Friday, 9 August 2013

My favourite CS Lewis re-reads

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Of the books published in Lewis's lifetime these would be:

The Screwtape Letters/ Screwtape Proposes a Toast
The Great Divorce
Mere Christianity
The Abolition of Man 
Surprised by Joy
The Discarded Image

But I equally return often to re-read the numerous collections of essays on broadly Christian topics that were posthumously edited by Walter Hooper, and the three volume Collected Letters.

I don't re-read any of Lewis's fiction to anything like the extent I return to the above books - and when I do it is to focus on selected 'essay-like' passages of That Hideous Strength; however, I often re-listen to Brian Sibley's marvelous BBC radio dramatization of the Narnia Chronicles.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Screwtape Letters" is pretty good. I haven't read any of the others recently enough to comment on them. I'm currently looking into connections between Lewis' Space Trilogy and the NCP, though, so that's probably going to be my next Lewis re-read.

Tucker said...

and when I do it is to focus on selected 'essay-like' passages of That Hideous Strength

It's funny - now that life is so busy for me, with both Tolkien and Lewis I often re-read my favourite passages rather than the whole book. I notice there's no Narnia in your list, but some of my favourite parts to re-read are from Narnia (Puddleglum's famous speech in the Underworld, for example).