I loved the Chronicles of Narnia as a kid (especially A Horse and His Boy and The Silver Chair) but this stuff is too funny to pass up.

The first is from the British critic and novelist Philip Hensher:

Let us drop C. S. Lewis and his ghastly, priggish, half-witted, money-making drivel about Narnia down the nearest deep hole… They are revoltingly mean-minded books, written to corrupt the minds of the young with allegory, smugly denouncing anything that differs in the slightest respect from Lewis’s creed of clean-living, muscular Christianity, pipe-smoking, misogyny, racism, and the most vulgar snobbery.

The other is Philip Pullman.

The message of Narnia, according to Pullman, is that “Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-colored people are better than dark-colored people; and so on.” The books, on this account, are “nauseating drivel,” and Pullman detests “the reactionary sneering, the misogyny, the racism.”