Finally I have finally finished Paradise Lost, which I’ve been reading off and on (mostly off, as you will gather) for well over a year now. I can’t even claim that I got stuck in the ancillary materials in this, the Norton critical edition, because it is the poem itself that made my steps through the tome more like slogging through molasses than tripping lightly through flower-filled fields. And then, after I’d finally finished the last book and watched Eve and Adam leaving home to look for work, I got re-bogged down in reading the “Areopagitica”. But just this past weekend I finally got through that prose by Milton complaining of the idea of prior censorship and got to the critical essays and extracts, and—voilà!—I’m done.
I can’t fault Norton for most of my issues with Mr. Milton’s poem—though the editor did allow a surprisingly high number of typos into the modern criticism extracts. ‘Twas the poem itself that wearied me. Don’t get me wrong: It’s a great poem, a staggering work of genius, as the phrase goes. But it gave me the staggers. Its lines were brilliant and moving in detail, but difficult to digest in large quantities. As Samuel Johnson says, “None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.” And that’s how I found it. And I’m glad I did my duty; I got plenty of entries for my personal book of quotations, and had quite a few surprises. Only … am I glad that’s over!
Done at the same time is my 1600th Book in my increasingly silly book tracking project (which phrase I may need to trademark, as I’m using it constantly now when talking about this database of books I track my reading in). I only finished Paradise Lost yesterday, and will try to write up for you posthaste the complete listing of all the books read in this last century of books.
I had still been reading at a ridiculous rate—i.e., better than a book a day—as I tried to make a dent in the total number of unread books I own. Exceptionally, this last set of books, I have released a book (two! in fact) which I have not read, or which I started and decided was not for me. Hopefully this is a new maturity in my reading life, but one shall see. (I’m not including those books in any list I’ll be sharing with you, not to worry.) As well, I hope to take a bit of a breather from this silly pace, try to finish some longer works, but … we shall see as to that as well. For one thing, the smaller books are more portable and thus I read them more frequently at work, where I do a lot of my reading during my lunch hour. (At night I tend to start with good intentions and then succumb to the lure of Morpheus as the words start to slide sideways across the page.) But plans are for the future. In this last tranche of books I managed an average page count of 193 & 1/2 … which drops to ~163 is we include all the comics I read (a couple of dozen, looks like).
I’m still trying to read as quickly as possible to keep my ‘Books Read’ figure greater than my ‘Books Bought’ figure. And thus my average page count for this last set of books is only 168 pages per. This goes up to ~196 if we exclude comic books, which I do and I don’t, though I’m not gonna get too much into those weeds just now, especially as I need to focus on getting those book lists out the door.
The first book of this past century was An Experiment In Criticism by C. S. Lewis, which I finished on the last day of May. I found myself wondering how much Lewis’s fuzzy opening was a response to his quite profound grief, especially in his digression on tragedy. But most of the work seemed pretty judgy for an argument against almost all ‘evaluative criticism’. His notions about ‘unliterary’ readers are pretty much blind prejudice—not necessarily wrong, but derived from an understanding of other readers as experienced by an Oxford don. My own bookstore career made many of his points seem laughable. The ending isn’t all that bad, however, and his conclusions from his ‘experiment’ are, again, not necessarily wrong.
Science Fiction (with a soupçon of Fantasy) preponderated in this last set of 100 Books, mostly because I’ve started rereading a lot of my old Philip K. Dick books. All told, I read 23 books of this genre-fluid genre, topping the usually leading Mysteries by 4 books. Regular old Fiction came in at only 8 Books Read, leaving 50 books in all the other categories. (I actually read more Children’s books than regular old Fiction, with 9 exemplars ‘consumed’.) Oh, and since we’re not counting Comics and Graphic Novels to the total Hundred Books Read number, I’ll confess that I read more of those than any other category, at 26 comic books imbibed. More details will be in the full list, soon to come (I hope).
The pace was a ridiculously speedy 96 days to read these 100 books, slightly slower than the pace set in the last century of books. If we include the comics, the pace was just north of 3/4 days per book read. Of course we don’t, so … moving on.
1 Book per .96 Days
See you soon with Book List(s), j’espère!