To be more than ourselves

We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves.

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

C.S. Lewis read for his profession (he taught literature at Oxford and later Cambridge), for pleasure and also, as suggested by the above quotation, for the enlargement of his being. Then he wrote many books that enlarged the being of his many, many readers.

In the books he wrote he had much to say about the books he read and about reading in general, and now much of what he said on the subject has been compiled into a single book, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes.

Lewis loved Jane Austen ("I've been reading Pride and Prejudice on and off all my life and it doesn't wear out a bit.") and War and Peace ("It has completely changed my view of novels."), but The Three Musketeers not so much ("I don't think there is a single passage to show that Dumas had even seen a cloud, a road, or a tree.") He wondered how Mark Twain could write Adventures of Huckleberry Finn yet nothing else that was nearly as good.

He has much to say about fairy tales and about children's literature in general, and of course his own Narnia stories became children's classics. He once argued: "I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story." As someone who did not read those Narnia stories until I was an adult, I am almost inclined to agree with him.

For parents, teachers or others who worry about the unworthiness of the books children read, Lewis offers this sensible advice: "Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books." Those discouraged from reading "bad" books may stop reading altogether.

And those who don't read, Lewis writes elsewhere, inhabit "a tiny world."