Here I'm going to be a little more esoteric, but I'm amazed at the number of real academics who read Lewis. On a recent trip to Greece, I was reading, with my students, a translation of Plato's Phaedo--a discourse Socrates made on the afterlife. In the Postscript to it, the translator said, "When the Narnia of C. S. Lewis is destroyed and like some shadow-land yields to a new and bright Platonic Narnia beyond (in The Last Battle), it perplexes some youngreaders, inspires other, and produces in other a mixed reaction." I was amazed that classicist and translator Harold Tarrant of the University of London had read the Chronicles and refers to them in the Postscript to his scholarly text on Plato.
Similar, the American neo-formalist poet Mark Jarman has written poems on Lewis, as has the well-know American classicist and poet Rachel Hadas, in her recent book, Indelible. These names are not as famous as Bill Clinton, Bono, or Margaret Thacher, but I am often astonished at how many "high-brow" intellectuals from the upper eschelons of academica have read, and admire, C. S. Lewis.
Of course, considering his acheivement as a scholar, I should not be surprised.
