I have an edition of the complete Narnia series published in the last 20 years or so. Numbers on the spines of the books indicate the intended reading order. The sequence is the within-universe sequence of events. Uh, no. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not number two in the Narnia series! It’s number one.

Below I set out the two most popular reading sequences, one being the order in which the books were originally published and the other being the within-universe order the publisher is pimping, followed by an alternative possibility. In all this I mean the best order in which to read the series for the first time. The books are wonderful singleton reads, in any order, once you’ve read the whole series at least once.

First, let’s dispense with a possible objection: The copyright page in my edition says that the within-universe sequence represents “the original wishes of the author, C. S. Lewis.” This is not really true, as shown below. But even if it were true, it would merely mean that Lewis had a rare lapse of judgment.

A. The Chronicles of Narnia ordered by publication date:

1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
2. Prince Caspian
3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
4. The Silver Chair
5. The Horse and His Boy
6. The Magician’s Nephew
7. The Last Battle

(I think I’m being pretty self-controlled in resisting the temptation to put an Oxford comma after “Witch” in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (Pats self on back.))

B. Ordered by the within-universe sequence of events:

1. The Magician’s Nephew
2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
3. The Horse and His Boy
4. Prince Caspian
5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
6. The Silver Chair
7. The Last Battle

C. Ordered by within-universe sequence except for The Magician’s Nephew:

1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
2. The Horse and His Boy
3. Prince Caspian
4. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
5. The Silver Chair
6. The Magician’s Nephew
7. The Last Battle

Sequence C is simply the publication order, except that The Horse and His Boy is moved from number 5 to number 2. Equivalently, it’s the within-universe order, except that The Magician’s Nephew is moved from position 1 to position 6.

Why should The Magician’s Nephew be in position 6, the next-to-last place? Because this works in terms of narrative structure. It is best to show us Narnia – the stories of Narnia – first. Drop us into an adventure in a strange magical land. Let us encounter fauns, minotaurs, murderous witches, and divine lions. Give us terrible perils, thrilling escapes, and exhilarating bravery. We don’t need a creation sequence distracting us from all this. That way the stories – books 1 through 5 above – are about the stories, not about a creation myth. I’m not dismissing The Magician’s Nephew, and I’m not dismissing creation myths. A creation myth is fine (and of course it’s also a story of a particular kind), but we don’t need that at first.

After we’ve been through several adventures in this land, show us the creation of the land. This doesn’t just avoid distracting us from the adventures: It also works better because after we’ve been through many adventures in Narnia we care about its creation. The creation of a land we’ve never visited before doesn’t have any emotional impact on us. We have no knowledge of it or emotional link to it. In short, we don’t care. You could write a good creation story under those circumstances, but the author would have to write it with the understanding that one thing he has to do is make us care as we read of the creation. In contrast, when Lewis wrote the final draft of The Magician’s Nephew he knew his readers already cared about this land, its creatures, its conflicts, its god.

The Magician’s Nephew is a good story anyway, and a good Narnia entry point, and I’m sure that people who read it first enjoy it. But I’ll bet they enjoy it, and the rest of the series, even more if they read it in position number 6.

So first show us the stories of Narnia, then, when we are emotionally invested in it, show us the origin of Narnia. Last, of course, show us the end of Narnia, the Balancing and Closing of Accounts and the Last One to Leave Turning Off the Lights.

Also:

At one point in The Magician’s Nephew, [SPOILER WARNING HERE] Jadis throws a piece of metal from a London lamppost at Aslan. It bounces off him harmlessly and into the soil of the still-being-created Narnia, and the metal grows into a lamppost before our eyes. This is because everything in Narnia is exploding with creation magic, so even a metal bar plunged into its soil bursts into life. (God, I love that. How did Lewis come up with that wonderful idea?!) And at this moment you get the wonderful shock of recognition of knowing that this is the lamppost. This is it, this is how it started, you think. All along there was a reason that lamppost was there in the middle of the Narnian woods.

Thus you have the pleasure of experiencing it both ways: When you read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe you have the pleasure of coming upon a mysterious lamppost in the middle of a woods, seemingly without any reason other than its own purely magical reason. It has its own raison d’etre, which it feels no need to tell you about. Why shouldn’t I be here, any more than any other thing, like a tree? it asks you. Do the trees feel the need to explain their existence to you? Later, when you read The Magician’s Nephew, you get the shock of knowing that there was a reason in terms of cause and effect that the lamppost was there. The cause and effect are magical, but comprehensible, given the premise of universe-creating magic.

The original publication order is also consistent with all this, and indeed, that order has something to recommend it: If we read The Horse and His Boy late in the sequence, we experience the pleasure of plunging into the myths of the world of Narnia after we are familiar with Narnia. That is, The Horse and His Boy not only goes backward in time from The Silver Chair, it also has the character of myth to an extent. This is buttressed by a reference to it as a (true) story in The Silver Chair, according to the interwebs, though I can’t find the references in my copy of Chair at the moment. This also could constitute a welcome pause before we get deep, into profound and sometimes uncomfortable moral conflicts, in The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle.

There is another reason it might be best to read them in the publication order. If we read The Horse and His Boy between Witch and Caspian, we break up the sequencing of the English children. In particular, we break up the adventures of the four Pevensies in Narnia, in which they are central viewpoint characters. The viewpoint character of The Horse and His Boy isn’t a Pevensie or even anyone from England; it’s Shasta. The Pevensies only appear in supporting roles. And more broadly, we break up the four stories (Witch, Caspian, Treader, and Chair) in which English children go into Narnia; Edmund and Lucy Pevensie bringing Eustace along in Treader and then Eustace bringing Jill along in Chair. After those four viewpoint-continuous stories are complete, then we get into the Calormor/Archenland story in Horse, and then it’s off to the beginning and ending of Narnia in Magician and Battle.

Steven D. Greydanus, an advocate of reading them in publication order, also makes that point, and others.

He also shows that the notion that Lewis wanted the books read in the within-universe sequence is very thinly founded on one letter he wrote to a reader, in which Lewis says, “I think I agree with your order for reading the books,” meaning in within-universe order. However, Lewis also says in that letter, “So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read[s] them.” Plainly the author did not have a definite preference!

Greydanus also gives more thorough reasons to read Wardrobe before Magician. Essentially,

Reversing the order of these two books gives us the answers first and the questions second. By answering questions we weren’t asking, and then posing riddles we know the answers to, Magician’s Nephew loses much of its revelatory force and The Lion much of its mystery.

 
So read them in publication order or in order C above. In either case, there are good reasons for reading The Magician’s Nephew next to last.