“If I want to read C. S. Lewis, where should I start?”
That’s a question I get periodically because people know I’m an avid reader and a Lewis fan. It’s also a difficult one, because Lewis wrote many books, essays, and even poems. His prose spans several genres, from children’s fiction to academic analysis of English literature, with multiple stops in between. Where someone should start depends a great deal on what she’s interested in and who she is.
I once made the mistake of recommending The Screwtape Letters to a new convert. The letters of a senior devil to his trainee were a bit too intense for someone just figuring out the basics of Christianity. However, if someone doesn’t like what he’s reading by Lewis, he should put that book down and try another.
The good news, as Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield once wrote, is that “somehow what [Lewis] thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.” That’s not entirely true, but it’s nearly so. Thus, if Narnia is a little too childish for someone, Lewis’s science fiction trilogy might be just right. For the more literary-minded, Till We Have Faces might be the novel that inspires deeper interest.
Yet there are better and worse places to gain a foothold in Lewis’s work. His significant scholarly works, like The Discarded Image or his volume in the Oxford History of English Literature series, are excellent. However, they’re not the place for a casual reader to begin. The Problem of Pain is helpful and philosophically sharp, but it’s less accessible than some of his later apologetic works.
My goal is to offer a pathway into Lewis for those who aren’t already fans, so they can experience the joy of meeting him for the first time.
Meanwhile, for Lewis aficionados, this article will most likely spark a vigorous debate about why I chose one book over another. Nevertheless, the debate over what’s best is part of the delight of appreciating Lewis.
Fiction
I first met Lewis through The Chronicles of Narnia. I think that’s an ideal place to start, no matter the reader’s age. Older readers may feel shy about reading books written for children, but as Lewis wrote in an essay in The New York Times, “I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.”
The seven books of the Narniad still stir my heart as an adult. In fact, the more I read of Lewis, of theology, and of Scripture, the more deeply I appreciate The Chronicles of Narnia. The stories get richer as I get older. According to Lewis, “A book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.”
There’s a great deal of debate about which of the stories should be read first. The only logical answer is to begin with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which reflects the order in which the books were published.
Many recent sets put The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth book of the series, in the first place because it offers a backstory for Narnia’s creation and discovery. The reordering is based on a letter Lewis wrote to a child, so he clearly didn’t think it was heresy to begin in the wrong place. However, I think it’s best to first meet Aslan by going through the wardrobe with the Pevensie children.
Apologetics
Mere Christianity is perhaps Lewis’s most famous book. It’s an argument for belief in Christianity that builds on a series of radio addresses Lewis gave on the BBC during WWII. His case for the rationality of both Christian doctrine and Christian ethics offers the clarity of a former atheist speaking with urgency to a population at war.
Lewis’s brilliance as a writer shines through in Mere Christianity. He makes a rigorous, rhetorical argument enthralling. It’s the sort of book that both delights and instructs. It can encourage the world-weary believer even as it helps skeptics overcome their objections to Christianity.
Biography
Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, offers a window into his intellectual and spiritual journey. Most importantly, it explains how someone who had been a convinced atheist ended up being a vocal defender of Christianity. Though Lewis doesn’t air all his dirty laundry, he’s not the hero of the story—God is. The result is a beautifully written narrative that has broken down barriers to the gospel for many skeptics. It has also helped many within the church understand their need for conversion.
The film adaptation of Lewis’s biography, The Most Reluctant Convert, is exceptionally well done. Actor Max McLean is the closest we’ll come to seeing Lewis in the flesh. And Harry Lee Poe’s multivolume biography of Lewis amplifies the background of Lewis’s story for those who want to go well beyond the narrative of Surprised by Joy to figure out what made him tick.
Essays
In addition to his numerous books, Lewis wrote many shorter articles and essays. My favorite of Lewis’s short-form pieces is the sermon “The Weight of Glory,” which is frequently published in the book by that title.
Anyone who has read much evangelical writing will have encountered several of his key illustrations, which are written into that text. We are “like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.” And further, we learn that “there are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Tragically, these vivid quotes are becoming clichés due to overuse.
It’s at this point that we come to grips with an annoying feature of reading Lewis. His works won’t be published as a single collected set until the copyrights expire because the rights to his books are owned by several different publishers. Additionally, publishers continue to repackage Lewis’s shorter works in different ways, which makes finding everything he wrote daunting.
At the beginning of this century, Harper Collins published one volume with nearly all his shorter writings: C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. The least expensive version of this treasure is the audiobook. Used print copies are available, but they’re expensive (I don’t let mine out of my office).
However, God in the Dock is the best readily available sampler of Lewis’s shorter writing. It includes several of his key apologetic arguments in essays like “Evil and God,” “Miracles,” and “Myth Became Fact.” This anthology also offers Lewis’s introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, “On the Reading of Old Books.” And only two chapters later, readers encounter his famous argument for the value of experiencing God in “Meditation in a Toolshed.”
Wherever someone starts in reading Lewis, the important thing is to begin. A lifetime of delight awaits in exploring new books and rereading old ones. That delight can only be surpassed by the pleasure of sharing the experience of reading Lewis with friends and family.
