Reading Great Books with C. S. Lewis

Insights into better reading for wiser living

A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it.

—C.S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books”

There is a remarkable boy in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader called Eustace Clarence Scrubb and C.S. Lewis is quick to point out that “he almost deserved it.”

Eustace was “up-to-date and advanced,” calling his parents “Harold and Alberta” instead of mom and dad, but he had no friends and he read all the wrong books. The books Eustace liked “were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.” “They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains,” Lewis informs his readers, “but they were weak on dragons.”

Since the books Eustace read were the wrong books, one can safely infer, given the predicament that compelled Lewis’s commentary—Eustace had unwittingly stumbled into a dragon’s lair—that the right books must have something to do with dragons.

Metaphorically, this is exactly what Lewis means; but it will require some unpacking to know that for which ‘books about dragons’ is metaphor. In what follows, we will discover from C. S. Lewis how to recognize and read the right books for better reading and ultimately, wiser living.

C.S. Lewis was a professor, critic, novelist, poet, philosopher, and theologian who wrote more than twenty books in addition to a prolific corpus of essays. Born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Ireland, the Oxford don and later chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, would become famous for his Ransom Trilogy and Chronicles of Narnia children’s novels. He died on November 22, 1963, sharing his death date with Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, and President John F. Kennedy, whose assassination in Dallas overshadowed the home-going of this remarkable teacher. 

With this brief introduction of the Oxford don out of the way, let us begin with Lewis’s rules for readers.