I was a different age from when I read Narnia. But I found Pullman shrill and vicious, not something whose converse I remember from Lewis.

I read them all as an adult. Halfway through two, Pullman started to give me a tic. But the Narnia books rang with the sounds of anvils. Children or YAs probably wouldn't notice so much.

I didn't find Pullman's anti-religious tone too offensive. I saw it as an attack on institutions, not faith. I can relate to that.

I read the Narnia books as a child of church-going parents, and I pretty much had the symbolism pointed out to me as I read. Given my Christian background, I didn't mind that. I can imagine people of other faiths, or none, finding Lewis offensive at times.

Yeah, the Dwarves in Narnia struck as pretty obviously anti-semitic stereotypes. And I thought the whole anvil about comparing atheism to people who lived in a gaslit hole underground with pussycats and could not imagine a lion or the sun was pretty vicious.

I just read Prince Caspian with my mostly 5th grade book club. The nonchristians -- missed all the christian myths( or synbols if you prefer) . But --- and mostly because they are all Percy Jackson fans-- they picked out a bunch of the greek mtyths references. None of them recognized the wild ride. The only other one I have read in that series is LWW. I read it as a kid and never went further with the series. My plan is to read the rest of them, partly because the mixing of various mythologies is fascinating -

the Dwarves in Narnia struck as pretty obviously anti-semitic stereotypes.

Not to mention the... interesting representation of Islam.

The Last Battle also features a happy ending in which all the kids and their parents die in a train accident so that they can stay in Narnia forever. Oh, except Susan, who is presumably left to mourn her entire family as her punishment for liking boys.

That was my favorite of the series as a kid, but as an adult it's quite nasty for a variety of reasons. But then, I think I would have liked His Dark Materials more at 10 or so than I did as an adult. Particularly the first two books.

I don't want to take this too far. There is much to like in the Narnia series, and Susan I think is punished not for liking boys but for denying the existence of Narnia. Still I think the reaction to Susan's situation is generally justified. The excuse for punishing her is added at the last minute; it is not really foreshadowed well. And her rejection of Narnia IS associated for the interest in boys and parties. When people read her as being punished for liking boys they may be missing a denotation, but are dead on in the connotation. Some of the remarks made later in life by Lewis seem to indicate that for various reasons he needed someone to survive and be left on earth remembering to make some sort of moral point, and Susan was more or less a last minute pick for that.

Yeah my main criticism is Dark Materials is not a bit of religion bashing. I think religion is powerful enough to stand up to it, and has done enough harm and given enough passes for that harm that it maybe needs a bit of literary bashing as a counterweight. My objection is that the writing is not as good as it could be. And that is a same because some of the character and world building are magnificent. I'm pretty sure that part of the problem is that Pullman changed his mind about where the plot was going between volumes.

I think one defense one could make of Lewis is Pullman is that the writing is better - a lot better. Though I think there are long bits of Dark Materials that are as good as anything Lewis did - just not the work as a whole. I'd love to see Pullman tackle something like this again, maybe on the same theme or maybe on another. But I think he is one of those writers like Lewis whose writing is strengthened by having a didactic purpose, even if it can get out of control on occasion.

I never saw Pullman as antireligious, but as against an oligarchy using religion as an excuse to control people and do terrible things in the name of religion. I saw it as vilifying the elders, rather than the practice of religion.

Susan I think is punished not for liking boys but for denying the existence of Narnia.

I don't find that any less nasty. Especially when the end result is that her own family dismisses her. There's nothing about her being left to remember them, or to learn something from their violent and inexplicable death. If that was Lewis's intent, he failed massively at communicating it. In the last third of the book they essentially say, "Susan sucks because she thinks Narnia was just a childhood game; let us speak of her no more." And they don't.

Pullman's far from perfect, and I'm not quite sure how to compare them, given that they were writing for such different audiences, but I really can't agree that Lewis is a better writer in any artistic sense.