2022: A Reading Year in Review
While the new year may feel like it’s gotten well under way, I am still reflecting on this past year. After noticing reading habits growing, 2022 was my most intentional year in regard to what I wanted to read. I was dubbing it my “Year of C.S. Lewis” and while setting numerical goals may be helpful, we read not for a number but for the joy of growing and challenging our own perspectives, escaping for a bit to a time or place that holds magic for us, and connecting with others through the sharing of interests and ideas.
It’s easy to start out strong when you have long winter nights suddenly emptied of Christmas festivities and Hallmark movies. The beginning of 2022 was filled with rereading favorite children’s books and learning more about C.S. Lewis’s life in Surprised by Joy and Alister McGrath’s biography of Lewis. The biggest surprise was The Awakening of Miss Prim, which helped me to imagine more what the pre-modern, post-Enlightenment mindset was like. It is easy to read facts about history, but understanding the thought processes that shaped the time is much more difficult. Miss Prim was a wonderful bridge to getting outside my modern mind.
This continued into Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy and The Abolition of Man, which I read with Michael Ward’s After Humanity. Ward’s book brought my attention to Lewis as a philosopher and not just as apologist and children’s author. The depth of Lewis’s knowledge really is astounding. In Abolition, it felt like he was undoing the modern assumptions my mind has picked up.
By the time I got to the sermons and lectures included in The Weight of Glory, I noticed a shift in how I was reading. Suddenly, more and more connections between Lewis’s works were popping up to my attention. And when I would start a new book about Lewis, I would flip to the back first and skim their bibliographies to see what other books I wanted to look into next. I was also starting Narnia and the Fields of Arbol which included a quote from Owen Barfield that “what he [Lewis] thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.” By about halfway through the year, I was able to start noticing this myself. An idea he started in a nonfiction book would appear in his fiction, and an image I was familiar with from his fiction would show itself to be an illustration of an idea in his nonfiction.
By the middle of summer, my reading time was dropping off. A generally more busy schedule met the completion of Mary Oliver’s Devotions and Dante’s Divine Comedy, two books I had been reading for the past eight or nine months. I was excited to finish these, but I was not prepared for what a habitual part of my day the time reading them had become and how I would feel the loss of those habits. One thing I hope to carry on after 2022 is having a slow, year-long book to ground my reading day.
As the year got on, books like Gary Paulsen’s Northwind, Island, and The Little Book of the Hidden People got me in the mindset for a trip to Iceland. Learning more about Lewis’s life and love for Norse mythology from his letters also contributed, while showing me just how much I have to learn about mythology. I was also getting into Lewis works that were deeper or that I knew less about, and so they took me longer. But still, the continuity in his mind and imagination was astounding. There’s a unity to his work across decades and genres.
I closed out the year with what are becoming traditional Christmas rereads: A Christmas Carol, Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas, and Waiting on the Word. It took me into January to finish Till We Have Faces (loved it!), and so my official last book of “A Year of C.S. Lewis” was Becoming Mrs. Lewis, historical fiction about Lewis’s late-in-life wife Joy Davidman, that ended up pairing perfectly with Till We Have Faces. Till We Have Faces was written as Jack and Joy were growing together in their relationship and the voice of the female narrator definitely makes me curious about Joy’s influence on Jack during this time. While Becoming Mrs. Lewis is historical fiction, it also helped me to put into place some of the events of their lives.
In 2022, I read a fairly wide variety for me, but came away with a greater appreciation of the benefits of focus and intention. The additional focused time on one author was well worth it. I’ve begun to be able to tell Lewis’s voice in a different way and am starting to understand him as a person a little more. I’m planning to continue with an author of the year in 2023. This time the author will be Wendell Berry and I’m eager to immerse myself in an author I have really only sampled before. Here’s to another year of reading and growing!