How I Got Through A Year With Cs Lewis Without Burning Out
I started the reading plan three years ago. I finished it, partially, then abandoned it for six months, then went back. The plan itself isn't complicated. It assigns one or two C.S. Lewis books per month, usually starting with the lighter essays and building up to Mere Christianity and The Four Loves. Most versions you find online or in printed booklet form just list the titles in order. The problem isn't the structure. The problem is that Lewis writes densely, and when you're reading 300-page books on a schedule while also working and dealing with life, it falls apart fast. Here's how I made it actually work for me.
Getting the Plan Itself
The original A Year With Cs Lewis reading plan circulates as a free PDF from various Christian reading community sites. I used to download it from the Barbenheimer Faith blog version, which has a clean one-page layout with monthly groupings. There's also a paperback companion called A Year with C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings by Bruce L. Edwards that's widely available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Neither requires purchase of a specific edition of Lewis's books, but having a collected works set helps because page numbers don't match between editions and the daily reading version fixes that problem. If you're just looking for the free plan, search for "A Year With Cs Lewis reading plan PDF" and grab the version from cslewis.com or similar. It's straightforward.
The Real Issue Nobody Talks About
The biggest mistake people make with this plan is treating it like a checklist. You read the assigned chapters, you mark them off, you move to the next month. This works fine for two months. By month four you're behind, you feel guilty, and then you either quit entirely or try to cram three books into one week, which defeats the whole point of reading Lewis slowly. What actually works is letting the plan bend. I stopped trying to finish every single assigned chapter. Instead I picked one Lewis book per month as the anchor read and treated the rest as optional supplementary material. For example, when the plan assigned both The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters in the same month, I read Screwtape cover to cover and only did selected chapters of Problem of Pain. You lose some thematic continuity but you retain your sanity and the reading doesn't become a chore.
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My Edge Case Problem and the Fix
About five months in, I ran into a real snag. The plan paired Till We Have Faces with Perelandra in the same two-week window. Both are heavy. Till We Have Faces is basically a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth through Lewis's own lens and it's emotionally exhausting. Perelandra is space theology. Reading them back to back left me mentally blank. I couldn't tell what I'd actually absorbed. The workaround was simple but not obvious from the plan: insert a buffer week between the two books. I dropped everything else that month and just read Lewis essays or short pieces like The Abolition of Man or individual chapters from Reflections on the Psalms. It broke the momentum slightly but kept me from tuning out completely. If you hit this same wall, just slow down. The plan will tell you it's designed to be read sequentially. It's not. It's a suggestion, not a syllabus.
Counter-Intuitive Insight: Start With the Essays
Most people begin A Year With Cs Lewis where the plan tells them to: usually mere Christianity or The Great Divorce. That's the wrong entry point if you're new to Lewis. He wrote in a very specific voice in his essays — conversational, patient, occasionally dryly funny — and once you know that voice, the longer theological works make more sense. The plan actually acknowledges this by starting with lighter material, but people skip ahead anyway because they assume the famous books should come first. Don't skip ahead. Read The Weight of Glory and other essays first. You'll understand Mere Christianity better when you get there because you've already heard Lewis explain himself in shorterform.
What This Plan Actually Fails At
Be honest about what the A Year With Cs Lewis plan does not do. It does not help you engage deeply with Lewis's theology. It's a survey plan, not a study plan. If you want to actually sit with Lewis's arguments about pain, love, or redemption, you need external resources. I used to pair each Lewis book with a secondary commentary or podcast series. For Mere Christianity I listened to the Bartlett and Walsh audiobook discussions on Spotify. For The Four Loves I read Alister McGrath's analysis. The plan alone won't give you that depth. It also completely breaks down if you're reading during summer vacation or holiday seasons when your schedule changes. The plan assumes a steady weekly rhythm. Life doesn't work that way. Build in a three-month buffer at the end of the year. If you finish early, great. If you don't, you haven't wasted a whole year of reading.
How to Actually Finish It
I finished my first complete run-through in fourteen months, not twelve. The extra two months came from being realistic about pacing. Here's what helped me stick with it: Read one chapter per day minimum. Not a whole book. One chapter. Lewis chapters are usually short enough that you can absorb one in fifteen to twenty minutes. That's it. Fifteen minutes a day accumulates to a full book in about three weeks, which means you stay on pace without feeling pressured. Keep a physical notebook. I wrote one sentence per reading session summarizing what I'd just read. Not a review. Just a summary. After six months those notes became useful because I could flip back and see how Lewis's thinking evolved across different books. Without that, you remember nothing past the current volume.
Drop books you genuinely hate. There's no rule that says you must finish every title in the plan. If The Silver Chair bores you or Prince Caspian frustrates you, skip it. Read something else from Lewis instead. The goal is engagement with his thought, not completion of a checklist.
Final Notes on the Approach
The A Year With Cs Lewis reading plan is useful if you treat it as a loose framework rather than a rigid schedule. It gives you a reasonable order to encounter his major works. But it was never designed for people with demanding jobs, families, or attention spans that vary from week to week. That's fine. Adjust the plan to fit your actual life, not the other way around. The books will still be there when you're ready for them.
