C.S. Lewis was a master writer, he knew his craft well.
I dare say he is very underrated by critics and ignored undeservedly by many.
I still have my copies of the Chronicles of Narnia somewhere.
I have those, thanks to a FReeper, but my favorite C.S. Lewis effort is “The Screwtape Letters.” I have to read them every so often to get a reality check.
“I still have my copies of the Chronicles of Narnia somewhere.”
Ahh, “The Chronicles...”; I need to re-read them all to combat the calcifying effects of middle age.
Lewis’ space trilogy (Perelandra, Out of a Silent Planet, That Hideous Strength) is worth an intentional read; being a sort of an Lewis’ own rendering of Creation, Fall, and Apocalypse.
I highly recommend his wartime radio broadcasts wherein he accepted the invitation of the BBC to explain “mere Christianity” to a beleaguered British people; these having been brought together in the book bearing that title.
And among the works of Lewis’ other close friends — “The Inklings” as they came to be called — Dorothy L. Sayers’ “Letters to a Diminished Church” is highly recommended. At the very least, the reader’s inner grammarian will revel in Sayers’ masterful command of the English language, but she delivers immeasurably more.
“Somehow or other, and with the best intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore — and this in the Name of One who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which He passed through this world like a flame. Let us, in Heaven’s name, drag out the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction.”
This seems a tall order, but Sayers expends the balance of her work keeping that target under continual barrage with an unrelenting bombardment of theological and philosophical munitions laced throughout with such wit and humor as to achieve the end without becoming oppressive or suffocating.