We just completed our 7th book this year!! My friend and I read the same book and then FaceTime once per week and chat about what we read and learned and how it impacted us. In December, we decided to read one C.S. Lewis book each month and stick to it! I did a search on the internet of his books and randomly picked some of the more well-known. And it has been an adventure, to say the least!!

If I had done more planning, I might have put them in a different order, or even picked different books. But it almost feels like more of a challenge to do it this way. To not try to control the direction or what is learned!

This book reads like an autobiography, because that is basically what it is! It gives his background. It explains how he was shaped emotionally and educationally. This book gives perspective into the boy Clive that became the man C.S. Lewis. His mom died of cancer, his dad was either absent or sharing his opinion loudly, his brother was away at boarding school, and there is a lot in this book that makes me sad for him.

This is definitely a book that needs to be read more than once! However, I will share some of what stood out to me the most. The working of the Holy Spirit in his life to go from atheist to theist to Christian is powerful to read.

I want to expound and explain, and yet I feel quiet. That my words cannot explain it any more than he did, and that perhaps you need to read it for yourself and let the Holy Spirit prompt you to what you need in your life at this moment!

pg 19 – “I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed on characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fast that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.”

pg 86 – “Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”

pg 93 – “…but that Divine punishments are also mercies, and particular good is worked out of particular evil, and the penal blindness made sanative.”

pg 131 – “Spiritually speak, the deadly thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominated by the social struggle; to get on, to arrive, or, having reach the top, to remain there, was the absorbing preoccupation. It is often, of course, the preoccupation of adult life as well; but I have not yet seen any adult society in which the surrender to this impulse was so total.”

pg 141 – “I maintained that God did not exist. I was also angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.”

pg 198 – “As Johnson points out, where courage is not, no other virtue can survive except by accident. Cowardice drove me into hypocrisy and hypocrisy into blasphemy.”

pg 209 – “Joy is not a substitute for ses; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.”

pg 280 – “The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”