The glossy paperback collection of the Chronicles of Narnia was a book so large that my seven-year-old self struggled to hold onto it. I remember sitting in the sunlight staring at the cover; a lion wreathed in flames staring back while the rest of the 4th of July festivities went on around me. A massive thing, It has now been read so many times that the pages are separating from the spine and the whole thing is held together with tape and ribbons.
These were the first more complicated chapter books I tackled on my own. My parents read the first few to me and I managed to finish them on my own. At that point, they were pure innocent magic: talking lions and strange ever-burning lamps, ships that sailed to the edge of the world, stars who took human form to marry princes, and generations of just rulers living forever in harmony in a wondrous never-land. These stories sparked my imagination. They allowed me to explore the corners of my own mind and got me to think creatively.
The next time I read the Chronicles, I grasped some of the more obvious internal difficulties the characters face. The world was growing steadily larger for my young mind and Narnia became an introduction to the lines between good and evil. Later, I saw more clearly in these books the themes of growing older, of maturity, of understanding. Still later I saw the Christian parallels (and got mad that my favorite childhood books were religious propaganda, how could I have missed it?!).
Still later - after reading about CS Lewis's insistence that The Chronicles were simply an answer to “what if the Christian narrative happened in a place like Narnia” and not supposed to be allegory, I picked them up again and again saw the many wonderful layers of these books. Sure there are Christian themes but there are also themes of friendship, morality, family, and loss. With every read, I picked out new pieces of CS Lewis's world.
I’ve been on this journey numerous times with numerous books, many of them children's literature like the His Dark Materials trilogy, and Watership Down then later with novels like “The Call of the Wild” and “The Mysterious Island” and now I am beginning the process of rereading some of my favorite classics like Hamlet.
When I pick up books now I see hundreds of stories lying within their covers. One day I’ll read it and pull out the story of sisters tied together by blood but struggling to understand each other, a story mirroring my own struggles. And maybe it elucidates something for me. The next time I pick up the same book I might notice the poetry of the language and how the author characterizes their world through language. A third time I might pick up the book feeling introspective and find myself seeing new stories emerge through the psyches of the characters. No matter how many times I re-read a book I never get the same story twice.
When asked why I re-read some books an upwards of 10 times I cite Narnia and all its companions whose value lies not in the words on their pages but in the way they have forced my mind to see the exact same story differently every time I read them.
