My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It's taken me quite a while to read this wonderful book, since I have been reading it pretty much every night once I get into bed. Generally, nowadays, that means a page or two followed by a plunge into sleep. But it's been fascinating to learn about the brilliant man's early years, from his own letters and without any of the rethinking and shaping that went into a book like Surprised by Joy. Here Lewis is not telling a story, but talking to his friends, his brother, and his father, from the age of 7 to the age of 32. Boarding school, the Great Knock, the War, Oxford after the War, Barfield, Tolkien -- they're all there -- and all the comments on all the books he's reading, which is for me in some ways the most interesting part.
The book has a good biographical appendix at the end, to detail the cast of Lewis' relatives and friends and teachers. The notes are much less good, often so useless that they made me scratch my head. Why, for example, would anyone interested and motivated enough to read Lewis' letters need to be told that Herman Melville is the author of Moby Dick?
Don't let that deter you. The pleasure is in getting to spend all that time with Lewis.
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