The Right Books

Remember in The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treader' how unprepared Eustace Clarence Scrubb is for his dragon adventure because he has "read none of the right books" (p. 463)?  Indeed, he has "read only the wrong books" (p. 464).

Well, already in the first chapter of Prince Caspian we can see that Edmund Pevensie has (thank goodness!) read exactly the right books.  He and his siblings have been magically jerked out of a semi-deserted English railway station (with "hardly anyone on the platform except themselves") onto a deserted island.  They are taken by surprise and certainly ill-equipped, as they have only two sandwiches among them and all the wrong clothes -- and they quickly grow thirsty under the hot sun.  But fortunately:

'It's like being shipwrecked,' remarked Edmund.  'In the books they always find springs of clear, fresh water on the island.  We'd better go and look for them.'  (p. 319)

After their thirst is assuaged, they start worrying about food and "[o]ne or two tempers very nearly got lost at this stage" (p. 321).  But again Edmund draws on his book-learning:

'Look here.  There's only one thing to be done.  We must explore the wood.  Hermits and knights-errant and people like that always manage to live somehow if they're in a forest.  They find roots and berries and things.'  (p. 321) 

So, to summarize.  The right books involve dragons (p. 463), hermits and knights-errant (p. 321), and shipwrecks (p. 319).  The wrong books are "books of information" with "pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools" (p. 425) and "a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains" (p. 464).

I can see how this might rub some people the wrong way, much like Lewis's quite useful distinction between the "literary reader" and the "unliterary reader" (despite the seeming whiff of snobbery in the phrase, the key is not what someone reads, but why and how they read; the tell-tale is re-reading).

Here, I think the crux is that the right books prepare you for an encounter with Narnia and the Deeper Magic, even helping you, perhaps, build resilience by developing imaginative and/or spiritual resources for the curveballs life may throw your way.  The wrong books can only prepare you for things foreseen.

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Postlude:
This is perhaps further underscored by the narrator's comment (p. 408): "The sort of History that was taught in Narnia under Miraz's rule was duller than the truest history you ever read and less true than the most exciting adventure story."

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Edition Referenced:

Lewis, C. S. The Chronicles of Narnia. 1st American ed, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001.