Since its publication in 1961, this short essay on The Reading Experience has been reprinted so often that it has become a classic.

C. S. Lewis proposes an "experiment" that proceeds in the opposite way to what is usual in literary criticism: "to judge literature from how it is read", not from a classification between "good" and "bad" books, but between "good" and "bad" readers. The reading habits and the prejudices associated with them, the different ways of reading and the different satisfactions -certain or illusory, disinterested or selfish- that each one obtains from the experience, are subjected to an enthusiastic and heterodox analysis, which manages to expose with humor, amenity and brilliance, without the terminological obscurantism, the primordial idea that "whatever the value of literature is, it is only verified when there are good readers who read it". The reader to whom everything seems "slow", the reader who seeks "truths" about life, or the reader who reads only to increase his prestige are some of the models reviewed in this essay, essential for anyone who loves books and still novel and unique today.