Paradise Lost, Prada, Poetry

When you're debating over whether to blog your experience of Paradise Lost, lament your idiotic lust of handbags you will never own, or the poetry reading at your local Borders, you know that you need to stop right there. Just dropping a note to let people know that I am alive and intend to 'blog Paradise Lost' in my next post. I feel guilty, as though I were coping that guy who blogged the Bible, but since iyov asked...

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Paradise Lost and Personal Libraries

I always buy books thematically. About six months back, it was poetry. Ted Kooser expanded my shelves, Garrison Keillor's Good Poetry suddenly arrived, I memorized long passages from Beowulf. Then it swung to early American history, and Alexander Hamilton and debates about the constitution started arriving in the mail. Then, a fit of children's fantasy took over, and their shining covers still brighten my shelves. After that, Greece and Rome (I bought the Iliad, technically poetry, but it's the same idea) Bibles have now taken a large chunk out of my pocketbook, and I still can't resist them, especially if I find them used.

Now, it is come full circle to poetry. It started with the Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost. Brand new from Borders, and jammed with all those wonderful juicy extras that Norton always includes, it cost me $10. That's right. $10. Try your Borders, that's a steal.

I am currently trampling my way through, recording some observations in a separate notebook, refusing to defile those shining margins. At least, until I've read through it at least once. When Milton's sentences have thoroughly saturated my mind, I pick up Wordsworth, his Prelude, in another Norton Critical edition.

I resisted temptation mightily when trying to decide between Wordsworth and Tennyson at the bookstore; I love Tennyson, one of the few poets that I do love, and yet I knew that I needed to broaden my horizons. I hadn't read enough of Tennyson. I nearly hurled both of them back onto the shelf and grabbed Robert Browning, but I knew, deep inside, that it was a compromise. I don't dislike Wordsworth or Browning, I simply love Tennyson very much.

At least I have decided on one thing: I will purchase my poetry more systematically. Because those Norton Critical editions are well-designed, jammed with extras and extraordinarily cheap (usually from $12-14, with a few in the $20s) I intend to buy my poetry in that format, and lend at least a show of order to my disorganized, wild, and crazy library.

The author realizes that this post somewhat contradicts the previous, however, said author has decided to call it 'tension' instead of contradiction, and feels quite happy about hitting upon such a neat solution.

One Book At A Time--Not Me!

There's one book that I read every day, and that is the Bible. There. But maybe the Bible simply illustrates my reading habits.

I almost never, ever read one book at a time.

Occasionally, there's a book that I sit down and read straight through, front to back, because it's a really good book. But most of the time, I have five or six various reading 'projects' going on at the same time. I inhale the written word. Whether this is a good or bad habit, it goes on and on.

My reading is sometimes thematic. I'll bang out several poetry books in a few weeks. Suddenly, acting is fascinating. If I had the money to buy all the books that I thought I needed to study my current obsession, I would own a private library. And then again, I could be reading an old childhood favorite, such as "Journey from Peppermint Street" alongside "Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World", which, while well-written and fascinating, is a bit higher on the reading scale than Peppermint St.

I would love to get reading suggestions from people on nonfiction books. Although I own various poetry volumes, half a dozen Cadfaels, the afore mentioned children's story, and some other fiction books, I actually read more nonfiction than anything else.

Current reading obsession: mathematics.

The Preacher of Cedar Mountain

I paid two bucks for a single page of writing the other day. This page.

"A burnt, bare, seared, and wounded spot in the great pine forest of Ontario, some sixty miles northeast of Toronto, was the little town of Links. It lay among the pine ridges, the rich, level bottomlands, and the newborn townships, in a region of blue lakes and black loam that was destined to be a thriving community of prosperous farmer folk. The broad, unrotted stumps of trees that not so long ago possessed the ground, were thickly interstrewn among the houses of the town and in the little fields that began to show as angular invasions of the woodland, one by every settler's house of logs.

"Through the woods and through the town there ran the deep, brown flood of the little bog-born river, and streaking its current for the whole length were the huge, fragrant logs of the new-cut pines, in disorderly array, awaiting their turn to be shot through the mill and come forth as piles of lumber, broad waste slabs, and heaps of useless sawdust."

I looked at the faded green volume in my hand, with an uncertain $2.00 written on the first page, as if the people running the tiny booksale weren't sure that anyone would pay that much for a worn hardback printed in 1920. That first page was enough to convince me. If you can read that, and not understand why, then I have no use for you. If you do, then you can pick up cheap copys of "The Preacher of Cedar Mountain" by Ernest Thompson Seton at amazon.com.

Now, to read the entire book.