Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)

An autobiography of Lewis’s early life and the influences and experiences that led him to become an atheist and then later return to Christianity. Gotta be honest — this one bored me most of the way through, right up until the last couple of chapters. ( )

4.5 stars - I really liked this book. The writing style was wonderful to read. I especially enjoyed this first-person perspective on his past and what events he felt were the most important and life changing. As with his other non-fiction, it was a slower read due to the literary quality of the writing, but that in no way diminished my pleasure in reading it.
Reading this book has both rekindled my desire to read more by Lewis and to look for a good biography of his whole life.
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3.5 stars. Lewis is so well-read that a lot of his references to authors or philosophies and how they affected his life really went over my head, or at best, I could recognize the reference and understand just a little bit. That was not particularly enjoyable to me. He has this way of writing conversationally, referring to points in his story ahead or behind his current place which was quite familiar and almost friendly, which was enjoyable to me. And then there is his textbook writing style that is so charming and matter-of-fact, his way with words that is such a joy to take in. The story of his conversion to Christianity is told from his childhood, pretty much up to the time of actual conversion and not very much further. His is not a typical story of a man who comes to find himself in a place of great need who sees God as his only way out and find more than he ever hoped. His is the story of the man who came reluctantly to his faith, inch by inch through his learning and logic and though he very much would have liked to avoid it. His God is not the lovey-dovey forgive-all-your-sins God, but the Inevitable, Unchanging, and Completely Right; the I Am who will not be ignored and who, when finally accepted and seen rightly, causes His followers to change their own lives to better relate to His holiness. ( )

The last three chapters were typical Lewis. And most of his insights into character were brilliant. However, most of the book was rather dry and methodical... not as exploratory as some of his others.

I did find myself disagreeing with him about his schoolmates known as "Tarts" though. And I was disheartened by the lack of progress in boys schools between his time and Dickens'. It was amazing that he was as untouched as he was... and still more amazing that the world isn't more messed up as a result.

His varied referenced to authors and works were both affirming and frustrating-- affirming because it confirmed that we had much in common and frustrating because there was so much I hadn't read.
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In some respects Jack was a conservative Christian, or at least a mainline Protestant of the old stamp, usually at least. Speaking about his schooling although he is much more restrained than the more popular camp today, he occasionally talks very frankly about the establishment trying to protect the powerful from the powerless, to defend the popular kids from the social pariahs, a complaint which sounds very liberal. Also, he is explicitly sympathetic to some of the old pagans, like Plato, and although one gets the sense he has little background in anything ‘East of Suez’, he approves of one of his friends relishing what he calls “quiddity”, and which I can only describe using the Buddhist term “suchness”; I don’t know if there is any popular Christian way of describing it….

Of course in other ways Jack loved his old books and old things and his classical education, the stamp of a Lost Generation intellectual, of a certain turn of mind, right. Of course the book ends before he was an adult in the habit of reading the Bible and doing Bible-type things, and he doesn’t sprinkle the book with Psalms like Augustine. Not that I mind exactly, it’s just curious because sometimes I can’t help but wonder, in a nosy way I’ll allow, what an evangelical could possibly see in him. Anyway, the stuff about Joy is worth reading, though I won’t pretend to understand it. Certainly I haven’t been classically trained the way his mind was, so I can’t say I’m familiar with all the books in his head. It’s worth knowing also I think, how mythological and musical his atheism was, even if he wasn’t literally or fully a Pagan. Still, as much as I shouldn’t (shouldn’t, though I know I will) skewer the journalists just for being different than me, it’s so I think that a lot of people think that atheism would go away of everybody knew about Christian journalist types like Lee Strobel, but it isn’t so. Jack was Eustace, it’s true, but he was also Edmund.