Veteran AF: Nov 26, 2022

Saturday, November 26, 2022

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como, Book 41 of 2022

Sometimes I have a book for a few years, suddenly remember I have it, and read it in a couple of days. That just happened with C.S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by Jim Como. I have had the copy since it was first published in 2019. I bought it and had it signed by the author at the 50th Anniversary of the New York C.S. Lewis Society.

Jim is one of the founding members. I joined a decade after the founding of the group in 1979 just after I left active duty in the Army in Germany. Jim and I have known each other for four decades. I attended meetings of the NY CSL Society about once a year for the past four decades. Like most NYCSL members, Jim lives and works in the New York City region.

I read the book now because I just finished reading CSL's longest book: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama. Lewis referred to it by the series name abbreviation OHEL: Oxford History of English Literature.

I read Jim's book to as a review of all that Lewis wrote before and after the OHEL.

The short introduction includes a brief biography, brief summaries and evaluations of all of Lewis's books and many essays. He even includes a list of the more prominent critics of Lewis and some of the controversies that cropped up during and after Lewis's life.

After being so far into the weeds of the 16th Century, it was fun to come back to all the ways Lewis wrote and lived. I have read all of the 40 books published in during the life of Lewis and most of the collections published after he died--a dozen more.

Lewis is now known most of all for the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia. All of them made into movies I will never see (I don't watch movies of novels I love.)

But Lewis is also a novelist. His Till We Have Faces is, I think, his best book and among the better novels of the 20th Century. Jim's description of the book and it's place in 20th Century literature is excellent.

Lewis is also a Christian apologist, a lecturer, a BBC radio personality during WWII, essayist, book reviewer, and a science fiction writer: Perelandra is a brilliant novel, and a literary critic of considerable reputation. Jim's most recent book is about Perelandra.

Jim's Very Short Introduction convey's all of this in 128 pages. If you have read only some of Lewis, this book will tell you what to read next.

And I will also suggest what to read next: If you haven't read The Four Loves or the essay "The Inner Ring," they should be your next read.

First 40 books of 2022:

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss.

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis, Book 40 of 2022

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

The longest book of the more than forty books written by C.S. Lewis in his lifetime, took more than forty years for me to finish reading.

I first read a few pages from English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama in my semester as a full-time student in 1980. In my Western Traditions II class, taught by Theodora Graham, we read the Norton Critical Edition of Utopia by Sir Thomas More.

Among the dozen critical essays in the back was an excerpt from Lewis's history. Amid essays claiming More was a communist, a socialist, an authoritarian and number of other political positions that mostly did not exist in the 16th Century, Lewis said the key to understanding the book was the magic map. He said the book was written for friends who shared More's taste for creating worlds--with magic maps.

It was a refreshing and fun essay in the midst of others with very long faces.

Twenty years later I read the long first chapter of the book, which is a wonderful summary of the century and its politics and religion. But I put the book down and did not read it except as a reference until this year. Then I decided to finish it.

Lewis read everything and everyone who published prose and poetry in the 16th Century in English. More than one reviewer said Lewis found the only good lines of poetry ever written by some very bad poets.

Lewis wrote about More and Tyndale as prose writers, and as martyrs. Tyndale, the Protestant, translated the Bible into English. His translation makes up a lot of what would become known as The King James Bible published in the early 17th Century.

More, a Catholic, wrote in defense of his Church. Both men faced death by torture and burning at the stake worried whether they would break under torment. But neither thought the concept of punishing heresy by death was inherently wrong, even when they were waiting in cells for execution. When we read old books, we are reading a whole world of different assumptions about life and the universe.

The final 200 pages of the book, 'Golden,' is divided into three sections: Seventy pages on Philip Sydney and Edmund Spenser, seventy pages on Prose in the 'Golden' Period, and sixty pages on Verse in the 'Golden' Period.

At several points, Lewis analyzes a sonnet cycle and says where the poet missed the mark in form or content. Sometimes in relation to the standard of that era, the sonnets of Francesco Petrarch. Then on page 502, after several pages on Shakespeare's longer verse, the first paragraph begins:

Shakespeare would be a considerable non-dramatic poet if he had only written Lucrece: but it sinks almost to nothing in comparison with his sonnets. The sonnets are the very heart of the Golden Age, the highest and purest achievement of the golden way of writing.

Lewis continues for another seven pages explaining why Shakespeare's sonnets are "the very heart of the Golden Age."

At this point I stopped reading this book, got a copy of Sonnets and started reading them aloud. It has been years since I read them. They are beautiful.

As with any book this comprehensive, we can read pieces of the book we care about and omit the rest. Anyone interested in the history of literature or in late Medieval Europe can enjoy the introduction "New Learning and New Ignorance." This 66 page essay could be a short history book all by itself.

Since I have read and loved so many Medieval works, Book I. Late Medieval, was interesting for me just as history of how literature was changed by the break up of the Church and subsequent religious wars and controversies.

Book II. 'Drab' is repellent just by the title. But it is in this section we learn about Tyndale and More. Reading Lewis on bad poets is interesting just to see how he handles the material.

Book III. 'Golden' is why we read history. Lewis pulls together all the threads of culture, society, religion, and literature and weaves a narrative to show us in detail how English Literature dragged along for a half century and suddenly flowered in a way no one could have anticipated.

Enjoy!

First 39 books of 2022:

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed