The third and last volume of the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis is out, and available here from Amazon.com. Santa brought me a copy of the UK edition (with rather nicer cover) for Christmas.
I’ve started reading it, and find to my astonishment that it is almost 2,000 pages long. The paper is the sort you find in a bible — extra thin, to keep the volume size within bounds. In fact it is nearly twice the page-count of my Gideons’ bible. What can the publisher have been thinking? Who can read such a monster without massive indigestion?
So far I have read the letters for 1950, which certainly accentuate the misery that Britons experienced after the war from the austerity measures of the Labour government, worsened by an untimely ideology. The shortages of basic food and clothing are a constant theme.
There are new letters here, and longer versions of those already familiar. I’m certainly glad to have more Lewis than I did. But I think that I would have been gladder if it had been split into two halves!