Book Worm--Volume 5

C.S. Lewis

One of my absolute favorite authors! He makes you think-and makes you rid yourself of preconceived notions. His books never cease to amaze me, and they are plentiful!

Here is a list of his complete works...(thank you booksfactory.com) The ones in bold are the ones I have read. So I still have a long way to go before I have even read half of his amazing literature.

Nonfiction:

• The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936)
• Rehabilitations and other essays (1939)
• The Personal Heresy: A Controversy(1939)
• The Problem of Pain (1940)
• A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942)
• The Abolition of Man (1943)
• Beyond Personality (1944)
• Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947, revised 1960)
• Arthurian Torso (1948)
• Mere Christianity (1952; based on radio talks of 1941-1944)
• English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (1954)
• Major British Writers (1954)
• Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955; autobiography)
• Reflections on the Psalms (1958)
• The Four Loves (1960)
• Studies in Words (1960)
• An Experiment in Criticism (1961)
• A Grief Observed (1961)
• The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964)
• God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (1970)
• Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966)
• Spenser's Images of Life (1967)
• Letters to an American Lady (1967)
• Selected Literary Essays (1969)
• Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1972)
• Of Other Worlds (1982; essays)
• All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922-27 (1993)
• Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories (2000)
• Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church (2000)
• Collected Letters

Fiction:

• The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)
• Space Trilogy
  • Out of the Silent Planet (1938)
  • Perelandra (1943)
  • That Hideous Strength (1946)
• The Screwtape Letters (1942)
• The Great Divorce (1945)
• The Chronicles of Narnia
  • The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
  • Prince Caspian (1951)
  • The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
  • The Silver Chair (1953)
  • The Horse and His Boy (1954)
  • The Magician's Nephew (1955)
  • The Last Battle (1956)
• Till We Have Faces (1956)
• Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1963)
• The Dark Tower and other stories (1977)
• Boxen: The imaginary world of the young C. S. Lewis (1985)

Poetry:

• Spirits in Bondage (1919)
• Dymer (1926)
• Narrative Poems (1969)
• The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis (1994)

Now that you have a sense of all that he has written, I would like to highlight two books in particular.

Til We Have Faces

and

The Great Divorce

(I am going to discuss Narnia in a later segment :)

Til We Have Faces was lent to me by my best friend Shawna when I was on bed rest with Libby. And it was incredible. It is not as famous as many of Lewis's other works-but it struck me. It tells the story of two princesses-one beautiful and one not. The back cover talks about the struggle between profane love and sacred love. One of my favorite passages was recently on my friend Addison's blog.

"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back."

READ THIS BOOK!!

The Great Divorce--*amazing*. Plain and simple. It is Lewis's concept of heaven and hell. The images are incredible and so hard to imagine that sometimes my brain hurt when I would read it--but in a good way. The part that struck me the most was how Lewis describes Heaven as being REAL--reality itself. While Hell is just a state of mind. This quote helps I think,

"Hell is a state of mind - ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind - is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains."

READ THIS BOOK!

I don't think you will be disappointed.

(PS-thanks goodreads.com for the quotes!)