Livre d'Or

I was raised Catholic. My father read TLtWatW to us when I was about 7, and I didn't get the allegory then. A couple of years later he read the entire series to us, and I noticed the allegory then.

Having been raised within the broader Catholic context (and spotting it relatively young) I didn't feel betrayed, though I did feel a bit dim for not having noticed the first time through.

Even as a Catholic, I bounced hard off TLB, both because of the troubling salvation stuff at the end but primarily because the first three-quarters of it are just an incoherent mess of a book.

I reread them again while at University, and really struggled with the racism and colonialism in VotDT: in particular, there's a really hideous scene where the "wise wizard" governing an island full of "primitive" people explains how difficult he finds living with such morons, but how it is worth it for him because he knows that at some time in the very far future they may become properly civilized people.