The Silver Chair

What Hacker News says

1. irrationalDec 2023
   > Granted, in either reading order, it takes awhile to reach the best book in the series, The Silver Chair

   Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. Because The Horse and His Boy is clearly the best.

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2. graemepJan 2025
   > Any reasonable reader would conclude that the Pevensie children are the main characters in that series.

   The main characters even in books they do not appear in (The Magicians Nephew and The Silver Chair) or appear in only as minor characters (The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle)?

   The older two Pevensies are only main characters in two books.

   > Frankly your comment sounds like cope. You so badly want to identify with this series so you decided that the main characters are the Telmarines.

   That comment is an ad hominem and does not relate to what I sad at all.

   I think the difference is that I am actually familiar with the books, and that you cannot let go of preconceived notions.

   > None of the characters have ever looked or spoken like me, unless they were a caricature to be made fun of

   I do not know enough about you to be able to evaluate that statement.

   Edit to add:

   > Indeed, that was the whole point - Lewis wrote Narnia for his goddaughter Lucy.

   He dedicated one book in the series to his god-daughter. he was written about his motives and inspirations for the series elsewhere and it goes far beyond "writing a book for Lucy".

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3. sersiJan 2025
   Yes, you're right about that specific dedication to Lewis' god daughter. But, you don't address the poster's point:

   > The main characters even in books they do not appear in (The Magicians Nephew and The Silver Chair) or appear in only as minor characters (The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle)?

   He does have a point and you're not answering it at all.

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4. SOLAR_FIELDSJun 2024
   The books are heavily allegorical and knowledge of who Aslan represents is usually enough to clue people in that it’s clearly a Christian metaphor, but I could easily see someone that didn’t have that background missing it. Even as a kid that grew up with a high level of Christian indoctrination a lot of the metaphorical concepts went over my head at the time. For example, in The Silver Chair there are rich metaphors about sin and salvation surrounding the characters that were totally unknown/unnoticed to me as a child, even though I knew all of the themes from my upbringing.
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5. kijinDec 2023
   I don't know why publishers keep insisting on chronological ordering of fantasy/SF book sets. Don't they understand literature? A lot of novels are not chronologically ordered, even within one book.

   Would you introduce someone to Tolkien and tell them to start with The Silmarillion? Absolutely not.

   Fortunately, film and TV producers seem to know what works better. IIRC I've watched at least two Narnia movie franchises, and both started with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and proceeded in publication order. They usually don't go beyond The Silver Chair, though. Which was probably the right decision, because the remaining three books feel more like Hollywood milking the franchise with contrived prequels, sequels, and spinoffs than a proper part of the same canon.

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6. frabbitSep 2019
   https://www.librarything.com/ is always better for finding books that I know part of the title (or sometimes even just the full title).

   I would like to be able to weight opinions (both positively and negatively) of individuals, and also based on criteria (e.g. "completely ignore the opinions of anyone who gave a low rating to The Good Soldier Svejk" and also "weight by 100 the opinions of anyone that rates The Silver Chair as the best of the Narnia stories".

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