Surprised by Joy

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Summary: The auto-biography of Believers.
Review: "Surprised by Joy" is C.S. Lewis' auto-biographical book about the early, formational years of his life, which began with a vaguely religious upbringing, led into devout Atheism, and ended in Christ's drawing Lewis home. This book is excellent as auto-biographies (Christian or non-Christian) go as C.S. Lewis was one of the 20th Century's best story-tellers and an amazingly well-read professor at Oxford as well. Whether the reader is a Christian or not, C.S. Lewis makes this story entertaining and thought-provoking.

For those readers who have come to believe in Jesus Christ as Man's only possible salvation, this book will leave them marvelling repeatedly at how Christ works in the lives of those he calls. Any Christian reader of "Surprised by Joy" will find numerous similarities in the path C.S. Lewis' salvation took him down, and a Christian reader can't help but want to join him in praising Christ for his awesome goodness in the lives of human beings he touches.

One fascinating element in C.S. Lewis' life, which is so encouraging for Christians in a post-Christian era, is that Lewis was raised by brilliant men to be constantly curious but always logical... always seeking the truth. One of the men Christ used the most in saving C.S. Lewis was a staunch Atheist; a dry, pensive, professor who demanded a rigid adherence to logic in any belief or action. This man, the "Great Knock", as Lewis, his brother, and their father called him, was so influential in Lewis' mental development that Lewis devotes a whole chapter ("The Great Knock") to discussion of him. How fascinating that whereas many today believe a rigorous pursuit of knowledge and facts leads to agnosticism, in the life of the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th Century it led to a belief in the sovereignty of Jesus Christ.

This is a book that I would recommend to anyone, but as "a must" to any Christian. While "Mere Christianity" is C.S. Lewis' best-selling book, and arguably has initiated more paths to Christ than any other book outside the Bible, "Surprised by Joy" presents a more complete understanding of those paths and their ultimate result.

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Summary: Classic C.S. Lewis.
Review: I'm a huge C.S. Lewis fan, however like most people who reviewed this book, I did start to trail off when reading the middle chapters of this book. In the first 8-10 chapters of this book Lewis focuses on his life as a child and the pages seem to fly by.

The same thing goes for the last 4-5 chapters where we finally get the details of his coming back to Christianity. However, the few chapters in the middle of the book are filled with Lewis' definitions and opinions on a lot of different topics and though they are relevant to the mindset of Lewis' thoughts, the chapters do not follow along with the story-telling element he so well utilized in the other chapters of the book. Not that that's a bad thing, but for those reader who were expecting to read a certain type of book from beginning to end (myself included), it's kind of confusing to adjust to and is probably a major reason why some people don't recommend this book.

Now don't get me wrong, this book is very touching and is a very worth-while read. However, if you plan to read this book, you may also want to make sure you're ready to read two different types of writing in the same book.

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Summary: a must read
Review: one of the best books by my fav author of all time. well worded, insightful, instructive, inspirational - how many more 'i' words do you need? please, take my word, and read this book.

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Summary: A Masterpiece: One Man's Journey to God
Review: C.S. Lewis has written a masterpiece on the subject of one man's conversion to Christianity. Not only that, it is a must-read for any fan of Lewis, for it sheds a great deal of light on his early life and biography. It follows Lewis from childhood to his conversion to Christianity as an adult professor, tracing the influences on his philisophical and religious thinking along the way. It is in my mind a modern Augustine's "Confessions". Lewis writes, as usual, with great candor and his usual lucid, easy to follow prose that takes complex issues and makes them understandable to everyone. This style has made him one of the finest Christian authors. His 'Mere Christianity' and 'Screwtape Letters' are other examples of his books that challenge a reader's religious philosophy. Of course, Lewis is more famous in most circles for his 'Narnia' books, which are also great, but it is his philisophical and deeply personal treatment of Christianity that makes him one of the greats.

Highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to see how one man made his journey to belief and/or wants to learn more about C.S. Lewis, the man.

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Summary: Disappointing
Review: A disappointment, though not without interest. Lewis's purpose is to tell the story of his conversion from atheism to Christianity. But there is little here to challenge or even interest the open-minded atheist. It seems to me that Lewis converted largely for emotional reasons, apparently because he believed in some kind of Hegelian Absolute. The last two chapters are so vague and poetic (or perhaps poetically motivated...?) as to be very tough to read when trying to find out why he believes and what relevance his conversion might have to me. I never really got clear answers to these questions. Lewis is always readable, but this was disappointing on intellectual grounds (which is true of all his apologetics).

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Summary: A lovely and perennially absorbing book
Review: This is a great book by a great writer, telling both of CS Lewis's life, including his education and his experiences as a front-line soldier in World War I, and his discovery of "Joy" and the sense of the scared, and his final conversion from Athiesm to Christiantiy. Full of wisdom, humor and fascinating historical description. His descriptions of his father, mother and brother, including his reaction to his mother's early death, are poignant and moving. He tells, also, of what it was really like to be a yong officer in the trenches of World War I, in which he was seriously wounded. In another key, how to really learn a difficult foreign language. This is a book to treasure and to read again and again.

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Summary: Introspective and Informative
Review: Lewis says the two families from which he sprang were extremely different in both temperament and origin. On his dad's side there was the Welsh lineage. He describes them as being sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical. While the Hamiltons, on his mother's side were less passionate, more critical and ironic. On both sides, his parents were "bookish" people. He says his brother was a blessing to him, although the two of them were different also.

I love the description of the house full of books in which he grew up. He writes: "My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest..."

He talks about staking out his claim in the attic and making it his study. Early on he became a reader and writer. It was a love affair with communication. He discovered his gift and pursued it from then on.

This book traces the stages of his spiritual journey as well. He is very straightforward in describing what was going on in his mind at various stages. In reading about his unique experiences one acquires insight that can be beneficial in reflection on one's own life.

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Summary: A confession...not to be confused with confusion
Review: Recently having had the opportunity to also read confessions penned by Augustine and Tolstoy, I must say that, like Augustine, Lewis gets to the heart of the matter without getting lost in the Confusion that I consider the true title of Tolstoy's short autobiographical essay. While Augustine reveals the evolutionary development of this faith, however, be forewarned that Surprised by Joy does not seriously appear to be a true confession until the last two chapters, called Checkmate and The Beginning. Just do not get into the mindset that the reader can skip to these chapters without having first read the prior thirteen - everyone's life needs to be considered in context, including that of Lewis. Simply put, Suprised by Joy remarkably describes one individual's journey from Atheism to Theism to Christianity, without the distractions of the ancient world, and sometimes difficult language, found in Augustine.

Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece
Review: This is C. S. Lewis's spiritual autobiography and it is a masterpiece. Lewis was raised in a somewhat nominal Christianity, which he threw off as a school-boy. But as Lewis says, "A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There were traps everywhere - 'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and strategems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous." And this book is Lewis's chronicle of God's strategems and nets and the surprises which eventually converted Lewis back to Christianity. Central to this process was Lewis's experience of joy, which he defines as "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." As a boy and as a man, Lewis was stabbed by this desire, yet never able to satisfy it. By a process of elimination, he came to realize that (as he says in another book) "if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." The desire led him to the Objective Other - the Absolute - Spirit. At first, Lewis viewed this Other as an impersonal and objective absolute. But, God strategically boxed him into a corner (Lewis uses the analogy of check-mate in a game of chess) where he was forced to acknowledge that this Other was God Himself, and beyond that, God enfleshed in Jesus Christ. Woven into the story are the events of Lewis's childhood, education, and intellectual development. Quite a lot of the discussion centers around his reading, from Beatrix Potter as a child, to Keats, Herbert, MacDonald, and Chesterton as a young adult. This is a fascinating book and one cannot quite hope to fully appreciate Lewis without reading it. I highly recommend it!

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Summary: A masterpiece Read this work of his first
Review: Owning all of C.S.Lewis' non-fiction works I believe this is the first book most people should own, simply because it shows his journey from being an atheist and a serious one at that, to becoming not only a Christian, but in many peoples opinion, including mine, the greatest Christian scholar on the twentieth century or many centuries. It is a book I recommend to any academia minded person who wants a literate and challenging work that lays out how a serious atheist and secular scholar can evolve into a scholar who also happens to be a Christian. Chapter fourteen titled Checkmate is where this really gets explained. The other interesting thing about this book is how it got me reading other works from the many people C. S. Lewis mentions as catalysts in his journey. People like George Macdonald, and G K Chesterton. Thus my home library has expanded a lot.