All My Road Before Me - C.S. Lewis

I just finished this book after getting it for free from some friends of mine. At first I thought it would be a great look into C.S. Lewis’ life for the five years it covers, but after reading it I am not so sure I would recommend it.

The book begins with Lewis as a student, and then moves on to him looking for a fellowship at a college. Throughout the book there are many bad words (one reason I would not recommend it) as Lewis expresses his frustration at his circumstances. He is living with his dead best friend’s mother and her daughter: Janie and Maureen Moore. At that time they were living very poorly and moved from house to house several times.
I guess the book would be best as a research tool, for a look at Lewis’ five years recorded by himself and giving his own opinions. And if I ever do write a paper on Lewis (which I’ve wanted to for a while) this would be a good jumping board to go off from.

The book, in it’s defense, provides a very good glimpse into the soul-searching and amazing amount of work that Lewis was doing at this time. The first thing is recorded a lot when Lewis talks about conversations with different friends, some Christian, some not. The second just blows me away, how Lewis talks about reading all of Paradise Lost before lunch one day, then writing four hundred lines in his poem until dinner, and then after dinner reading two books and grading papers (Maybe he never did that exactly, but this is how he records how much he does). It is amazing the amount of work he fit in at that time.

While not strictly a Christian book, (since he was not a Christian at this time) I still would tentatively recommend this book to someone, especially if they were doing research on Lewis. If you simply read through the entire book ‘for fun’ like I did, than it can be very tiring and monotonous (Since, after all, it is only a diary). It took me two or three weeks to read, too, so it is long. All in all, the book is pretty good and I rate it at three and a half stars.