C. S. Lewis wrote his Narnia tales seven decades ago. About a decade later — in the 1960s, I read them for the first time, and then I re-read them aloud to my kids.
In the early 1970s, I opted to focus on those inimitable stories in my Master’s degree thesis. Two gracious teachers at Ridgecrest Elementary (where our kids were in school) agreed to read one of the Narnia books to their classes and then to document their students’ reactions for one chapter of my thesis.
After that, until last spring, I don’t think I had turned a page of the Narnia series. For some reason that I don’t remember, one April day I picked up the first volume in the series and read that whole book that afternoon. In the week that followed, I re-read the other six books…