My 2024 Literary Life

Below is my Goodreads 2024 review.

It was a good year for CS Lewis! I read 6 books either written by him or about him. He is definitely one of my favourite authors. I am not much of a fan of his apologetics but I love his literary work and The Chronicles of Narnia (childhood favourites 😏). It has been a year of broadening my horizons and learning a whole new way of reading literature – in the old literary tradition of Lewis and Tolkien.

Mum and I, though we live in opposite hemispheres, have been doing what we call Literary Tea Time, where we read a book together and weekly (generally anyway) meet together via video call to chat and discuss the book. The first one we read together was The Reading Life, which is short excerpts from Lewis’s writing on the subject of reading. We loved that one, so with the next book we dove in deeper, and read The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind by Dr. Jason Baxter. That book was deep and required some work to ‘get it’, but it blew us away. After that, we decided to change gears a bit and do a series of classes called How to Read Fairy Tales with the literary teacher Angelina Stanford and The House of Humane Letters. We are currently up to class 6 of 9 and it has blown our socks off even more! Lewis and Angelina have introduced us to a whole new way of reading literature, the way they used to do it before things got modern and psychological. So we’ve both been reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales as part of this course, and I have been trying to read as much of Lewis’s intellectual works on reading and literature as I can get my hands on. Lewis’s quote, “One day I shall be old enough to read Fairy Tales” makes much more sense to me now! He loved fairy tales and so did Tolkien.

I also read this year many books that I have not yet finished. My reading style is that of a book bee, jumping excitedly from book to book, sampling a little from each. I don’t love that this is my reading style, and it can get a little overwhelming having so many books on the go at once. But I just have so many interests and books that I want to read and topics that I want to delve into that I jump from one topic to another faster than I have time to finish books. Remember that I am a painfully slow reader.

You’re probably keen to ask, what was my favourite book that I read this year? Honestly, it is a hard decision. But I think it would have to be The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis by Dr. Jason Baxter. Mum and I had many great conversations about this one and we got to delve in quite deep. Not only did it help me to understand Lewis better and the great books and ideas that shaped his mind, but it also broadened and deepened my understanding of medieval people and the medieval world and the way they saw and understood things. The sort of in-depth understanding that you don’t get in your regular modern medieval history book. I felt like the book helped me to get into their heads and to see with their eyes, and it deepened understanding of the medieval period a great deal. We moderns seriously misunderstand the medieval period and medieval people, and if I ever become a medievalist I’ll set the record straight.

There were a couple of re-reads this year. Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland was a re-read, and so was The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis. I read all The Chronicles of Narnia growing up, but I want to read them again as an adult, deepened and enriched by what I have learned about Lewis and what he is doing with those books, and my understanding of the literary tradition.

I was also introduced to Harry Potter for the first time. As was typical with conservative Christian homeschooling families in the early 2000’s, we weren’t allowed to read Harry Potter growing up. Fears of witchcraft and spells made parents like mine wary of them. More recently though, Mum and I have come to realise that many of those fears were unfounded and not based on reality, and that these books are actually deeply Christian, and that JK Rowling actually wrote them in the same literary tradition as Lewis and Tolkien. Angelina Stanford believes that this may be why the books became so popular with the general public. They’re different from your typical modern YA fantasy novel. They are so incredibly deep when you get into them! I enjoyed getting into the first book this year and am excited to continue the series in the new year!

What will my reading life look like in 2025? Well, I hope to finish a few more of the books that I started in 2024! Ancient authors like Plato and Thucydides that I have been plowing through, and somewhat lengthy history books. I’m also looking forward to reading more of the Harry Potter books, and hopefully a few more Narnia books as well. I would like to read more about the British Empire this year and do a history research project about that. I am also keen to read more mythology, particularly Celtic and Norse, and of course, more Greek. And of course plenty of reading and research for my book in the making!

So, there you go, my literary life 2024! I am excited for a new year of reading.

What about you? What was your reading life like this year? What was your favourite book that you read? Feel free to leave a comment and share, I’d love to hear!

Happy New Year everyone! 🥂😊