Reading life

Review: The Reading Life

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Cover image of "The Reading Life" by .C.S. Lewis.

The Reading Life, C. S. Lewis. Harper One (ISBN: 9780062849977) 2019.

Summary: Essays and brief readings from his books, essay collections, and letters on the joys of reading.

It was a serendipitous find while looking for something else. This is not a “lost” book of C.S. Lewis but a recent compilation of writing by C, S. Lewis drawn from his various books as well as his correspondence. And all of this is on our lives as readers. What’s not to like for a C.S. Lewis fan and bibliophile, right?

Some of the material was familiar, for example his “The Case for Reading Old Books” in which he advocates we read one old book for every new one we read (or at least for every three. Or there is the biographical piece from Surprised by Joy on “Growing Up Amidst a Sea of Books.” But there are a number of pieces I either haven’t read or don’t remember (I don’t have Lewis’s eidetic memory).

The first part of the book contains his longer essays, though only one, on “The Achievements of J.R.R.Tolkien,” is longer than ten pages. “Why We Read, ” from An Experiment in Criticism, serves as a good introduction to the whole collection. Lewis makes the point that “[w]e want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.” This is followed by “How to Know if You are a True Reader.” He offers five criteria, and I qualified. I suspect many drawn to this book qualify as well, or are on their way! There are wonderful discussions about children’s literature (the best being not just for children) fairy tales (as less deceptive than “realistic’ stories), and the marvellous.

One of the most important for our day is his discussion of “How to Murder Words.” We do so through inflation, verbiage, and speaking less descriptively and more evaluatively. We are “more anxious to express approval and disapproval of things than to describe them” Yet how can we judge a thing without knowing what it is? The following essay on “Saving Words from the Eulogistic Abyss” carries on this theme. The danger in our careless and imprecise use of words is that “[m]en do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”

As rich as was the first part, the short readings in the latter part of the book were an absolute find. Excerpted mostly from letters, I’d never seen most of this. For example, Lewis offers this pithy observation in a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves: “If only one had time to read a little more: we either get shallow & broad or narrow and deep.” Like many of us, Lewis loved not only reading but also “Talking About Books.” He encourages reading for enjoyment, especially for children, denounces literary snobs, and says “all sensible people skip freely” that which is of no use to them.

Then there are the readings offering opinions of various writers. He praises Dante but excoriates Alexandre Dumas. He speaks of the utter importance of Plato and Aristotle, opines on Shakespeare and Tolstoy. And he has nothing but good to say about Jane Austen (in contrast to Henry James). He boasts: “I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice on and off all my life and it doesn’t wear out a bit.”

I’ve only offered a sampler of the riches to be found in this slim volume. It is a gift to have so many of Lewis’s thoughts on reading in one place. I’ll leave you with his concluding comment on “Good Reading”:

A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling.

Review: I’d Rather Be Reading

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I'd Rather Be Reading

I’d Rather Be Reading, Anne Bogel. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2018.

Summary: A collection of essays on the reading life with its unique joys and dilemmas, by a booklover, for booklovers.

I’d Rather Be Reading is a delightful set of essays for those of us who really love books and reading. If nothing else, it tells us that we are not alone. Anne Bogel is the host of the blog Modern Mrs Darcy (A Jane Austen reference) and the “What Should I Read Next” podcast. Not only does she write and speak on reading, she is a reader, one of our tribe. She writes, “We are readers. Books are an essential part of our lives and of our life stories. For us, reading isn’t just a hobby or a pastime; its a lifestyle.” This essay collection explores the nature of reading and the quirky aspects of our reading lives that made me wonder, “have you been to my house?”

She opens with an essay on confessing your literary sins, from those unpaid library fines to the fact that you just can’t get excited about the book everyone else absolutely loves. She describes how books sometimes find us, particularly when they come up in several different, unrelated conversations in the same week. She reminds us of the books that first hooked us on stories and the books that have made us cry. In a variation of the idea that we are all the ages we have ever been, she reflects on the different readers she has been from the child who encountered A Wrinkle in Time to the twenty-something reading spiritual memoirs to the young mother rediscovering children’s books. She writes of fulfilling a fantasy of many of us booklovers to be a bookseller, at least for a day. She talks about her “inner circle” bookshelf of books by family (or those who are like family) and friends.

There are the darker sides of our love of books–the deadly sin of being “book bossy” in our recommendations of books to others (“you really should read this”). There is the quest to organize our shelves and what to do when we run out of them. She has a whole chapter on bookworm problems and the recurring thought of having more books than time and life to read them.

Even these are handled with self-deprecatory humor. The overall tone of the book is joyful–a celebration of what books and reading mean in the lives of those who are “book people.” She delights, as have others of us, in finding a “book twin.” She talks of her discovery of the delights of the “acknowledgements” pages in books (something I discovered only later in life). She concludes with an essay on reading journals and the preference to “rather be reading.”

This book came along about the time I was reading Karen Swallow Prior’s On Reading Well (my review). Both books are celebrations of the reading life, and how our books shape who we are. Prior’s book focuses literary fiction and how our reading might help us reflect on and live into different qualities of virtue. Anne Bogel’s book is a good complement. It is lighter in tone, and helps us hopeless bibliophiles laugh at ourselves, find words for why we love books so much, and know there are many others in the tribe.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.