I must admit I completely missed it
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Pretty sure I did when I first read them - mind you, I’ve never been religious (I even used to skive Sunday school) so maybe that’s not surprising.
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Well at least one person didn’t notice it then but does still like them now!
It is very much despite the allegorical aspect though. And of course I have no idea whether I’d like them now if I hadn’t liked them so much at such an early age.
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having read “lion, the witch.,” and one of the middle ones a decade or so ago, I’m confident to say the answer is probably no. the story is okay, but the writing is awful. Quite a bit of that is the ham handedness of the allegory. the first was better, it might be okay.
It will be interesting to see if Greta Gerwig manages to make a movie of it, and how that turns out. (Netflix has the rights to the whole series. At one point they claimed to be planning a series based on it. Not sure what the state of any of that is.)
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Did you watch the TV show? Because my wife and I have to say it really pulled me in. One of the few times I wanted to watch “just one more episode”. But I know what you mean “it’s not that simple”, it felt like a feel good show and if that’s well done I can enjoy them a lot. Like This is Us. Or to mention a book example because we are in the “what are you reading” post 
Midnight Library by Matt Haig.
So I thought about reading the book too. Did that with several shows and movies (Band of Brothers, The Queen’s Gambit, Greyhound and some others) and got never disappointed if I remember correctly.
February and March are busy season for work so my pleasure reading slows down and I tend to grab for comfort stuff.
So I just finished a re-read of the Chronicles of Amber. Just the first five as the rest have never appealed. I still enjoy them a lot. I’m always impressed with the odd mix of concepts and results Zelazny fused together. His prose is distinctive and enjoyable as well. I don’t know if Zelazny’s voice is Corwin’s voice or if he spent a lot of time locking down Corwin’s voice but the storyteller is very clear even without a lampshade hung on the framing device until the very end.
I also read Piers Brendon’s The Dark Valley a Panorama of the 1930s which is a very good survey of the 1930s north of the equator as the combatants from WW1 endure the depression and the forces and people affecting WW2 land where they will land for the events of the 1940s. I found having read Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory and Modris Ekstein’s Rites of Spring helped inform a read of Brendon’s work very much.
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I’m always amazed that the same author wrote that AND Damnation Alley, AND This Immortal. That’s some range.
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Can’t wait to have all the books in the same format. I know it shouldn’t really matter tho!
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Have to say - I prefer the original covers
Just finished Toll the Hounds (Malazan #8).
This was the hardest book of the series so far. Both to finish reading and to read the final chapters. Although the latter… I believe with every single book I get the same feeling. And yet this tragedy seems even more tragic than the ones that came before (which I think after every book).
I feel like this time around I was better able to grasp the details and what most of it meant and what the motivation of most characters was than last time. If I ever get here a 3rd time, I might finally remember where Cutter gets that lance.
Now on to the last book in the series: the intro to Dust of Dreams says it is really just one more book, but too long to be published as such.
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I still love the covers but they are a real mismatch - especially with the more ‘realistic’ art of the later books.
The worst thing I’ve seen done with Discworld covers is when they cut up the Josh Kirby art and rearranged it. Including this version of Equal Rites where they removed the main character:
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A spectacularly stupid move
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Needs a screaming emoji. Unbelievable.
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I can just hear the marketing people saying “boys won’t buy a book with a girl on the cover”.
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Earlier today I read a short story with perhaps the finest title ever imagined by humankind. You can find it in this issue of Science Wonder Stories at the Internet Archive.
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Finally got around to a lot of science fiction/fantasy:
The Colour of Magic–it’s fine! I liked it a lot to start, but my interest waned heavily by the end. Will probably keep reading the other books in the series, but not itching to.
Ancillary Sword–good, but a bit disappointing after the excellent first book. Justice set up a fascinating world with this really interesting struggle at the heart of it regarding identity, loyalty, and trust, then just kind of… set that aside, to tell a relatively low-stakes and generic story about prejudice. Still a good read, but I didn’t love the severe shift of focus.
Foreigner–definitely shows its age, but still worthwhile. Reminds me of A Memory Called Empire, but with more focus on the potentially impenentrable cultural gap between species.
Finder–didn’t really enjoy this one. Extremely rote story and characters, and a world that didn’t seem particularly interesting.
Infomocracy–easily my favorite of the books I read, and one that I finished in a single day. Sort of a lightly-cyberpunk political thriller, with a lot of unsettling (but interesting) things to say about the state of information, how bad actors can manipulate the fact that “all knowledge is at your fingertips” to limit your exposure to the truth without you knowing, and how people might even prefer that state of affairs because it’s easier than actually doing your own research. Even aside from that, though, it’s just an engaging read–would highly recommend!
The Midnight Library–this one joins the unfortunate pantheon of “books I truly depise,” joining Alas, Babylon and Walden. It starts off interestingly enough, but quickly devolves into mawkish, borderline manipulative sentimentality, and ends with a sequence of conclusions that feel extremely simplistic at best, and genuinely unhealthy at worst. Maybe I’m just too cynical to enjoy the message here, but this is the first book in a long time that left me truly angry.
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