully, they'll also adapt the third book in the series: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

 

 

*Shoryl calls me an information junkie.  It's likely true, but I'd need to find out more to be sure ...

Treasure Hunting

Inspired by some of the posts, thoughts, and general zeitgeist of the blogosphere lately, I went on a treasure hunting trip yesterday.

 

Out came all of my tubs of yarn, all the works in progress that had been shoved into corners, all the little slips and pieces and remainders of yarn from actual finished projects (yes, I do in fact finish things on occasion).  And I went through it all.  WIPs that were unloved or no longer needed got ripped and reballed.  Yarn for projects actually got put with the project they go with.  And I critically examined every single ball of yarn to determine whether it was loved enough for me to give it a home. 

 

It was part treasure hunting and part nostalgia, which is as a stash dive should be.  There were some unlovely yarns in there: yarns I'd bought when I was desperately poor and didn't know any better, some yarns that had been given to me in swaps or as gifts.  Some of them are from before I realized that I don't like to work in anything thicker than DK weight. Some, well, some I couldn't tell you how they ended up in my stash or what they were supposed to be.  In all, an entire tub of yarns found a new home.  The acrylics went to StemmedRose for prayer shawls. The sock yarn and wool went to Shoryl for her weaving.  In all, only 3 skeins of yarn will be leaving the house completely.  But they're not mine anymore.

 

My stash is now full of beautiful memories and beautiful yarn: the Irish wool brought home to me by Aunt Cheryl. The anniversary yarn for Shoryl and I.  Several heartbreakingly beautiful sock yarns, lovingly held in reserve until they can be given proper attention. Laceweight that I can only aspire to be talented enough to do justice to. 

 

The yarn stash dive was followed by the other stash dive - my fabric.  All that remains of my large (and at times misguided) fabric stash are my costume fabrics and a few fashion fabrics that may one day become skirts.  Less nostalgia, more criticism in this stash cleaning than the other, though there was some.  The purplish penne velvet cloak my ex-husband used to teach me how to use a sewing machine, the white lace I made an entire dress out of,  remnants from various sets of fest garb.

 

Both my stashes are now free (maybe only mostly free) of some misguided purchasing from when I worked at Jo-Anns.  All I have left are treasures. 

 

I'd like to end with some bit of wisdom or another to wrap this whole thing up cohesively, something about loving what you have, and letting go of what you don't love.  But there's a lot of that out there right now, so I'll just point out that more space in my tubs means I have someplace to store things when I make more deliberate purchases in the future. And hey, I rescued three full sets of US 1 dpns from ripped back WIPs.  That's gotta mean I can start some new socks now ... right?

*Blows off the dust*

Um, wow. Just, wow.

How long has it been again?

You know, let's not talk about that. Let's leave the past in the past. Let's not declare this an attempt to smooth over the fact that I didn't blog in almost a year. Let's make a fresh start.

Cuz I just got remote blogging to work - finally! So while I won't bore you with what I've been doing in the past, I'll be able to bore you with what I'm doing now, or in the future. Things like:

"Circe took in a breath to tell Ellice what she had heard. But then she spied Philina waiting beyond the priestess, a frown marring the line of her broad mouth. Not in front of her, she decided, and clamped her teeth down on her tongue hard enough to make her eyes water. The priestesses would need to know, of course, but she wouldn’t give Philina the satisfaction of thinking Circe had, after her warning, made the ritual into a production. So she said nothing as Ellice unclasped the soaked chitoniskos from her shoulders, letting it fall to the earth. Nor did she let out her precious secret when the white chiton was pinned on her, tangible evidence of her passage into womanhood. Philina might be favored with the priestesses, but Circe had just discovered that she was the favored of a god."

Yep, I'm writing again.

I'm also knitting as usual, but I haven't been able to find my camera cord lately, so no pictures.