Reading with tea

C.S. Lewis

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

C.S. Lewis

As someone who enjoys both drinking tea and reading books, I must comment on this comment by C.S. Lewis.

I usually have a cup of tea at my side when I read in the afternoon, but I favor a small cup. You might even call it a tiny cup, about the size of one you might find in some Asian restaurants. The advantage of the small cup is that the tea stays hot until it is empty, unlike a larger cup that usually has cold tea at the bottom. A small cup requires a tea pot, of course, but part of the fun of drinking tea is pouring the tea from pot to cup. And it stays hot much longer in the pot.

As for long books, I tend to agree more with Jane Austen, who said, "If a book is well written I always find it too short." I never thought Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove or Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit were too long. Another 200 pages of each would have been welcomed. Yet I've read plenty of 300-page books that were way too long.

Similarly, a good song can never be too long or a bad song too short. The same with movies.

The Lewis comment is interesting because he favored high-brow books, the older the better. He would have considered Little Dorrit contemporary literature, though he was a 20th century man and Dickens wrote 100 years earlier. I doubt that he would have bothered with Lonesome Dove at all had he lived long enough to consider it. Considering the kinds of books he read, I must admire Lewis, even if I can't quite agree with him on the subject of large cups and long books.