This video brings together two series, the 10 Minute Book Talk with Dr. Brenton Dickieson (i.e., me), on Youtube, and what I want to do as a 5 Books Series here on http://www.aPilgrimInNarnia.com. I have had this video done for a while but still haven’t worked out any other part of the series. So I am pre-launching the series because I think this is a helpful video, and I get more questions about this topic than anything else.
Here, I talk about 5 biographies of C.S. Lewis, each with a different way of looking at his story. The conversation includes:
#1 A personal biography by student and friend, George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis
#2 A baseline critical biography by Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
#3 A controversial biography from a skeptical angle, A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography
#4 A literary biography by American public intellectual Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis
#5 A biography of the spiritual life, Devin Brown, A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C.S. Lewis
I also make some comments about some other biographies of and books about C.S. Lewis, just because I’m not good at sticking with 5!
A Pilgrim in Narnia 
I liked Alister McGrath’s biography. I like McGrath’s writing style (even though I often dislike his ideas, he writes elegantly).
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McGrath sort of intimidates me, reading 20+ books per week and writing a book every year or two. Increadible. I wish this book was more exciting, but perhaps I’m not reading it in my mind with a good enough voice. It is a tight writing script.
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If it’s any consolation, before reading this reply, I just wrote my other reply about the number of books you’ve already read this year 😊
Authorial voice is so important. When I read Ronald Hutton’s books I can hear them in his voice (when he gives a talk, it’s in the same style as the books, which helps). He also writes very well indeed.
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This was so helpful and well done. Thank you!
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Thanks so much!
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Not a biography, but I really enjoyed “Becoming Mrs Lewis” (recent novel about Joy Davidman).
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Yes, Yvonne, I generally liked that novel too. There is much historical in it, but I could never quite see Joy’s personality itself there. Many people think I am wrong about this!
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I must get around to reading Surprised by Joy and some of her poetry.
I was looking at your Goodreads book count and noted that so far this year you’ve already read the same number of books that I read last year. (I used to read a lot more books when commuting by bus!)
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Many thanks for this, Brenton. I enjoyed listening to it and I think that I would like to read the Devin Brown. I have read the A.N Wilson. For years I have been used to hearing him discoursing cynically, in his highly cultured and carefully crafted accent, on all kinds of issues and it was only in coming across a recent film about T.S Eliot that I realised with some shock that he had returned to his early Christian faith.
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Yes, Wilson’s (re)turn is interesting. He has actually rewritten some ideas about Lewis in this updated form–not rethinking Lewis’ facts of biography, but his relation to them. I commented on them here (https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2019/02/18/narnias-lost-poet/), a 2nd part in a series, but I admit I did it in a very rushed way.
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Tangential question – I’m still consulting the first edition of Paul Ford’s Companion to Narnia for the (likely) composition history of the chronicles, though (unless I missed it) he doesn’t document how he arrived at it – what do ‘we’ (as opposed to I!) know of the current state of this matter? (E.g., I keep reading refs to McGrath’s redating of Lewis’s conversion(s) – does he redate lots of other things I should know about, including Narnia? I’ve yet to read the latest three of these five biographies…)
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