I enjoyed Audra’s segment on how these stories affected her growing up thought it would be nice to here everyone else’s.
Well here’s mine i have never to this day read the books but love these story’s. Sounds weird right; but i have had the deepest connection to these works. Some of it is without a doubt the fact i grew up in a religious family. and the conection was never lost on me. What was magical was that i found narnia completly seperatly from that; my family, or my priest, or the sisters who were my teachers, none of them ever told me about the books. None told me about them. i found them after school on TV. It was a BBC series about them and every day after school i was transported to land of talking animals and witches and lions. i know that the animals were simply people in bad costumes but it made and makes no difference.
i love these stories,
I think magical is the word I would use. I don’t recall being influenced more by these books than by any of the thousands of others, but they are engrossing.
My first encounter with the stories was also on TV, but with the animated version of the Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe. I still remember seeing the big half-page color picture of the witch on the front of the Chicago Tribune TV Section for that week. 
Seriously creepy. I must have been around 10 or 11.
I found the books either that year or the next at my grandparents house over Christmas. I don’t remember how many days we stayed, it couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5, but I read all the books in the series, lying on their living room couch over the course of that single visit. I’m sure the only reason they had them in the house was because they were written by a religious man.
I’ve read them all again as an adult, and found that they’d lost a bit of their appeal for me. The allegory seems so much more apparent than it was when I was younger, and my feminist side dislikes some of the choices he makes with regard to women characters (evil witches & Susan in the Last Battle). But, like Audra, Aslan’s death & resurrection still make me cry, and I can’t resist the talking animals & mythological beings.
I’m really liking the new movie adaptations, and especially thought James MacAvoy as Tumnus was inspired casting, despite having always envisioned him as a much older (or older-looking) faun.