C. S. Lewis gave me the first reading enjoyment of my life.

I was in third grade. My public school library had copies of The Chronicles of Narnia. I’m not sure why I picked them up. Maybe a friend recommended them. They wouldn’t have been a natural selection in my home, or in my classroom.

The series delighted me like nothing before, and hardly anything since.

I didn’t profess faith in Christ until age 15, and I didn’t pick up any of Lewis’s apologetic works until college and my early 20s. All my Christian friends read Mere Christianity. A friend gave me a copy of The Screwtape Letters for my bachelor party. A small group struggled together through The Problem of Pain.

I dabbled here and there with other Lewis lectures and essays. I saw why everyone loves “The Weight of Glory.” But in my foolish arrogance, Lewis’s popularity among American evangelicals turned me off. I, for one, wasn’t going to follow the well-trod path to Oxford and The Kilns. (I had a similar aversion to Charles Spurgeon. No need to read him when no one can stop quoting him.) Even when I wrote about Tim Keller, so often compared to Lewis, I focused more on his fellow Inkling, J. R. R. Tolkien.

This new guide by TGC books editor Andrew Spencer explains what I missed. You don’t need to love the Chronicles to appreciate his insights on “The Abolition of Man.” You don’t need to geek out on the Space Trilogy to benefit from “Learning in War-Time.” There’s something for everyone in Lewis. You don’t need to love everything he wrote to find a paragraph, a story, or just a quote that could change your life.

A couple years ago I dropped my arrogant pretenses and decided to go back and read just about everything Lewis wrote. (It’s given me great fodder for my weekly newsletter, Unseen Things.) That effort turned into the book I’m currently writing about Lewis, Churchill, and the Second World War. Now I’m that obnoxious guy who has a Lewis quote for seemingly every situation. I’m experiencing the joy of that third grader again.

I wish I’d never stopped.