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It's not just the lipstick stockings and invitations stuff, with Lewis. Look at Eustace's parents, for example. Their great crime seems to be that they have installed progressive views in their son (feminism, republicanism, vegetarianism, lack of corporal punishment etc) and this has made him the whiny, pompous little coward he is at the start of Dawn Treader. I did like the Narnia books as a child, but I didn't like the way that Lewis involves the reader in snide asides about liberal values, rather than just presenting his case and letting the reader make up his/her own mind.
(Although there is a rather amusing Oxonian dig at the Other Place in Dawn Treader - Eustace's ghastly trendy parents live in Cambridge....)
Oh and I second the recommendations for Norrell and Strange....brilliant...and south American magic realism. Marquez and Allende are great. I also recommend - slightly different but wonderful, intellectually rigorous fantasy nonetheless, Jorge Luis Borges.
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Out went the candle, and we were left darkling
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