2024: A Year with C.S. Lewis

The Reading Challenge

One feature of GoodReads is that it allows you to set up a yearly reading challenge. It looks like “My goal is to read X number of books this year,” then it allows you to check in as you check books off your list all while keeping track.

For 2024, I added an additional layer to my goal. It would be a Year with C.S. Lewis, with the goal being the majority of books I read would be by, about, or influential to C.S. Lewis.

If you’d like to see my reading challenge on Good reads for yourself, which includes my reviews and after thoughts for each book, you can tap here. I did read beyond the Lewis focus, so if you do look at that list the only books I included in this challenge meet the parameters above. Simply the list is just below.

Note: I talk about a lot of books on this post and there are several links. None of these are affiliate links. They’re merely there to provide convenience if you want to investigate any title further.

The Books

The following list is the books that fell into the parameters of the Year with C.S. Lewis Reading Challenge and their format.

1. Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis (physical)

2. Planet Narnia, Michael Ward (audio)

3. God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis (ebook)

4. Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis (physical)

5. The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis (audio)

6. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis (audio)

7. The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis (audio)

8. Prince Caspian, C.S. Lewis (audio)

9. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis (audio)

10. The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis (audio)

11. The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis (physical)

12. The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis (audio)

13. The Dark Tower & Other Stories, C.S. Lewis (audio)

14. The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis (physical)

15. A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis (audio)

16. Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen (physical)

17. On Stories, C.S. Lewis (physical)

18. Poems, C.S. Lewis (physical)

19. After Humanity, Michael Ward (physical)

20. The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis (physical)

21. The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis (audio)

22. Deeper Heaven, Christian’s Hale (audio)

23. Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis (audio)

24. Perelandra, C.S. Lewis (audio)

25. Live Like A Narnian, Joe Rigney (physical)

26. That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis (audio)

27. The Screwtape Letters (audio)

28. The Great Divorce (audio)

29. Letters to Malcolm, C.S. Lewis (physical)

30. Beyond the Shadowlands: C.S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell, Wayne Martindale (physical)

31. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis (family reading)

32. Miracles, C.S. Lewis (audio)

33. A Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis (physical)

34. Phantastes, by George MacDonald (physical+audio)

35. The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis (ebook)

36. The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton (audio)

37. Paradise Lost, John Milton (audio)

38. The World’s Last Night, C.S. Lewis (physical)

39. Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis (audio)

There are a few other volumes I wanted to read but wasn’t able to fit them in by the end of the year. If you’re interested, those include:

1. Surprised by Laughter, Terry Lindvall

2. Lilith, George MacDonald

3. The Divine Comedy, Dante

4. Medieval Literature of the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), C.S. Lewis

5. The Poems of John Donne

6. The Wind and the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

7. Present Concerns, C.S. Lewis

8. Of Other Worlds, C.S. Lewis

9. Bandersnatch, by Diana Pavlac Glyer

10. A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and A Great War by Joseph Leconte

I did not have Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis on my radar because I read it at the end of 2022 and did not feel the need to return to it. I did, however, watch the excellent movie based upon it, The Most Reluctant Convert. If you are unfamiliar with Lewis, that is an excellent place to whet your palate.

The Journey

What was the point in all of this?

Up until 2020, I had not read much Lewis beyond The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity. The Space Trilogy (from here on more accurately referred to as The Ransom Trilogy) sat on my bookshelf unread for 20 years. Yes, you read that right. I bought it as a late teenager when I was working for Family Christian Stores because the first book, Out of the Silent Planet, caught my eye when it had the same title as my favorite song off of Iron Maiden’s then new album, Brave New World. Very spiritual, but this is how things really happen. The trilogy was on its way to the purge pile on the basis of, “I haven’t read this in 20 years. The print is small and I’m not going to read it.” I had the idea to check out the audiobooks from the library just to get a glimpse of what I was about to do. The first reading was disorienting but I immediately started the trilogy over again as soon as I was finished. It was 2020 and the final book in the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, was resonating with the dystopian zeitgeist of 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World, but it was so much more.

Following that, I was given The Weight of Glory as a birthday present in 2021. I returned to it again this year and it remains my favorite book by Lewis. His wonder and hope and wisdom and counsel in The Weight of Glory resonate with me more than anything else he wrote. If I could only have five books on a deserted island, The Weight of Glory would be one of them. I love this book. Every essay is excellent but three that stand out are The Weight of Glory (the best), Transposition, and The Inner Ring.

The challenge started with what’s heralded as Lewis’ most well written book, Till We Have Faces, his retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche. This is a medieval setting that is heavy with myth but not quite fantasy. Beyond being “the most reluctant convert in all England,” Lewis was a scholar of sixteenth century literature. This would come into play as the year went on.

God in the Dock was the first Kindle book in the challenge. It surprised me how many of the arguments and essays I had some familiarity with already. The collection of essays is based around the idea that instead of God being the Judge and us being on the stand (dock), in hubris we reverse the order by making ourselves the judge then expect God to answer to us. Two essays stand out, which I’ll link to the audio here. On the Reading of Old Books is especially timely considering the collapse in evangelical leadership we’ve seen between 2020 and 2024. This quote sums up its value: A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood with out the knowledge of a good many other modern books. Meditation in a Tool Shed has the phenomenal analogy about look at or along a beam of light. This struck me deeply and helped me with how I view the world around me with all the wonderful elements it contains. I recommend God in the Dock above Mere Christianity, but maybe not before Mere Christianity, if that makes sense. I admit it may not be as accessible as his arguments can be more abstract than straightforward.

Speaking of Mere Christianity, my son and I engaged in several rite of passage activities in 2024, one of which was a reading challenge. This only included 4 books, but Mere Christianity was the first. One of the best benefits of this book is that Lewis doesn’t enter into many of the side rooms that make for doctrinal or denominational distinctives among Christianity; rather, he stays in the main hall. If you have not read any of C.S. Lewis’ non-fiction, Mere Christianity is an excellent and common place to start. I particularly like the chapter on temperance as I think that provides some helpful categories for thinking about the way we interact with certain things as opposed to broad brush strokes. Spirit of the law over letter of the law and whatnot.

No C.S. Lewis reading challenge would be complete without The Chronicles of Narnia (read in publication order if it’s your first time, I don’t care how they’re ordering them now. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is where you should start, even if The Magician’s Nephew chronologically comes first). It’s worth noting here that Narnia is not an allegory for the Christian Faith, but rather a supposition. “What would happen if this truth were to happen in the fantasy world of Narnia?” The Narniad is where this reading challenge began to blow my mind. I preceded the Chronicles with Planet Narnia by Michael Ward. There has been speculation of what ties these seven books together. Where does The Horse and His Boy fit with The Silver Chair and The Last Battle? Get ready for this. Ward takes the entire book to explain his thesis that each of the seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia correspond with one of the heavenly bodies in the medieval view of the heavens and cosmos. Later one of the Narniad is the children’s story. Later two is the supposition. Layer three, the most obscured, is the imagery of the seven heavens: Jove, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury, Luna, and Saturn. This is where I first began to understand Lewis on a deeper level and it would further develop and crystallize throughout the year. There is much overlap with the Ransom trilogy in Ward’s analysis, which will come up soon. Ward did write a more streamlined edition called The Narnia Code if you’d like to dip your toe in this exploration without going into the full scholarly work, Planet Narnia.

The Dark Tower & Other Stories is an interesting volume because The Dark Tower is an unfinished story of Elwin Ransom, who shows up later. I really wish I could know what came of the chronoscope. Anyone wanting to read the complete fiction of C.S. Lewis would be at a loss to skip this one, even with its unfinished tale.

I almost considered How to Read a Book by Andrew Naselli for this list because of C.S. Lewis’s heavy influence on him, but I didn’t after all. This is downstream of Lewis and not really about him; nevertheless, one of my takeaways from this book is helpful to understand how some of the books that did get included in the challenge went for me. The most memorable section was his analysis of three different levels of reading: surveying, macro-reading, and micro-reading. Surveying really is just that. Macro-reading is like a surface reading where you get the basics but little of the depths. Most audiobooks fall under this as it’s difficult to slow down and meditate on a section. Micro-reading is deep study. These are helpful categories as all books are not read in the same way.

This was the first time I had read The Four Loves and I found it remarkable. Basically, we only have one word for love in the English language and it does not adequately convey the meaning of affection, friendship, Eros, and charity. As I said in my review, in my Christian walk I have heard people refer to this with a pish-posh and wave of the hand, but that’s too dismissive for a culture that has forgotten what the meaning of love is. The Four Loves became my first new “I’m going to reread this several times in my life” book of the challenge.

The short book A Grief Observed is short but intimate. Lewis shares journal entries from his life after his wife, Joy, died of cancer. He does not write it as a guide to walking through grief. It’s his grief. His grief is unique. Lewis doesn’t offer universal application here, just a window into a grief that he’s experiencing. If you want to grow in your practice gratitude, you may find insight here.

Somewhere I picked up Lewis’ affection for Jane Austen and that’s when I decided to modify the reading challenge to include books that were important or influential to him. I added in my wife’s most favored story, Pride and Prejudice, which I can report has excellent characters and razor sharp wit. The audience is undeniably female but to say it is valuable to women only would be a mistake. Obviously, C.S. Lewis loved it. Don’t be too quick to dismiss it.

On Stories is a collection of essays where Lewis focused on stories of others. He writes on George Orwell, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jane Austen, and more. The wonderful essay On Three Ways of Writing For Children is in this book. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a link to the audio to share here. There is another collection called Of Other Worlds I did not get to, which has some crossover on included essays.

I began Lewis’ collection of Poems and it revealed clearly I do not have a mind for poetry. I am not giving up, though, and would like to continue by reading The Poems of John Donne, as Lewis references in his writing about medieval literature. The one standout poem for me was As The Ruin Falls, which contains the heavy line, “For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains you give me are more precious than all other gains.” Apparently it stood out to Phil Keaggy, as well.

As a gift this year, I was given another of Michael Ward’s books, After Humanity, and the accompanying edition of Lewis’ The Abolition of Man. After Humanity offers insight and line by line analysis of people, places, events and ideas Lewis refers to indirectly in Abolition. I read these two books in tandem, bouncing back and forth between the two to stay in pace with the references. After Humanity is insightful but not necessary to read Abolition. Lewis deals with moral relativity and objective truth and meaning. Further, he outlines the logical end when we individually and societally abandon such meaning. It is in The Abolition of Man that we find one of C.S. Lewis’ most relevant quotes on men without chests: And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. It may be one of the more difficult books read, even if it is one of his shortest, but I do believe The Abolition of Man to be the most important of Lewis’ writings. It’s one of his books I say should be recommended reading. After all, to quote it again, a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

To help us understand what he was talking about in The Abolition of Man, Lewis takes the abstract thoughts in Abolition and works them out in the fictional setting of That Hideous Strength. This is why I read these books in the order I did, as the leading up to the glorious masterpiece of the Ransom trilogy, which is better but more poorly known as the Space trilogy. To gain more insights out of the trilogy, I listened to Deeper Heaven by Christiana Hale as an accompaniment, similar to how I read After Humanity, although Deeper Heaven accompanied book by book instead of line by line. In much of the same way Michael Ward did with Planet Narnia (which offers its own insights to the Ransom trilogy), Deeper Heaven sheds light on major themes and what’s going on in these books. It’s likely that Elwin (Anglo-Saxon for “elf friend”) Ransom is modeled after Lewis’ fellow Inkling, J.R.R. Tolkien. I mean, he is a philologist.

Why not the Space trilogy? Lewis makes a case across his writing that space is a poor word for what is above us; rather, it should be referred to as the heavens. Note that these stories are much more mature than what one might expect if their only exposure to Lewis’ novels is the Chronicles of Narnia. I wouldn’t recommend them as nightly reading. Out of the Silent Planet introduces us to Elwin Ransom, who finds himself on a journey through space against his will. The story continues in the second book, Perelandra, where we meet the Green Lady and the Un-Man (astute readers may recall this reference to an earlier Fightin’ Poseidon post). The trilogy culminates with the third book, That Hideous Strength, that has a shift in focus to the excellent characters and marital drama of Mark and Jane Studdock. We also meet one of my favorite characters, Mr. Bultitude, and one of the most villainous organizations in all of literature, the N.I.C.E. (National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments). To say much more is to give away the story, but I will tease this out a little bit with a post from X’s resident Lewis and Tolkien expert, Andrew Snyder.

In the middle of the Ransom trilogy, my son and I started reading Live Like a Narnian: Christian Discipleship in Lewis’ Chronicles by Joe Rigney as part of the rite of passage activities we had planned this year. This is an excellent study of character qualities embodied in the Chronicles of Narnia. Of course it would be easier, perhaps less abstract, to just talk about living like a Christian but quite frankly many of us are not quite as good at that as we think we are. To live as a Narnian is to live as a Christian, if we learned anything from the books, and to say otherwise is pure moonshine. Narnia sneak past the sleeping dragon of our own religiosity and shows us what it means to walk in the Way.

Of course, I read The Screwtape Letters, which is probably my most read book by C.S. Lewis. I’ve been reading and rereading it for years. If you’re unfamiliar, the letters are correspondence from an elder demon to a younger demon. How these letters fell into anyone’s hands is up for question. It’s diabolical. I have not read the annotated edition, but I’d like to. Most of these letters are only 3 pages long so Screwtape is my first recommendation anytime someone asks about books for people who don’t like to read.

Bookending my venture into the heavens was The Problem of Pain and The Great Divorce. Both of these I listened to on audiobook and did not glean as much as I would have liked. They were for sure macro-reading. There are classic quotes in The Problem of Pain and it calls for a much slower reading. The Great Divorce, another fiction book, planted seeds that would bear fruit in an upcoming book on Heaven and hell. The Great Divorce is a fiction book that takes a busride from hell to heaven. Even given the choice, would we take heaven after we’ve been to hell? It’s here between these planes that we speculate the fullness of existence contrasted against the emptying out of what constitutes existence. Why is the grass that cuts his feet more solid than the man himself? If you consider Jesus’ appearance to His disciples after the resurrection, this has some wild possibilities. Before that, though, I diverged into Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer. Maybe it was the months I was reading these, I don’t know, but I know I did not find this as rich as many other readers have. It did comfort me on reading prayers as my own that others have written. Even though they are not my words, my heart resonates with them and makes them my own in the prayer. That was a gained comfort and my biggest takeaway from my first read of Letters to Malcolm. All three of these books would be good candidates to return to as a micro-read.

So much started to come together when I read Beyond the Shadowlands: C.S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell by Wayne Martindale. What this book does is pull from several other books that Lewis has written to get a more comprehensive idea on what he thought about these two destinations. The Great Divorce is especially insightful, but there’s also additional mining from Ransom, Narnia, Screwtape, and Till We Have Faces.

I started a family reading of the Chronicles of Narnia, in publication order, of course. We finished The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and then got a start on Prince Caspian but didn’t finish it before the year ended. I think Prince Caspian is my least favorite of all seven books, but that doesn’t mean I dislike it.

I’m not sure what I expected with Miracles. On audio, it was another macro-read. When it released in 2015, I had read Eric Metaxas’ book also called Miracles. Metaxas’ book was supposed to be the same concept but updated for the current day and it’s what turned towards Lewis’ book, even though it would be an almost 10 years later that I read it. I found Lewis hard going here and his arguments higher than I anticipated. It reads more like his contribution to G.K. Chesterton’s work, The Everlasting Man, which according to Lewis was the book that baptized his intellect. I think these two books would go well hand in hand. Chesterton has an iron wit and Lewis appreciated his humor immensely.

Before Chesterton got to his intellect, George MacDonald baptized Lewis’ imagination with Phantastes. This was a unique book in the challenge because 1) this was one of the most influential books in Lewis’ life, as you’ll read about in his several accounts of it and 2) I read this one like one of those read-a-long books I had when I was a kid. I listened to the audiobook while I had the hardcover open in front of me. If you’re looking for Lewis while reading Phantastes, I doubt you will find him. You’ll probably wonder, “What the heck did Lewis see in this book?” Especially if you’re only familiar with his Christian apologetics. However, if you read this book, then read Lewis, you will undoubtedly see Phantastes in Lewis’ writing. Unintentionally, my family and I listened to an episode of Haunted Cosmos (our favorite to listen to all together as a family) on The Fair Folk while on a fall getaway. In it, the hosts reference The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis and the categories that the medieval mind had for fairies. I bought that on Kindle and it blew my mind. The Discarded Image, the last book Lewis wrote, will likely spin the heads of readers only familiar with Lewis’ most popular works. It’s from here I believe Michael Ward first discovered the idea of the Narniad corresponding with the medieval concept of the cosmos. I wouldn’t include this in the reading challenge, but all of this is building on my prior readings of the late Michael Heiser’s work: The Unseen Realm, Reversing Hermon, Angels and Demons. This intersection of Phantastes, The Discarded Image, and Haunted Cosmos is where my own mind began to spin on Lewis’ work. Everything began to have a common thread made of the gospel, the supernatural, and the medieval mind weaving it together.

A Preface to Paradise Lost was difficult to read. Mainly I think it’s because this was my first foray into Lewis’ work as a scholar on a specific piece of literature. I thought it was help me prior to reading Paradise Lost, but I got halfway through and felt more lost than last year’s Easter eggs. I took a break with an easy non-Lewis read then came back to Paradise Lost on audiobook. This was the hardest book I’ve ever tried to read as I had such a hard time maintaining the context of the narrative during each book/chapter. If I’m going to get anything out of this, I’m going to need some serious hand holding with a slow focused crawl through it.

The World’s Last Night was solidly good. I had never read Screwtape Proposes a Toast, even though my paperback edition of The Screwtape Letters contained it. This is another prescient work from Lewis. Overall, this is the work that challenged me to be more present. I’m reminded of a line from The Screwtape Letters where the elder tempter said to the younger, “Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.“ Even though the subject matter is eschatology, I was confronted with the question of how I would live my life if today was the world’s last night? I’m a work in progress, for sure, but this is a good goal to aim for.

Finally, I capped off the year by returning to Till We Have Faces on audiobook. I enjoyed it much more as a physical read but the sisters Orual, Redival, and Istra are just as good as any of Jane Austen’s characters. Such a lovely book. I’m thinking of making it a beginning of the year/end of the year tradition for me to read Till We Have Faces. It’s a different type of fiction than Narnia or anything else, but after The Discarded Image, I can see the depths of Lewis in the story. It is very pleasant to read.

On typing this out and reflecting on my Year with C.S. Lewis, I enjoyed it so much I decided to carry it on into a second year to pick up some of the titles I didn’t get to, to reread some of the titles that call for a slower reading, and add in some I forgot about. How could I have not added anything by Tolkien? So, as I type this, the first book I started the year with was the audiobook for The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. I can tell you already it’s a macro-read. Trying to listen to this without maps and genealogy charts is something, but I’m still enjoying the history of the first and second ages of Middle Earth. Andy Serkis is a wonderful narrator.

I hope that in someway this post has given you a point to start your own discovery of C.S. Lewis’ works.

Here’s to a year of good reading for all of us.

~ J.P. Simons