The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

by C.S. Lewis

Even The Chronicles of Narnia for children contain nearly one hundred echoes or allusions to myth, history, or literature.

For Lewis, reading was both a high calling and an endless source of satisfaction. In fact, his sense of vocation and avocation were virtually indistinguishable whenever he picked up a book—and often when he wrote one.

This fellowship is not one of merely sharing a hobby but of people whose worlds have been enlarged and deepened by books.

Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.

I AM ALMOST INCLINED TO SET IT UP AS A CANON THAT a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty—except, of course, books of information.

To define the world of The Hobbit is, of course, impossible, because it is new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone. . . .

As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves.

You can eat the local food and drink the local wines, you can share the foreign life, you can begin to see the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourist, but to its inhabitants. You can come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before. So with the old literature. You can go beyond the first impression that a poem makes on your modern sensibility. By study of things outside the poem, by comparing it with other poems, by steeping yourself in the vanished period, you can then re-enter the poem with eyes more like those of the natives; now perhaps seeing that the associations you gave to the old words were false, that the real implications were different than you supposed, that what you thought strange was then ordinary and that what seemed to you ordinary was then strange. . . .

Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.

It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never ‘skip’. All sensible people skip freely when they come to a chapter which they find is going to be no use to them.

I don’t believe anything will keep the right reader & the right book apart. But our literary loves are as diverse as our human! You couldn’t make me like Henry James or dislike Jane Austen whatever you did.

I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice on and off all my life and it doesn’t wear out a bit.

It is the immemorial privilege of letter-writers to commit to paper things they would not say: to write in a more grandiose manner than that in which they speak: and to enlarge upon feelings which would be passed by unnoticed in conversation.