Ironically, since I am one of the firm supporters of the original published order, the first volume of CoN that I ever read part of was MN. In the seventh grade, I had found a copy of it on a shelf and read part of it, up to the Wood between the Worlds and into a bit of Charn. But I had to give the book up and never got any further with it for many years. I pretty much forgot about the book itself, though just the idea of the Wood between the Worlds with its seemingly infinite different pools leading to different worlds was a distinct source of what I would later find out that Lewis called Joy -- ie, it was an intense longing, almost a painful thing, of simply the pure idea of a place like the Wood Between the Worlds, completely apart from how it related to the story of MN.
Also, a bit ironically, around that time or a bit later, I also subscribed to a publication, "Mythlore" that focused on the Inklings -- I was interested in LotR at the time and knew nothing, so I thought, of Lewis -- and it had a picture (shown below) that also sparked that feeling of intense, painful longing for "I know not what". I didn't know what the picture was from or what it represented -- only that it conveyed that sort of stark loneliness and isolation and sadness that I think Lewis also felt a bit in his description of "Northernness" that he talks about in
Surprised by Joy.
Of course the picture turned out to be a depiction of Jadis showing the children the city of Charn. So I had two distinct stabs of Joy that were directly from MN before I even knew what Narnia was or who Lewis was or even what Joy was.
Later, in high school I ravenously read the CoN in the original published order and, boy, what a jolt it was when I got to MN and discovered that long-forgotten source of the image of the Wood Between the Worlds and the image of that dying or dead city that had so affected me for all that time (now that I think about it, the image of the dead Charn probably gave me similar pangs along the line that Lewis describes about himself upon reading the line "Balder the Beautiful is dead, is dead").
By the way, just to add another bit of irony, all this happened before I was a Christian, and at that time I didn't pick up on any of the Christian imagery in the books. It wasn't until college when someone tried to get me to read Mere Christianity that I realized (with horror, if truth be told) that one of my favourite authors, the writer of CoN was apparently one of "those" icky Christian-types that I tended to avoid. Egads! What was I to do? I had just read the Space Trilogy for the first time (again, with no hint of any Christian ideas) , so I quickly re-read them along with the CoN to see if they had any of "that stuff" in them and found, to my dismay, that not only could Christianity be found in them here and there, they were, to the contrary, stuffed, in nearly every paragraph -- stinking to high heaven, it seemed to me -- with the dreaded Christianity. What a disappointment.
But of course it all came out ok in the end:-)
--Stanley
…on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a fair green country under a swift sunrise.
I found it hillarious but to others there was nothing remotely funny about it.
by UrendiMaleldil » January 22nd, 2007, 5:16 pm 
). but later on, when someone told me what the stories were "about", it was amazing to see the wheels turn... to begin to associate the sensation of being loved & accepted, and of belonging to some place great and beautiful, (some way of explaining the strangeness & ugliness surrounding all of us in this place) with my earliest perceptions of who Christ was (is).
