Thanks for that link, I had similar issues when I started reading the Narnia books years ago. I *loved* the first book, but stopped reading the series midway through the third book. I didn't identify why at the time (I was in elementary school), but I'm incredibly hesitant to see the movie now because of all the Christian overtones. Nothing against Christianity, but I'm not going to spend $8 to hear a sermon when what I really want is entertainment and a good story. And I'm sad that I'll never be able to share my innocent enjoyment of LW&W; with my daughter, because I don't think I can read it now without getting upset.

When I was about 5 years old me and my dad's housemate John read me the entire Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. He also introduced me to role-playing games in 1977. But I remember my feeling at the time and forever afterward was that each story had one major shortcoming--

1) Narnia was too cute. The themes were deadly serious but the violence was mostly either off-camera, or so allegorical that it wasn't violence in the "goblin cleaver" sense of the word. This struck me as unforgivably condescending. Because the stories never seemed to take themselves very seriously I had a hard time taking them seriously and it was always my feeling afterward that the Chronicles of Narnia bore the same relationship to The Lord of the Rings in heroic fantasy that Sesame Street bore to The Muppet Show on TV.

2) My beef with tLotR was sort of a weird one, especially for a 5-year-old-- but it really bothered me that there were no women in the story. For some reason the drama just didn't seem as interesting to me when there were no female characters. Everyone was supposedly fighting for their way of life and their futures, but the characters were all single men with no children and weirdly regressive attitudes towards actually talking to women. That always seemed like a major flaw in the story to me and I never really did get over it.

This second point actually worked out to ruin the movies for me as well. Because my very favorite part of any fantasy book ever is the part where Eowyn kills the Nazgul. It doesn't quite make up for the vacuum of female characters in the rest of the story, but it's a great moment and the Rankin-Bass cartoons I grew up with did a great job of translating it. But Miranda Otto was just gutless as Eowyn in Peter Jackson's movies and the final battle sequence where she does for the Nazgul was completely unbelievable. She was just this flinching awkward woman who got in a luck hit-- certainly not a "maiden of the Rohirrim, child of kings, slender but as a steel-blade, fair but terrible." She certainly shows up badly against Trinity of The Matrix or Uma Thurman's excellent bride in Kill Bill.

...which I guess is a little off-topic.

I'm just say'n.