10 C. S. Lewis Works You Must Read
The ones that explain the modern world, illuminate the inner life, and remind you what it means to be human.
There are writers you read for entertainment, writers you read for information, and writers you read because something in you knows that if you don’t understand what they have to say, you will be slightly less human.
Lewis belongs to the third category. He wrote across genres… fiction, theology, literary criticism, memoir… but the deeper thread running through everything he produced was the defense of reality: moral, spiritual, and intellectual. His books are more relevant now than when they were published, because the world has drifted further away from the truths he saw so clearly.
These are the ten works you must read if you want to understand Lewis, and more importantly, if you want to understand the age you’re living in.
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1. The Abolition of Man (1943)
If you can only read one Lewis book, read this. It’s the intellectual spine of everything he wrote afterward… a warning about what happens when a civilization stops believing in objective value.
Lewis saw that once you sever the link between truth and emotion, and treat morality as a subjective preference, you don’t free humanity, you hollow it out. He was describing the early stages of dystopia. The clarity of the book becomes more alarming every year.