This book has been an eye opener and a game changer. I expect to read it many more times and I look forward to learning even more about what it means to be a literary reader. ( )

C.S. Lewis and I are not the best match. I'm even in the small minority who don't appreciate the beloved Narnia books. He has a loopy excessive style which was very prevalent in this book. To me, it seems like the writing equivalent of thinking aloud. However in all that word salad, he did catch my attention a few times. I quite enjoyed his essay on Poetry. I also liked his thoughts on critical reading and the way certain books and authors come in and out of vogue over time. He asks the question, do we judge a book by the quality of it's reader, or a reader by the quality of the book? It's topsy turvey thinking but I've always been interested in what people are reading and why they love or hate it so these notions of what makes a good book are interesting to me. All said - I managed to take something away from this book despite struggling through much of it. ( )

C. S. Lewis and I don't agree on everything. But we both love words, books, and beauty. We're "kindred spirits" that way, to borrow L. M. Montgomery's phrase. I loved his musings on why we read, why we critique, and why art, specifically literature, is necessary in life. His words, particularly on how literature and art connects us, made me think about the amazing writers that have expanded my life, helped me see, fear, suffer, love, and rejoice with others who are not like me and, yet, are, like me, human. The list is long, but not long enough, and so I still read. ( )

I read this book during a C. S. Lewis class taught by Jerry Root. This is one of my two favourite Lewis works -- the other being "The Four Loves." Those who love words and reading and music and the arts should absolutely read this book. My copy is full of underlined phrases, and it is something I revisit every year or two to refresh myself after a long spell of dogged study. ( )

This is a fantastic short book on the purpose and value of criticism. I had read chapters from it previously, but this is my first read all the way through. This read through is prompted by my preliminary work on developing my thesis for the MA program at Mythgard Institute.

Not only does Lewis make a strong case for looking at literary criticism from a different perspective — that of how readers read, as opposed to what they read — but it ends strongly, stating what I think is at least a similar sentiment to my own about what literature does, and something that I strongly suspect is a universal experience for what Lewis calls "literary readers," even if not all of them acknowledge it.

As I've done before, rather than trying to sum up my thoughts, I'm going to note passages that I enjoyed while reading this:

p. 91-92: "In characterising the two sorts of reading [good and bad] I have deliberately avoided the word 'entertainment'. Even when fortified by the adjective mere, it is too equivocal. If entertainment means light and playful pleasure, then I think it is exactly what we ought to get from some literary work…. If it means those things which 'grip' the reader of popular romance—suspense, excitement and so forth—then I would say that every book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less."

p. 106: "Observation of how men read is a strong basis for judgements on what they read; but judgements on what they read is a flimsy, even a momentary, basis for judgements on their way of reading. For the accepted valuation of literary works varies with every change of fashion, but the distinction between attentive and inattentive, obedient and wilful, disinterested and egoistic, modes of reading is permanent; if ever valid, everywhere and always."

p. 120: "The question is about the criticism which pronounces on the merits of books; about evaluations, and devaluations. Such criticism was once held to be of use to authors. But that claim has on the whole been abandoned. It is now valued for its supposed use to readers…. For me it stands or falls by its power to multiply, safeguard, or prolong those moments when a good reader is reading well a good book and the value of literature thus exists in actu."

p. 130: "Are you and I especially obliged or especially qualified to discuss what, precisely, the good of literature consists in? To explain the value of any activity, still more to place it in a hierarchy of values, is not generally the work of the activity itself."

p. 132: "A work of literary art can be considered in two lights. It both means and is. It is both Logos (something said) and Poiema (something made). As Logos it tells a story, or expresses an emotion, or exhorts or pleads or describes or revokes or excites laughter. As Poiema, by its aural beauties and also by the balance and contrast and the unified multiplicity of its successive parts, it is an objet d'art, a thing shaped so as to give great satisfaction."

p. 140: "Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality…. But in reading literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see." ( )