This is Book 4 of The Chronicles of Narnia.

I will likely be done with all of these by the end of the month, at the rate I'm going and ease of reading. I will be okay with being done hunting for Christian allegorical elements in the books I'm reading by Christmas.

This book puzzled me a lot in a couple places. I'm okay with time passing, and the kids being pulled back to Narnia - it's magic, and if you accept magic, you need to suspend disbelief and let the newly defined laws of nature reveal themselves. That's fine.

What I'm struggling with is that that talking animals, the Talking Animals, eat their own kind. They serve bacon and eggs and bear to the kids. In another book, the kids ate roast. Okay, so, maybe the animals who can't talk are a different species, distinctly farm animals? Nope, turns out that Talking Animals can devolve into non-talking animals. This means, there is a spectrum of Talking in Narnia with the animals. If we take Talking as a measurement of intelligence, then the Talking Animals eat their stupid, their dumb, their deaf, their mute, their mentally incapacitated, their learning-disabled. While this could be okay in some societies to cull the herd, I'm not sure this is what C. S. had in mind when he had his Talking Animals.

This book was published in 1951. The Two Towers was published in 1954. Why is this significant? Because C.S. Lewis had the protagonists saved by a giant forest of trees in this book. That's three years before the Ents were released on the world. Another struggle.

While in Seattle a while ago, I wandered into the Elliot Bay bookstore and, unsurprisingly, left with a stack of books. In that stack was The Great Gatsby, which I hadn't yet read. So tell me why, when I decided to read a Fitzgerald book, I would start with this book, The Beautiful and Damned? I mean, I can't even blame BookRiot for this one.

I picked it up, however, and started reading. The book is about Anthony Patch, a social parasite, and his marriage to his wife, Gloria. Okay, no, it isn't a abook about Patch, who is the grandson of a wealthy tycoon from the late 1800s, and a moocher of said tycoon's wealth. Patch doesn't actually work, he lives off an allowance from his grandfather, and hopes for the man's death throughout the book.

Except the book isn't about Anthony. Rather, it is a social commentary on the worthlessness of the non-working financially elite who don't actually do anything for society except spout non-sense about intellectuals, non-intellectuals, the meaning of life, the lack of meaning in life, and a billion things they actually know nothing about. Unironically, said people continue to exist today.

That the main characters are pretty awful, shallow people, I can't say I was ever on their side. When Anthony's grandfather interrupted a particular rowdy party during Prohibition, I cheered for Anthony's disinheritance. Fitzgerald's characters in this book are unlovable, disgusting, mooching parasites of the world. Which, well, the describing of such was likely the point of the book.

I'm glad I read it. I look forward to reading the Great Gatsby.