Books like Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis

Honestly, I don't know whether to be monumentally irritated or give this guy a standing ovation. Boxen is one of the more unique books you can read from C.S. Lewis. Which is saying something. It's riddled with spelling errors, poor sentence structure, and it's downright boring...until you realize it was written between 1906 and 1912 which would put him starting on these stories about the age of 8. Suddenly, it's mindblowing. Jack (Clive Staples Lewis) and his brother, Warnie, used to play in the attic, creating stories inspired by Beatrix Potter's world of Peter Rabbit & Co. He said that he was captivated by a world where animals wore clothes and lived like people- which is pretty cool to know when you take Narnia into the grand picture. His childhood fascinations came to life even in his adult writing career. Here's my irritation: what eight year old child has a solid grasp of economics, politics, naval history and vernacular, and geography? Apparently Lewis did! This teensy kid had a firmer grasp of some difficult concepts than I ever will. One of the first books by Lewis I read this year was Surprised by Joy, and in it, Lewis described a tenuous (at best) relationship with his stern father. Knowing some of the things he endured (like being forced to sit through long, adult conversations about politics and finance), it's interesting to realize he was imitating life through his art, even at that age. So maybe, all things considered, I'm not so jealous. After all, he was already learning French AND Latin. No big deal. In addition, there's a particularly stern character in his little animal world of Boxen. It doesn't take much stretch of the imagination to realize that this was a reflection of his father. It's cute to see his child's mind at work, throwing ridiculously large words into his writing, some incorrectly, but a shocking amount correctly (really, there's never a good reason to drop the word "ejaculated" into a sentence to describe the way someone is speaking, but we'll give the 8 year old a pass for using a 5 syllable word). Also, he wrote a whole mini "comedy" about a "hussy" living with someone out of wedlock and the bear being blackmailed for money to hide the clandestine relationship...WHAT?! What kind of dinner parties was this poor child subjected to? The other thing that's fascinating to see are the pictures and snippets of his handwritten pages scattered throughout this book- drawings of frogs and bears in suits, naval ships, maps, and diagrams. Apparently, these are scans from the actual notebooks that were saved from a fire (Warnie apparently tried to burn all of Jack's handwritten work in a barrel in the backyard after Jack died many years later- Jack's step-son managed to save a fair amount of his work, although there are pages occasionally missing from the stories). Would I recommend this to people to read? No. Definitely not. The stories just aren't good in terms of engaging literature- unless you are all about reading every piece of his work. Do I regret slogging through it? Not at all. But that's largely due to my 2020 goal to read through all of his work. I'd rate this a PG. For the hussy. Also the occasional use of "d---" (not being prudish- that's how he wrote it).