Articles Usage – How to Use ‘The’ with Conjunctions

You can include it or omit it. Quite often, the article is omitted for the sake of brevity and conciseness.

Exceptions might include where a lot of adjectives are used in the list, or when it's a list of thinly-related items. In such cases, the sentence can read very awkwardly when the subsequent articles are omitted. For example:

When I went shopping, I wanted to buy a cool leather jacket, a gold chain necklace, or a new case for my iPhone – but I didn't have enough money for any of them.

My favorite sights at the parade were the ballet troupe's float, the man on the tall stilts, and the trick motorcycles.

Of those two, you could get away with leaving them out of the first sentence – it's simply a matter of style and taste, not grammar:

When I went shopping, I wanted to buy a cool leather jacket, gold chain necklace, or new case for my iPhone – but I didn't have enough money for any of them.

In your example, though, I'd leave the second "the" out:

The first and second chapters were my favorite part of the book.