Convenient Collection but Bizarre Organization

This one's going to be rather brief (I hope).

After re-watching the movie version of the first installment of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" a while back and with the impending (at that time) release of the the movie version of book two "Prince Caspian" it might be high time to re-read the books. I had read them many years ago but had little coherent memory of them. Eventually I found this one-volume collection from Harper-Collins cheap somewhere on-line and ordered it.

The Chronacles are a connected but not contigious series of seven books set in the fantasy world called Narnia. They are, in order of publication:

"The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe". This first foray into Narnia introduces the members of the Pevensie family, four children sent to the British countryside to be safe from the German Blitz. There inside an old wardrobe cabinet they discover a gateway to Narnia. They were brought to Narnia by Aslan, the Lion Lord to fight against the White Witch who hold the land in the grip of endless winter.

The next book is "Prince Caspian" is the second book which continues the Pevensie's are brought back to Narnia to displace a tyrant and return the rightful heir to his throne.

The third book is "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" wherein the two younger Pevensie children along a disagreeable acquittance Eustace sail for the edge of the world with Prince Caspian.

Number four is "The Silver Chair" chronacles the search of Eustace and his schoolmate Jill for a lost prince of Narnia.

"The Magician's Nephew" is the story of the creation of the world of Narnia and Aslan's population of it with talking animals and others.

Coming down the home stretch we have "The Horse and His Boy" which is an "Arabian Nights" style adventure south of the land of Narnia's borders.

Finally, "The Last Battle" marks the end of Narnia as Aslan, Lewis's stand-in for Jesus Christ brings the existence of Narnia to a close.
(Each link above will give interested readers access reviews by myself and others.)

This is the order the author produced the books and therein lies the main problem with this book. Readers will note that with respect to the internal chronology of these seven books the above order rather jumps about a bit. This book presents them in internal chronological order ("Magician's Nephew", LWW, "Horse", "Caspian", "Dawn Treader", "Silver Chair", "Last Battle").

This is the wrong order to read these book for two principal reasons. First, "The Magician's Nephew" is probably the weakest book in the series and thus makes a poor introduction to the Narnia legendrum. Second, the ideas behind the series evolved and matures as Lewis went along and reading them in this order leads to a rather disjointed experience. Saying one must read the stories in the order this volume presents them in is rather like saying one must read the Bible starting with Genesis all the way through to Revelations, don't even think about flipping forward to Acts or Habakkuk!

Other than this organization problem, there isn't anything much to complain about here. All of the original illustrations and maps are reproduced. There isn't any introduction or other extra content but that isn't what most readers came for anyway.

So, for a conveniently collected, if oddly organized collected volume of the Narnia tales this edition should serve you well.