Tuesday, April 12, 2011

School Reading: Paradise Lost by John Milton (Mini-Review)

By mini-review, I mean that I only read a (significant) portion of the book and am blogging of my impressions of it, without including a synopsis of the story. Presumably everyone knows the basic gist of Paradise Lost (it's basically an epic retelling of the biblical Creation story) anyway.

My opinion of Paradise Lost? It would be a great epic poem if it wasn't so dang long. It wouldn't even seem so long if Milton didn't keep going and going on the same subject. I would be reading, kind of zone out, get my mind back on the passage on the next page - and he'd still be talking about the same thing. Normally I hate it when teachers assign only sections of a book, rather than the whole thing, for class, but this time I was perfectly happy with it. I generally love "classic" literature of all time periods and I've enjoyed some really slow books before, but Paradise Lost is not a work that I will be reading in its entirety (or even revisiting sections of) anytime soon.

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