Tag Archives: c.s. lewis

Reading Together #16

I present to you my sixteenth instalment of Weltenwanderers and SchlunzenbüchersGemeinsam Lesen“ (Reading Together).

Each Tuesday one of them asks four questions, with the first three always being the same about the book one is currently reading and the fourth a new one by either of them. All questions below are obviously translated from today’s German post.

1. Which Book are you currently reading and which page are you on?

This week I’m kind of reading two books.
On the one hand did I start with The Fellowship of the Ring, Part One of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which I chose as part of BiblioSmile’s Summer Book Challenge as a book I always meant to get around to.
With this one I’m on page 69.
On the other hand did I start with The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis, which is the first part of the Chronicles of Narnia, even though it was published last.
Here I’m currently on page 146.
I kind of switch between them on occasion and today I explored Narnia.

2. What is the first sentence on your current page?

„What’s the Thing talking about, Horse?“

or in German:

„Wovon redet das Ding, Pferd?“

3. What do you desperately need to tell about your current book? (Thoughts, Feelings, a Quote, whatever you want!)

One of the reasons I switch is because it is exhausting to read the long and carefully structured sentences in the Fellowship. I have to read some of them several times before I fully grasp what they mean and that means I can’t follow the story as easily as I had hoped. The Narnia book is a nice alternative here, as the phrasing is fit for children, though sometimes just as confusing.
While reading I remembered bits of the first LotR movie already and I think, I also already saw a few differences between the written and the movie-version. But it’s still nice to get a different angle on the whole thing.
And there weren’t as many pages describing the Shire (I had to think for a moment what it was called in English as I’m too used to the German version: Auenland – meadowsland) as I had anticipated from others‘ tales.
The only thing that actually bugged me was that it was never said which dwarves visited Bilbo on his 111th Birthday. I wanted to know if there were some we knew from the Hobbit. >_<
And I was surprised that Frodo turned 50 before the whole story actually began…the movies give you a totally different impression here…
Narnia has a completely different narration and it’s odd when the narrator addresses the audience, but it is still quite interesting to read about the discovery and birth of Narnia.

4. Do you put the books you are going to read into an order early on or do you decide spontaneously which one will be the next after you finished a book?

Like so many things this depends.
Most of the times I just pick a book I feel like reading, but there are also times – especially now in regards to the challenges – where I think which would be best to read next in order to finally finish them.

Additional thoughts

You can obviously participate in these questions by either using my translated or the original German version.
PoiSonPaiNter
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