As someone who writes back cover copy for a living, I tend to read it with an eye toward quality. Is this good copy or not? What can I take from this to make my own work better? The back cover copy on the very 1990s-looking Broadman & Holman edition of C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters is good copy and creates the perfect setup and explanation of this slim volume for the uninitiated:

"My dear Wormwood, . . ." So begins this product of C. S. Lewis's wickedly funny imagination, a correspondence between two devils, Screwtape and his young nephew, Wormwood. As the senior fiend advises his young apprentice in leading humanity astray, Lewis delves into questions about good and evil, temptation, repentance, and grace, offering knowledge and guidance to all who are trying to live good Christian lives.

A perfect, pithy description of the content of a book whose small size conceals great depth of wisdom and breadth of philosophical discussion.

Because it is an explicitly and unapologetically Christian book, I would not expect to have been assigned The Screwtape Letters in my public high school or my liberal arts state-funded university. However, I run in circles (in my personal religious life and in my professional life) in which C. S. Lewis is positioned in the spiritual hierarchy just below Jesus, about on par with the Apostle Paul. He is eminently quotable and showed such excellent scholarship and wit that I think secretly all Christian writers must hope in their heart of hearts that they are even a tiny bit like him. Most are not, of course, as his level of writing and thinking is ever more rare.

So I have heard and read quotes from this book for some time. In fact the reason I started reading it was to help my husband who was looking for a quote he thought he remembered being in there. This book had been on our shelves since we got married almost ten years ago, and I had never opened it. So Saturday evening I read the first half of the book and I finished it while on the treadmill tonight.

Though it is but a scant 100 pages as typeset in my copy and can be easily read in one sitting (if one does not start at 10 pm as I did) this book really deserves a slower, more thoughtful reading. A class or reading group could spend a week discussing but one of the 31 "letters" because of the religious and philosophical questions they raise.

I recommend that every Christian, whether new in the faith or a lifelong church member who prays daily, tithes weekly, takes Communion monthly, and fasts yearly, read and digest this book. Every believer will see himself or herself, his struggles and temptations, her fears and comforts, somewhere in this book. Sometimes convicting, sometimes comforting, The Screwtape Letters is brutally honest and unflinchingly clear in distinguishing good from evil, right from wrong, profitable activities and attitudes from unprofitable ones.

I'm not sure what a non-Christian would get out of this book, but I would welcome any comments from non-Christians who have read it.