C.S. Lewis. All My Road Before Me: The life of the young C.S. Lewis was filled with contemplations quite different from those of the  mature Christian apologist and well-known author, and this early diary – begun when Lewis was twenty-three – provides readers an excellent window on his formative world. At the time of these writings, Lewis was a student at Oxford with atheistic convictions. Newly returned from the war, he filled his days with studies, trips to the countryside, friendships, and, most interestingly, a home life with Janie Moore, a woman twenty-six years his senior. Irish-born like Lewis, Mrs. Moore was the mother of a classmate killed in the war, and she, her daughter Maureen, and Lewis lived a frugal life together on the stipend passed along by Lewis’s father – who was unaware of the housekeeping arrangement. As Lewis’s old friend Owen Barfield notes, this diary is a real treasure for those “who feel a special interest not only in his literary legacy but also in the personal being of C.S. Lewis.” For example, this entry from January 1927 gives a haunting glimpse of the inner struggle that led up to Lewis’s conversion two years later: “Was thinking about imagination and intellect and the unholy muddle I am in about them at present: undigested scraps of anthroposophy and psychoanalysis jostling with orthodox idealism over a background of good old Kirkian rationalism. Lord what a mess! And all the time (with me) there’s the danger of falling back into most childish superstitions, or of running into dogmatic materialism to escape them.”