Surprised by Joy

Rating:
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.

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!