Karoline > Recent Status Updates

Love Books 11-12 (sorry CS Lewis)! They're the corresponding balance to Raphael's history before Adam fell - the second part of Adam's education; and they deepen the epic scope to take in the entirety of redemptive history. If Milton's stated purpose is to justify the ways of God to man, he needs this "lump of futurity" to complete his purpose.

"Earth felt the wound; and Nature...sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe"

9.782

Maybe getting carried away with my Wordsworth month? Maybe not? I meant to read just the Grasmere years but now I can't stop.

Books 5-8 are the wisdom books! Read a comment that Milton innovated by making Paradise a place of activity instead of passivity. Adam is being trained for wise leadership by history, character portraits, advice, and instruction. Makes the coming tragedy so much more poignant to contemplate!

if Marianne Dashwood kept a journal to record her passion for dead leaves, it might resemble Dorothy Wordsworth's passion for skies, mosses, glow worms, and trees

though I doubt Marianne would include quite so many mentions of unpleasant illnesses, pitiful beggars,. never-ending laundry, and failed giblet pie

still finding this journal easy and delightful listening (Sarah Lambie reading)

Book VI and the war in heaven makes me think Milton's most current legacy is urban fantasy and superhero battles

Entirely delightful as read by Emma Lambie ("The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals"), sparseness, gaps, mundane details and all.

I feel so fortunate to have one of the great epics in my own language

Somehow I have never read this play.

I have also, unfortunately, learned that many schools put this on their reading lists because it's short.

Which experience was nearly enough to turn my Shakespeare-loving daughter against the play forever.

Turns out she will be assigned the play again this coming year so we are moving to reclaim it. 😂 Wish us well.

a pleasant narrative introduction to the work, purpose, and history of the Supreme Court with some autobiography - makes a nice audiobook listen

(although, I don't think it's fair to imply that Solomon pronounced his judgments without any reference to past or present case law! Deuteronomy, anybody?)

Dark academia fantasy that's a love story to the wonder of languages and the art of translation.

Or would be, but 80% the footnotes and a quarter of the paragraphs read like a flaunted middle finger to the British Empire and racism. It's feeling less like a story and more like a diatribe.

There are some resonant images and intriguing tensions, so I'm hoping these will move to the forefront and make it a Story.

Somewhat accidentally reading five first-person spiritual narratives at the same time, written across a millennium and a half

Which is just fascinating. Augustine to Julian to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Tennyson and the Psalms behind them all . . . watching the baton pass from hand to hand, altering and transforming and turning corners and picking up new passengers is amazing.

Immensely enjoying this translation and the spacious, poetic formatting! For readers whose primary interest is spiritual and literary, I don't think there's a better choice to start with!

Just wish books 10-12 had been included. Even though I get the reasoning for omitting them.

A verse novel is a hard sell but oh my word I LOVED this. A Charlotte Bronte plot with Elizabeth Gaskell interests told as a prolonged, interior, confessional reflection reminiscent of Augustine, wrestling with modernity, social reform, vocation, men and women's work, and love and ending - with a nod to Dante - at daybreak in Italy before a vision of the New Jerusalem. Love my girl EBB.

Chapter 4. ❤️ Beautiful in English but I can never pass it without the Latin too. All the superlatives . . . summe, optime, potentissime, omnipotentissime, misericordissime et iustissime, secretissime et praesentissime, pulcherrime et fortissime, stabilis et incomprehensibilis, immutabilis mutans omnia . . .

Decided to try this translation of the first nine books with its intentionally poetic layout - which certainly honors the prominence of the Psalms in Augustine's prayer-narrative. I think I'm going to like this . . . .

somehow this poem manages to be intensely interior and very wide-ranging at the same time!

Why hello St. John Rivers - I mean Romney Leigh! Remarkably strong Jane Eyre parallels here in Book II. Now I'm trying to think of other Victorian heroines who make a conscious choice AGAINST the zealous social reformer and commit to less tangible service - love or poetry. Gaskell's North and South presents an interesting variation on this pattern.

The Victorian novel nobody ever thinks about because it's written in verse!

Sentences, my friends, sentences. If you're writing a book, please know your way around sentences. Mystified by the clumsiness here. Surely an attentive editor should have addressed this??

The music of it, and the shock of it, and the rigorous rightness all at the same time. . . nobody is quite like Hopkins. Once the lines and the images get into your ear, they stay. I don't think I've walked outside once in 25 years without "seeing in Hopkins."

HERE for arcane arguments about whether or not the word "protagonist" can be appropriately used in the plural. #teamdryden

"They are afraid of nothing. Together, they would brave Satan and all his legions."

Quite the final judgment! It's the altogether more ordinary and conventional second generation that actually stands up to the powers of hell.

Hard to imagine anybody has ever turned Heathcliff into a romantic hero. Emily Bronte makes him as savage, repellent, malignant and generally depraved as possible.

Emily Bronte: I'm going to write a book that says - Don't sentimentalize the rural country. Don't sentimentalize soul consuming passion. Don't sentimentalize mysterious brooding heroes. And don't sentimentalize impulsive marriages. Questions?