Formative influences: Books

Some Lewis-inspired reading

 

Last week a group of my internet friends and I were talking about books that had a formative influence on us so I thought I’d rework it into a blog post. These books are a few of the earliest influences that are still with me, in roughly chronological order of reading.

1. The big, gorgeously illustrated book of fairy tales from around the world, which was part of my steady reading diet for most of the first decade of my life. There are a couple I first met in that book that I still enjoy reading – they’re both in Andrew Lang’s books. “The Bones of Djulung” is a Polynesian tale that’s in the Lilac Fairy Book, and “The Song of the Yara” is a Brazilian tale found in the Brown Fairy Book (Lang calls it “The Story of the Yara,” but I’m pretty sure my book called it a song). I’ve long since lost this book, but boy I wish I could find another copy of it! It was big and orange and had a paisley pattern on it, and it’s probably why orange was my favorite color as a child and I still love paisley.

2. An illustrated edition of King Arthur stories. I didn’t read it as much as the fairy tale book, but it was one of my early favorites and led me to read lots more of the same kind of thing. This book and the big fairy tale book were on the bookshelf in my room in my earliest memories. I have a feeling that these two books and the others were put there at the same time as the crib, changing table, and rocking chair. The fairy tales and King Arthur stories really shaped my taste in story, and to this day the stories I love best are the Romances, the stories that have a fairy tale shape.

3. Mere Christianity, which I first read when I was 15 or 16 years old. I grew up Baptist, and that meant that I was very familiar with the Bible, but I’d never had anything remotely resembling a systematic theology taught to me. Not that MC is exactly that, but it was the first clear, logical explanation of key elements of the Faith that I’d ever come across and it was like drinking water from a clear mountain spring. After reading that I searched out more of Lewis’s non-fiction and I feel like he’s been my spiritual father ever since then. I like to call him Saint Jack. :-D

4. Surprised by Joy, which I first read about a year after Mere Christianity. This is when I discovered that Lewis was a kindred spirit, and I’ve spent most of the rest of my intellectual life alternating between wanting to read everything he wrote and wanting to read everything he read. The former might be possible, but the latter never will. My interest in the last few years has been reading things he talks about in The Discarded Image, which is why I’m now reading Martianus Capella, as I mentioned in my last post. It was Lewis’s love of The Faerie Queene that first led me to read it, and you can see how the foundation for my own love of it was laid in my childhood. I’ve written so much about FQ here that it has its own tag.

5. Our Marvelous Native Tongue: The Life and Times of the English Language, by Robert Claiborne. My mom bought this for me when I was 17 or 18 because I was already a word-nerd but I had no idea that there could be a biography of a language. It expanded my word-nerdery into love of languages and how they work. Even though I haven’t had many opportunities to study that kind of thing it’s always on my radar, even to this day (hence this post last week on the life of the word galaxy). Mike has memories from early in our acquaintance (I was 19 when we met) of me talking about this book a lot and he says that one time brought it with me to some singles group activity. I don’t remember any of that specifically, but I’ve been taking books to social evens since I was a child. Being a grown up I try not to do that anymore. :-D
 

Recommended editions of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

This is the third post in a series.

• Part 1: “How to read The Faerie Queene”
• Part 2: “Strategies for reading Spenser’s Faerie Queene”

 

Some of the editions I recommend below come with scholarly essays, but the important thing to keep in mind is what C.S. Lewis says about reading it in his chapter on Edmund Spenser in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. He says that while reading commentaries can be helpful, they demand a certain kind of mindset that’s the opposite of the way we need to approach the poem itself.

Its primary appeal is to the most naïve and innocent tastes…. It demands of us a child’s love of marvels and dread of bogies, a boy’s thirst for adventures, a young man’s passion for physical beauty. If you have lost or cannot re-arouse these attitudes, all the commentaries, all your scholarship about “the Renaissance” or “Platonism” or Elizabeth’s Irish policy, will not avail. The poem is a great palace, but the door into it is so low that you must stoop to go in. No prig can be a Spenserian. It is of course much more than a fairy-tale, but unless we can enjoy it as a fairy-tale first of all, we shall not really care for it (132-3).

Audio

I haven’t mentioned this before, but another great way to experience The Faerie Queene is to let someone else read it to you. I highly recommend two versions:

• Thomas Copeland on Librivox
• David Timson on Audible

Print

Free:

The Faerie Queene at Luminarium
This is the complete text in an easily navigable format. The drawbacks are that it has all the original spellings, and there are no notes on difficult words. Includes the letter to Raleigh and the commendatory verses and sonnets.



Low cost:

The single-volume Penguin Classics edition edited by Thomas Roche is the one I use when I’m reading aloud. It does not have the footnotes and marginal notes that I find distracting, but the margins are wide enough for me to add the notes that I do need.

• All spellings are original, which includes many instances of swapping V and U, using I instead of J, and swapping I and Y. Examples: Vna for Una, Sansioy for Sansjoy, Ioue for Jove, Yuory for Ivory.
• Includes all the commendatory verses, dedicatory sonnets, and Spenser’s letter to Raleigh explaining his plan when writing the story.
• No footnotes.
• Endnotes are fairly minimal, defining unfamiliar words and giving some Biblical, Classical, and literary explanation of Spenser’s allusions.
• Textual notes in an appendix. This is a section that tells all the variants in different manuscripts and how they’ve been reconciled in the text of the poem.
• Helpful glossary of common words.
• No essays or study guides.

Moderately priced:

The Routledge Press edition, edited by A.C. Hamilton, who is a respected and reliable Spenser scholar. This large, single-volume edition includes a general introduction which is very helpful to the reader who’s just getting started in Spenser scholarship.

• Original spellings as described above.
• Includes all commendatory verses, dedicatory sonnets, and the letter to Raleigh.
• Extensive footnotes defining archaic words and explaining Spenser’s allusions.
• Textual notes in the back.
• Character list, including brief descriptions and where they first appear in the story.
• Extensive and valuable bibliography.
• Chronology of Spenser’s life and work.

 The Hackett Classics edition in five volumes (Book 1, Book 2, Books 3 and 4, Book 5, Book 6 and the Mutability Cantos), various editors. Each volume has its own introduction, which is not always sympathetic to the work, depending on the editor—some are pretty good, some are downright awful, so this edition is best for the reader who isn’t especially interested in those extra essays.

• Slightly updated spellings: uses of U, V, I, J, and Y are all regularized and some words use standard modern spellings to avoid confusion, e.g. “bee” updated to “be” because it’s the verb, not the insect.
• Includes letter to Raleigh, but commendatory verses and dedicatory sonnets are missing.
• Footnotes are minimal and generally helpful, defining difficult words and giving brief explanations of the allusions. When dealing with more “adult” allusions in the text, these notes tend to be more explicit than the notes in either Penguin or Hamilton.
• Textual notes in the back.
• Glossary of most commonly used difficult words.
• Index of characters.
• Bibliography.

Expensive, and out of print, but glorious if you can afford them:

The Folio edition, with illustrations by Walter Crane.

• Walter Crane’s enchanting illustrations and the excellent physical quality of the book are the main reasons for owning this one.
• Very slightly updated spellings (they’ve modernized the usage of I/J and U/V), but otherwise original. 
• No notes or essays.
  

The Variorum Complete Works of Edmund Spenser, in eleven volumes, ed. Erwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford, 1932. The first six volumes contain all the books of The Faerie Queene. The remaining five are all of Spenser’s prose and poetic works, a Life of Edmund Spenser by Alexander Judson, and an index to the poetry.

• The main attraction of this one is all the scholarly commentary. I mean ALL the scholarly commentary. It contains everything in every language (untranslated) that was available when it was published.
• Original spellings.
• Includes all commendatory verses, dedicatory sonnets, and the letter to Raleigh.
• No footnotes.
• Extensive endnotes explaining literary allusions, historical background, the allegory, the roles of certain major characters, and more. Each volume has one book of the Faerie Queene that takes up about a third of the volume. The other two-thirds is commentary.
• Ideal for the uber-nerd like me who wants all the commentaries!
• Have I mentioned all the commentaries?
  

Of interest:

Oxford edition, published 1909, edited by J. C. Smith. This is meant to be an authoritative text, so it contains all original spellings. The introduction gives some historical background on the publication and revisions of the poem and explains the editor’s philosophy and method. The footnotes are all differences in the texts of the various manuscripts. Contains the letter to Raleigh, commendatory verses and dedicatory sonnets, and has an appendix with longer critical notes.

And now, unfortunately, I have two anti-recommendations.

The first one is the one published by Canon Press. So far they only have the first three books out, and I’ve only read the first one, Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves, edited by Roy Maynard. This is the updated and annotated edition that I bought when I first wanted to read the Real Deal. The updated spellings are the only thing this edition has going for it. Where Maynard updates the language he sometimes errs, and he frequently gives bad definitions in the margins, so it seems that he doesn’t actually understand the language of Spenser. Worse, his explanatory notes are heavily agenda-driven—he makes it seem like Spenser was an anti-Catholic Puritan. Lewis says that this was not the case. In Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Lewis says that although Spenser was educated at Cambridge, he never became attached to the two intellectual movements of the day, Puritanism and what we now call the Neo-Classical movement, the “young, fierce, progressive intellectuals, very fashionable and up-to-date,” who were united by their “hatred for everything medieval: for scholastic philosophy, medieval Latin, romance, fairies, and chivalry.” This one probably won’t kill your love of Spenser if you read, but I can’t recommend it since there are so many better options.
This edition is missing the letter to Raleigh and the commendatory verses and sonnets.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

The second one hasn’t been published yet, but it’s received a lot of publicity in my circles. This is the “modern prose rendering” by Rebecca Reynolds. I have read one of the cantos, which Reynolds forwarded me so my son and I could read it. I’m not at liberty to share anything about the text, but I will note that if you’ve read Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf, you’ll have an idea what to expect from this edition. Tolkien first made that translation early in his career as an Old English scholar and revised it continuously for the rest of his life. It was his personal study of the language of the poem, and should be seen as an exercise in linguistics, not as a work of art. That is, Tolkien’s Beowulf  is not a literary translation meant to delight the reader. Rather, it’s a textual and linguistic study of the poem, which is why so many people were disappointed when they finally received their much-anticipated copy of it.

Where Maynard in his Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves seems not to understand the language of Spenser, Reynolds seems not to understand the form of Romance itself, including its use of stock characters and its way of using metaphor to point to transcendent reality. In her “Introduction to Books Five and Six,” while explaining that all of Spenser’s knights fail in their quests to one degree or another, Reynolds says that

the title knights of Book Four would have killed one another, had not their lethal conflict been resolved through a magic potion inaccessible to the average reader. (Spenser has claimed that the Faerie Queene instructs readers how to live virtuously. Where does he expect them to find such a potion?)

This, in a teacher of literature, is inexcusable ignorance of the way magic works in a Romance. A Romance is essentially a long, literary fairy tale, and fairy-tale magic of this sort works in the fairy-tale world the way the grace of God works in our world—you don’t find it; it finds you. She consistently discusses Spenser’s treatment of characters as if they were people living in our world, and not characters in a secondary world, an imaginative world of Spenser’s creation, and specifically characters in a story with a long literary tradition behind it. In the “Introduction to Book One,” she says, “Spenser’s treatment of women sometimes employs the extremes of angelic young ladies and wicked old enchantresses, females typed instead of embodied.” But this is exactly the way the medieval Romance works. It’s not a modern realistic novel.

Reynolds repeatedly makes the biographical fallacy of thinking that understanding the author helps you understand the story. In her “Introduction to Book One,” she writes pages of commentary explaining “Spenser’s questionable treatment of race, religion, gender, and nationality,” saying he glorifies whiteness and objectifies women, and writes extensively on “Spenser’s Anti-Irish Behavior,” among other atrocities. This is the topic of “Elizabeth’s Irish policy” that I mentioned when quoting Lewis at the top of the blog post. In Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Lewis says, “The many generations who have read and re-read The Faerie Queene with delight paid very little attention to the historical allegory; the modern student, at his first reading, will be well advised to pay it none at all.” Reynolds is taking exactly the opposite approach, pointing out all of Spenser’s supposed flaws, according to very modern (may I even say “woke”?) standards.

Which brings me to the last area of concern that I’ll be addressing here. The major issue with this edition is the same as with Maynard’s: it’s highly agenda-driven. I have read all the introductions that are available on the website, and I encourage you to do a web search and download and read the essays for yourself for more information. The introductions are quite long, so I will include here a longer selection from the “Introduction to Book One” to illustrate this agenda.

Spenser made some grave mistakes as a writer and as an Englishman living in Ireland. Perhaps it could be helpful for you to read about some of his shortcomings and how I handled them before beginning this book. Where I didn’t sterilize Spenser, it was out of a conviction that we need an accurate record of the past to help us make our present and future better; I don’t think we can overcome wrongs by denying they existed. Where I muted him a bit, it was out of a desire to instill respect where there was once hostility….

As a reader, I’ve given myself permission to shout disagreements with Spenser here and there.... I welcome you to both rage at him with me and glean alongside me as we read his tale. May our journey through this and all old stories be indignant and supple at all the right moments.

...

Throughout the text, I couldn’t resist including a few maternal footnotes for young female readers who may be encountering the jolt of objectification in a historic work of literature for the first time. Though I couldn’t address every instance of sexism, I want these intermittent messages to serve as a little hand squeeze for the youth wandering through these stories. Ladies, if you feel angry over how a female is treated in a given scene, I’m likely right there with you. Let’s stare unflinchingly into the hard realities that our foremothers have faced. Let’s learn from the past.

In summary, Reynolds claims to love The Faerie Queene. She says she hopes that “this rendering will help both younger students and curious adults with busy lives who simply don’t have the time or training to untangle four-hundred-year-old language.” She says that she hopes people will read her prose rendering and then go on to read an edition such as Hamilton’s. But it seems to me that Reynolds’ approach will have the opposite of the intended effect.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

To read other things I’ve written about The Faerie Queene over the years, please click the Faerie Queene tag. Happy reading!
 

How to read The Faerie Queene; or, You are already qualified to read Spenser's masterpiece

Many of you know that last school year I taught a year-long class on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. To help prepare myself for the classes, I spent hours and hours reading commentaries and scholarly essays on the poem, because I wanted to give my students (mostly adults, but a few high schoolers as well) value for their money. If you’re going to pay for a class, you should get more out of it than you can get just by reading something on your own.

Before deciding to teach the class, I had read The Faerie Queene aloud with my children three times over the previous several years. I loved the poem and wanted to share it with other homeschool families, so that, in my opinion, was my main qualification for teaching it—I was familiar with it and I loved it.

But what qualified me to read it to my kids in the first place? I don’t have a college degree, let alone a degree in English. I didn’t have any specialized knowledge of Edmund Spenser or Elizabethan England or of the kind of poetry Spenser was writing.

The only qualification I had was that I wanted to read it. And I wanted to read it because I loved C.S. Lewis, and he loved The Faerie Queene.

The only specialized knowledge I had was that I knew the Bible pretty well, I was fairly familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, and with fairy tales and the legends of King Arthur. Really you can’t even call that specialized knowledge. All of that is what every child ought to have been listening to from birth, “building blocks of story,” as Angelina Stanford says, summarizing Northrop Frye and his brilliant commentaries on literature.

So, how do you, dear Homeschool Mama, begin reading this glorious masterpiece to your own children?

Here’s what I did with my four children who were still at home with me—my fifteen year old daughter, thirteen year old son, and eleven year old daughter, plus my nineteen year old special-needs son.

Charlotte Mason suggests having younger children read from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare before reading the bard himself so that they will be familiar with the stories. I felt it was even more important to do this with Spenser’s Faerie Queene, since the language in his poem is more difficult than in Shakespeare’s plays.

Most of us are familiar with C.S. Lewis’s mention of first reading The Faerie Queene from a large illustrated volume on a rainy day. Here is the quote in full:

Beyond all doubt it is best to have made one’s first acquaintance with Spenser in a very large—and, preferably, illustrated—edition of The Faerie Queene, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen; and if, even at that age, certain of the names aroused unidentified memories of some still earlier, some almost prehistoric, commerce with a selection of “Stories from Spenser,” heard before we could read, so much the better.
(“On Reading ‘The Faerie Queene,’” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, p. 146)

I had been reading Margaret Hodges and Trina Schart Hyman’s gorgeously illustrated edition of Saint George and the Dragon since before some of these children were born, and Lewis’s words here spurred me on to find another high quality children’s edition of the whole story, for he says that that’s where even the mature reader must start, if not with the children’s versions, at least with the child’s unjaded appetite for stories like “Jack the Giant Killer,” and his lack of awareness of any allegory or moral purpose. In the same essay, Lewis says,

It may not be necessary for all readers at all stages of the narrative to know exactly what the poet means, but it is emphatically necessary that they should surrender themselves to the sense of some dim significance in the background—that they should feel themselves to be moving in regions “where more is meant than meets the ear.”

 

I found two beautifully written editions that served us well. The first and shortest is Stories from the Faerie Queen by Jeanie Lang. Her book is just a few chapters long, roughly one chapter per book of Spenser’s FQ, each taking 15-20 minutes to read aloud. The second is Mary Macleod’s much longer Stories from the Faerie Queene. The chapters are all “read-aloud” length, like Lang’s, but Macleod’s book covers the poem in much more detail than Lang’s book.

Our method was to read a chapter of Lang one day (kids narrating), then in the following days I would read aloud the corresponding chapters from Macleod (again having the kids narrate). Then I read aloud from my Penguin edition of The Faerie Queene (pausing occasionally for narrations). In this way we worked through FQ, one book at a time.

If your kids are much younger than mine were, say all under twelve, you could read aloud the whole Lang book, and later read aloud the whole Macleod. Do be sure to have your kids narrate both books. This way they’ll be so familiar with the basic outline of the story that when you get to Spenser they’ll be able to follow the Elizabethan poetry without trouble in the way that Lewis describes.

In my next post, I’ll give some tips for reading the full edition of The Faerie Queene.

 

The Faerie Queene

 

This is the Folio edition,
illustrated by Walter Crane,
which my family gave me
for Christmas a few years ago

Those of you who have followed me for any length of time at all know that I adore Spenser’s epic romance, The Faerie Queene (check out my Faerie Queene label for past posts on it) I’ve mentioned loving it and reading it aloud to my own children, who also love it, so many times that people finally started asking me to teach it to them so they could read it and love it too.

Starting next August I’ll be teaching a year-long online class through House of Humane Letters. While all adults and high school aged students are welcome, I’ve designed the class especially with the homeschooling mom in mind, so we’ll be meeting in the evenings and following a schedule that’s looser than the traditional school year.

For each of the six books, I’ll have one introductory lesson, then we’ll read the book’s twelve cantos over the course of four weeks, then take a break before starting the cycle over again with the next book. All classes are recorded, so if you aren’t able to make the live class, you can watch the recordings and take things at your own pace.

Registration begins March 1 for families new to House of Humane Letters and will be conducted via email, so if you’re interested, go to House of Humane Letters and sign up for their email list.

Here’s my description of the class:

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

“From the time of its publication down to about 1914 [The Faerie Queene] was everyone’s poem—the book in which many and many a boy first discovered that he liked poetry; a book which spoke at once, like Homer or Shakespeare or Dickens, to every reader’s imagination.”

~ C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

The Faerie Queene along with its style of storytelling has been out of favor for so long that we encounter several difficulties (apart from its sheer size!) when trying to read it. Lewis identified three for us: its narrative technique, its allegory, and the texture of its language—that is, the kind of poetry it is, which affects how it’s to be approached.

In this class, I’ll not only give you the imaginative frame of mind for entering into Spenser’s masterpiece, I’ll help you with these three areas. Together we’ll become more comfortable with the polyphonic narrative style, which you may never have encountered before. We’ll discuss how to understand the story’s allegory as well as when to ignore it. We’ll learn to appreciate Spenser’s poetic style and I’ll teach you strategies for reading the poetry, whether to yourself or to your children.

And that really is my goal for this class—not just to help you read this magnificent story, but to give you the confidence to read it to your own children as I did to mine.



Recommended editions (affiliate links):

I have found three editions which I can recommend for this class. Every edition has the same system of numbering the cantos and stanzas, so we can each use the one that best meets our own needs.

The single-volume Penguin Classics edition edited by Thomas Roche is the one I use when I’m reading aloud because there are no notes in the text, which I find distracting. All of the notes, which are in the back, are fairly minimal, defining unfamiliar words and giving some Biblical, Classical, and literary explanation of Spenser’s allusions. All spellings are original, which includes many instances of swapping V and U, using I instead of J, and swapping I and Y. Examples: Vna for Una, Sansioy for Sansjoy, Ioue for Jove, Yuory for Ivory. It’s a little confusing at first, but you do get used to it. Includes all the commendatory verses, dedicatory sonnets, and Spenser’s letter to Raleigh explaining his plan when writing the story. No essays or study guides.

The Routledge Press edition, edited by A.C. Hamilton. This is a large single-volume edition. Extensive footnotes defining archaic words and explaining Spenser’s allusions. Includes all commendatory verses, dedicatory sonnets, and the letter to Raleigh. Includes a chronology of Spenser’s life and work, a helpful introduction to the work, an extensive bibliography, and a list and description of all the characters and where they first appear in the work. Retains original spellings as described above. This edition is best for the student who wants to go deeper in his study of the work. A.C. Hamilton is a reliable Spenser scholar.

The Hackett Classics edition in five volumes (Books 3 and 4 are in one volume), various editors. Footnotes are minimal, defining difficult words and giving brief explanations of the allusions. When dealing with more “adult” allusions in the text, these notes tend to be more explicit than the notes in either Penguin or Hamilton. The introductions and essays vary in quality depending on the editor—some are pretty good, some are downright awful, so this edition is best for the reader who isn’t interested those extra essays. The commendatory verses and dedicatory sonnets are missing, but each volume contains the letter to Raleigh. Each volume has its own introduction (not always sympathetic to the work), bibliography, list of characters, and a glossary of the most commonly used difficult words. This edition has slightly updated spellings: uses of U, V, I, J, and Y are all regularized and some word use standard modern spellings to avoid confusion, e.g. “bee” updated to “be” because it’s the verb, not the insect. [Individual volumes: Book 1, Book 2, Books 3 & 4, Book 5, Book 6 and the Mutability Cantos]

Tips for readers: Getting through hard books

Earlier this summer when Cindy Rollins and Angelina Stanford were interviewing me for their Literary Life podcast, I mentioned that I didn’t start reading books that were hard for me till I was in my thirties. They asked me how I pushed through when reading something like that, so I mentioned a fairly recent experience with Charles Williams’ poem Taliessin Through Logres. In that case, I just kept looking for things I was already familiar with, which helped me keep going till I’d become familiar with Williams’ style and the general flow of the story.

I’d like to share some other strategies I’ve used over the years.

About a decade ago I decided to get better acquainted with Flannery O’Connor’s stories. Up until then I’d only read her short story, “Revelation,” but I’d read it many times, first in high school and then again every few years to see if it turned out any better, by which I mean, to see whether I could get to the end of the story without the bad guy turning out to be ME. Our library had the huge Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor—short stories, novels, essays, letters—so I started reading the fiction, and when it got too dark and difficult, I’d take a break by reading the non-fiction. Her essays are so thoughtful and her letters are delightful, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, and I found that getting to know the author as a person made reading her stories easier.

Another thing that has made it easier to persevere though hard books is reading and discussing them with friends, whether this happens in person or over the internet. I read Homer and Virgil and Ovid this way, and am currently working through Plato’s Republic with friends. Knowing we’re going to meet on a certain day, and that my friends will have read the next section, and that they will definitely have interesting things to share about it is very motivating for me!

This one may come as a surprise, but reading aloud to my children has gotten me through some hard things that I had tried and failed to read alone. William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene fall into this category. I read Langland to my older set when they were in high school, but I started Spenser with my younger set much earlier, so I had to do some groundwork before reading the unabridged poem, but knowing that they loved the story and were waiting for the next canto, and sharing their delight in the story, helped me keep doing my part.

This next example is kind of hard to categorize, but maybe I should call it comparing the hard book to something else I already know and love. C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man was like this for me. I tried several times to read it and just could not comprehend what he was talking about, and always gave up before I’d gotten even half way through it. But one day when I picked up That Hideous Strength to read for the umpteenth time, I happened to notice the words “Abolition of Man” in the Preface. I don’t think I’d ever read the Preface before, and I was surprised to read, “This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.” This drove me back into that book and finally I could see what he was talking about in there, since I already knew what it looked like from That Hideous Strength.

How about you? How do you manage to read hard books?