A Short Rant about Book Order

This should be blatantly obvious, but apparently it’s not, so I’m going to say it: Books in a series should be listed and read in the order they were written, not necessarily in order of the events in the series. In particular I’m talking about The Chronicles of Narnia. The fifth and sixth books in the series are flashbacks, but modern publications of the series number them as books 1 and 3. This is totally stupid, and not just because the author clearly intended them to be read after the first four books (although that’s a good reason too). The main problem is that the first four books have some continuity of character development, and they’re just plain better. They get you interested in the series and make you feel invested enough to want to read the later books, which are a bit quirkier. Reading The Magician’s Nephew first would be a bit like (I cringe at the thought) reading First King of Shannara before any of the other Shannara books. And while The Horse and His Boy happens between the first two books, it doesn’t include any of the main characters of those books, so reading it in-between breaks up the character development. I’m pretty sure kids are smart enough to understand that a book they’re reading happened before a book they’ve read before.