Started: March 14
Finished: March 15
Notes: This is C.S. Lewis' take on literary criticism, so it should be pretty good.
Mini review: I hate to say it, but this is my least favorite of all Lewis' writings I've read, which is not everything but is still quite a lot. His premise isn't bad. He begins by separating types of readers into the literary and what he calls the "unliterary," and this last term he does not mean in a negative fashion. Then he spends more than a hundred pages boring me with various thoughts on music and poetry and other forms of art, sort of commenting upon how all this is similar but also not similar to literature. Finally he gets down to his real premise and it's a long, slow, boring, pedantic mess that really tells the reader nothing. Only in the epilogue does he finally spout some kind of theory about literature, and it's basically that we transcend ourselves by experiencing the thoughts and emotions and lives of others. Not a bad premise, but he could have said it in a few paragraphs instead of rambling on forever and ever. Glad I didn't read this one earlier or it might have turned me off Lewis. I'll read more of his works, but I'll be more wary from now on.
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