Surprised by Joy

I can’t believe I’d never read this before! I love C.S. Lewis, but I’d purposely avoided this one because his wife was Joy and she died of cancer, and I thought this was that story. But no: it’s his autobiography, sort of, but more the story of how he became a believer. The beginning is very autobiographical, describing the boarding school he went to, and his life in his nuclear family both before and after his mother died. But what really struck me about this portion of the story was how much detail he went into not about the actual details of his external life, but about his internal life of ideas. I can so identify with that… I think anyone “bookish” can. A lot of the time, what happens in my head is more interesting than what’s actually happening in my life. In Lewis’s case, this was a critical part of his ultimate conversion: the idea that “joy” was something to be found in ideas, in philosophy, and in ultimately finding the source of all of the concepts he’d always loved.

My rating: *****

Language: none

Sexual content: none

Violence: none

Political content: none

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