Six of My 2025 Reads: The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis

At the top of 1997 I sat down and listed all the books I’d read up to that point. I came up with ~40 titles. I’m sure this was not all of them, but it was a fair start. Beginning that same year I began to keep a list of the books I’d read each year.

With the end of 2025, I’m highlighting six of the past year’s reads—a book of poetry, two novels, and three non-fiction titles. Perhaps you’ll find one you wish to add to your 2026 reading stack. Of course, I’d recommend you add all of them.

The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis

Based on a 1958 radio series and published in 1960, The Four Loves is a treatise on the loves we share: Storge (Affection), Philia (Friendship), Eros (Romance), and Agape (Charity). In a pair of introductory chapters, Lewis explores Need-Love (e.g., the love a child receives from a parent) and Gift-Love (e.g., the love granted us from a God). He then speaks to the concepts of Loves and Likes, and the distinction between Pleasures of Need vs. Pleasures of Appreciation. With this groundwork begins the exploration of The Four Loves.

The gem of this book is the chapter on Friendship, an exploration of male Philia. Lewis’s thorough exploration of the facets of friendship among men is invaluable and available nowhere else. “Very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all…few value it because few experience it,” writes Lewis. As always happens with Lewis, there’s little sense that the text was written over 65 years ago. The issues and concerns he addresses are contemporary and fresh. Lewis speaks of the risks of group-think and aristocracy, yet states “it seems no wonder if our ancestors regarded Friendship as something that raised us almost above humanity.” 

Could there be a more reasonable admonishment for our present state of culture? Establish or deepen your friendships. “The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.”

Leave a comment with a title you read in 2025!