C. S. Lewis

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I am wondering what other people here think of C. S. Lewis, and particularly of his books.

I think the best books of his I read were The Magician's Nephew and Out Of The Silent Planet. He has an enjoyable writing style and sense of humor I think. What are some thoughts?

I didn't like Mere Christianity. If you think that the moral argument is weak, then the entire book is a waste of time for you.

I read the whole Narnia series when I was younger, and have been meaning to get around to some of his non-fiction.

I like almost everything he's written. The apologetics are great for Christians and anyone sufficiently interested in a Christian viewpoint. The Narnia stuff is great, and I love Out of the Silent Planet. The rest of the space trilogy isn't as good, although I liked Perelandra pretty well.

Despite mostly loving everything he's written, though, there is one book of his that I absolutely despise. The Pilgrim's Regress. It sucks even more than Pilgrim's Progress, which it's based on. Although it might work for you if you like Blatantly Obvious Allegories.

I only have read The lion, the witch and the wardrobe.

I very much enjoyed the Narnia series, it was the first fantasy series I was allowed to read. I've yet to read his other works, fiction or not.

I probably ought to read Mere Christianity, but it's just not on my list.

If you love the moral argument, you might enjoy it as that is his major approach. If you are indifferent to, or dislike the moral argument the book will get on your nerves. Beyond that, the book is for a general, layman audience, so it wouldn't be as good as many other books you could read if you think you have a solid understanding of Christian doctrine/bible theology/whatever the else you want to call it.

In "The Silver Chair"; Puddleglum stamping out the sweet-smelling hypnotic smell of the witch's incense in the fire with his bare feet, and saying, that even if this, ( the underground world ), was all there was, ( no Narnia, as she was arguing ), Narnia still knocked spots off her reality.

Somebody standing in a garden in the third of the sci-fi trilogy, suddenly aware of god, as an immense living glowing presence.

In "The Last Battle"; after passing through the wooden hut into the second Narnia, how it gets bigger and vaster and more beautiful the further in that they go.

Eustace in "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" desperately peeling off layer after layer of dragon skin/flesh, and each time finding another layer, until he asks Aslan to help him.

Brilliant descriptions of spiritual experience, ( and there are many others in his fiction ), however simplistic/literal/limited some of his concepts and symbols are, they come from real personal experience, with truth in them, for anyone with a similar metabolism anyway!

I think it is very interesting how his friendship with Tolkien developed over the years. The writings by each of them form a fascinating dialogue of different, aswell as similar, spiritual languages/experiences.

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I love C.S. Lewis's books especially his collection tales of Narnia.

I don't really care if he was a christian, spiritual, atheist, or whatever, I think he had some interesting ideals in his books. Don't have time right now to go into details right now cuz I have to leave. But will get back to it.

What's ironic is many of his books come off more pagan-ish than religion-ish.

He is nonsensical, but I liked his books.

I found his pseudo-science fiction/fantasy quite amusing but not to be taken seriously. On a level with Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series.

The Magician's Nephew was my favourite.
I still have and hold all the chronicles in a very high regard amonst my book collection.

C. S. Lewis topic

His Narnia books are far better than Rowling's Harry Potter. She is too wordy for my taste, though the films were good.

He died the same day as JFK was assassinated.

I really hated the books, they seemed to childish. I loved the plot line but not the way it was written.

(And the day before the first Doctor Who episode aired. I always wonder, given the stable in The Last Battle, of which Lucy notes that its inside is bigger than its outside, what he'd have made of the Tardis.)

I'm in two minds. I love his fiction, and I think he was a profoundly gifted imaginative writer. My absolute favorite part of anything he did is the Great Song near the end of Perelandra. Ouinon, I also love the Puddleglum episode you describe - in fact, I think he's at his closest to the Divine when he's most strongly affirming the power of the imagination.

I'm also rather fond of an eerie short story of his called 'The Shoddy Lands' in which the narrator unexpectedly finds himself within a young woman's psyche, seeing the world through her eyes. (It's been criticized for showing a kind of sexual disgust of women, but I think what it's really showing is a disgust of a certain superficial type of person. People have often complained about his attitude to women, as they have about Tolkien's; I think it's down to that very male university world that they both moved in.)

I've read a number of his apologetics, and I find him both fascinating and frustrating in places. He was brilliant at arguing his point, but his own conversion, to go by his account, obviously came from a place deeper than the intellect, and I find sometimes he appears to be trying to argue logically for things which can only ever be directly experienced.