Milton is a tricky reading

I do enjoy a challenge. I have already labeled what I wish to read in the summer and I haven't even started my vacation yet. I feel it so close that I want nothing more at the moment. The first order of business is really reading Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained by John Milton.

At the present, I am jumping around because reading all twelve books and having other homework due is making it difficult to truly enjoy it. I really do enjoy the prose as well as the poetry that he conveys throughout the rest of the poem, but I am just as interested as how he pictured the fall of man and extended what is said in Genesis as the Original Sin of man due to a woman.

I have to hate and love the fact that man is placing this blame on us poor females, but also the fact that they blame women as bringing them down with us. But that is besides the point.

I didn't think that there can be angst and passionate carnal lust in an epic poem such as this until I read it with my own eyes. You see the innocent smile that Eve gives him in the fourth book, and see how Adam has initially transformed as he demands her almost. It was enticing, and I have to agree with my Young Adult Literature professor as she states that the innocent scene in book 4 was cute and lovable, but the lust scene in book 9 was loads steamier and the lyrical prose is much more enticing.

Even so, I want to reread this poem, alongside with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey because so much of it is intertwined within the other. That's why I say that Milton's readings can be difficult, because if you don't know your Greek history, you are going to have a hard time understanding what he is referring. Sometimes, even the references within my own book is lacking in description. I feel as though I need a Plato book in one hand, a dictionary in the other, and a bible to look up the verses that he is referencing towards on top of my head.

I can't wait for summer vacation in all honesty. It couldn't come any sooner and the anticipation is just as bad as it is because I am graduating this summer as well.

Ay, poor me, you might think. No I don't deserve pity. I just deserve more time to dedicate to reading. :P