Hey Beehaw (and friends)! What’re you reading?

Novels, nonfiction, ebooks, audiobooks, graphic novels, etc - everything counts!

  • Lavenderlily@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 year ago

    After two weeks, I’m on the last chapter of paradise lost by John Milton! It was a weird read to end my summer of working through several of the epic poems. It’s one of the most beautifully written poems I’ve ever read, but Jesus Christ has it been a weird and difficult read. My fav part was when Jesus out of nowhere rides in on a chariot and chases satan off the edge of heaven. Genuinely not enough talk about how some of this shit felt like a weird fever dream twist.

    • HipPriest@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      This is on my to read list. I have an annotated copy to help because I’ve heard it’s hard going but I know it’s hugely influential and so keep meaning to get to it!

      • Lavenderlily@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        It was definitely hard going. I had multiple browser tabs open, the heavily annotated modern library version, and my years of Catholic upbringing to guide me through it all and it was definitely a journey. I read it right after reading Dante’s divine comedy and while the comedy and they both really blew me away. Half of Paradise Lost (and Dante too for that matter) is just really deep references to the Aeneid, the Iliad, the odyssey, and Ovid’s metamorphoses.

        • HipPriest@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          I’ve read Dante and enjoyed that a lot. It’s interesting how Dante also puts a lot more of his contemporaries into the various parts of the afterlife then I was expecting; so footnotes can veer from talking about Greek mythology to minor figures from the civil war that had led to his exile. Which can be a little jarring sometimes!