#165 Surprised by Joy

Just a little background as to why the number 165: Growing up I was always told that I read a lot. I was called a bookworm, and everyone who knew me told other people that I always had a nose in my book. This was most likely true until I reached the age of 12, and my new friends didn’t like reading. They thought people who read were tres uncool. I didn’t quit reading altogether, but my habit did slow down quite a bit. By the time I started to fall out with those friends, I decided to get back into reading. On March 13 2002, I decided to keep track of just how many books I’ve read. 165 is the number since that date.

It’s kind of embarrassing that in just over nine years I’ve only read 165 books. That averages out to 18.3 books a year, or 1.5 per month. I suppose this is more than the average person, but not for a bookworm. I blame the lack of numbers on university. The thousands of pages I read were never counted towards this record. I only count books that I’ve read pretty well cover to cover.

This most recent one, Surprised by Joy (C.S. Lewis) was given to me by a friend on my birthday. She hoped that I would also be surprised by Joy as C.S. Lewis had been.

I read through the book with an open mind. I very rarely don’t finish a book that I’ve started (unless it’s for school), but I have to admit I was bored practically to tears through most of it. He warns readers in the first chapter if we don’t like how/where it’s going, we should put it down now. I felt an obligation to continue, and so pushed on through it. It took me two months to read, and I finished 7 books in the meantime.

I think the big difference between Lewis and me is that Lewis wanted to be an atheist, and purposefully, almost rebelliously, abandoned theism. I, on the other hand, wanted so badly to be a theist, but was “surprised by reality” that steadily led me down the path to agnosticism. Our stories are almost complete opposites, and I therefore cannot relate to his circumstance and discovery of Joy. (Though Joy, in the end, is not what is most important).

I would recommend this book to people who are Christians and would like to see the path that an atheist took to Christianity. It might also satisfy some curiosity of the atheist who wants to understand how an atheist could turn theist. For those of us who were theists turned atheist/agnostic, the book is irrelevant, disappointing even. I was definitely not surprised by joy during this book.