C. S. Lewis and the Reading Life

The hobby of reading has a curious feature. All hobbies have books written to explain how to more fully enjoy the hobby. But reading is the only hobby where the act of reading about the hobby is the same as the hobby itself. Hence books about reading are quite common. Indeed, as you read more and more, it is hard to avoid reading books by enthusiasts for your hobby.

C.S. Lewis has become an Institution. In many Christian circles, he is the theologian for people who don’t really want to read theology. He is a genial writer, making deeply substantive points in a winsome manner. You can read Lewis quickly for the joy of his prose and the flashes of insight littering the book. You can read Lewis slowly, taking apart his arguments in detail and trying to fill in the gaps. He has fiction and non-fiction, both dense and light, but always written in a prose which just carries the reader along. People find Lewis in all sorts of ways—through Narnia or science fiction or Screwtape or grief or The Abolition of Man. Once you find him, you notice you find him everywhere.

Couple the last two paragraphs together and you have an obvious book, indeed one it is a wonder is only being published now. As I mentioned in a recent newsletter, C. S. Lewis’ The Reading Life is a collection of excerpts about reading which are scattered among Lewis’ voluminous output. If you like Lewis and if you enjoy reading, you have already clicked the link above to buy the book. It is an irresistible title.

But, is the book any good? (Is it heretical to even ask if a book of Lewis’ writings is good? In some circles, yes.) It is, as you might expect if you are not in the Church of Lewis, a mixed bag. There are some really great essays in here and some fun short excerpts. But there is not enough to fill a whole book. It isn’t hard to see why. Lewis actually has a whole book on reading which explains his ideas at length. An Experiment in Criticism is rather good; I’ve used it in reading groups as a way to kick off the discussions. But, given that Lewis published his fully developed thoughts on reading in a book of their own, is there enough left over in the rest of Lewis’ corpus for a full anthology?

The present anthology kicks off with a couple of excerpts from An Experiment in Criticism, which would be hard to avoid. Then we move to a bunch of hits and pieces from elsewhere, some gems, some obvious filler. Lots of blank space and pages with the super large fancy italicized font of an excerpt from the excerpt you are reading. The real market for this book is when you need a gift for a friend who likes reading. The format and contents of this book scream “Present for the Reader in Your Life.” Not a bad gift, by the way.

What about the content? Lewis makes a distinction between True Readers and people who happen to read. “How to Know if You are a True Reader” is the title of the second selection. It is a four part test:

1. Loves to re-read books
2. Highly values reading as an activity (versus as a last resort)
3. Lists the reading of particular books as a life-changing experience
4. Continuously reflects and recalls what one has read

If you hit on all four, congratulations, you are a True Reader (but you already knew that). If not, well, it’s not too late to join our cult.

And yes, the Cult of Readers is a real thing. As Lewis notes:

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated.

It is often difficult to explain the pleasure of reading to those not as enamored with it. For many, maybe even most, people, reading is a chore. It is something you do to learn something. This is even true of reading fiction; many people read fiction as if they are accomplishing the chore of learning the plot. I suspect this is why many book clubs fail; if reading is a chore and you are reading a book purely for the task of going to your book club, there is something lacking in the experience. Sure, getting together with your friends is fun, but if reading the book was a chore for everyone involved, it is no wonder the conversation feels stilted.

For Lewis’ True Reader, the act of reading is not a chore you do in order to accomplish another end. One reads because in doing so, one is catapulted into a pleasure that is literally unattainable in any other way. Perhaps it is best explained by noting that the way to attain the pleasure of reading is to realize that reading is not a serious hobby. It is a light-hearted and fun hobby.

For a great deal (not all) of our literature was made to be read lightly, for entertainment. If we do not read it, in a sense, ‘for fun’ and with our feet on the fender, we are not using it as it was meant to be used, and all our criticism of it will be pure illusion. For you cannot judge any artifact except by using it as it was intended. It is no good judging a butter-knife by seeing whether it will saw logs. Much bad criticism, indeed, results from the efforts of critics to get a work-time result out of something that never aimed at producing more than pleasure.

This is not just true of schlocky genre fiction, by the way. Dickens also should be read with your feet on the fender. So should Plato. For those for whom reading is a hobby, the whole point of reading Thucydides or Chekhov is simply that it is fun to go along for the ride. Imagine starting Ivanhoe or Middlemarch in exactly the same relaxed mode you had when you picked up Good Omens or Harry Potter. If you can do that, you are a True Reader.

Books are not death marches. “It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never ‘skip.’ All sensible people skip freely then they come to a chapter which they find is going to be no use to them.” I acutely suffer from this failing, by the way. I have pushed my way through far too many books I knew I should have abandoned. I blame Moby Dick. I forced myself through an endless amount of whaling trivia, wondering why I was reading all this, only to find that it all came to a magnificent end in which all that lore was suddenly necessary to appreciate the epic clash at the end of the book. Ever since then, I have pushed through many a book, thinking, “Maybe this is like Moby Dick.” Decades later, I have no other examples of when not skipping was worth it.

If you want to cultivate the hobby of reading, how do you do it? It’s remarkably simple. Find a book you really want to read, put up your feet, and start reading. The trick is not to wonder if you have picked the right book. If you enjoy it, it is the right book.

After a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,
The child whose love is here, at least death reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

When you forget yourself in a book, you know the feeling. Then start another book and forget yourself again. When you do this, you’ll notice something else wonderful; there are other bookish people around you. “When one has read a book, I think there is nothing so nice as discussing it with some one else—even though it sometimes produces rather fierce arguments.”

Why do I have a blog? Why do I send out a newsletter? There is nothing so nice as discussing books with someone else.