The Reading Room

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Bookworm

05:34

I am having trouble parsing a passage from Paradise Lost Book 11. God is decreeing that Adam is to be expelled from the Garden of Eden: But longer in that Paradise to dwell, The law I gave to nature him forbids: Those pure immortal elements that know No gross, no unharmonious mixture foul, Eject...

Bookworm

05:57

Q: Identity of a story anthology containing "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Great Stone Face"

I think I remember two specific books which I read in the summer of 1962. One was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz one of several borrowed from the Cape May, New Jersey public library that summer. And the other was an anthology of short stories, possibly restricted to stories by American authors. It ...

identification-request anthology

Rand al'Thor

06:48

@Bookworm Ooh nice, a @verbose question. It's been a while.

verbose

07:24

@Randal'Thor Well, I've been busy. Re-reading paradise lost in its entirety takes ages. Thanks for the enthusiastic reception!

I'm now emailing my former professor Steve Fallon with various questions and comments about his edition, which is cited in that question.

Rand al'Thor

07:46

@verbose It was lost to you, but you regained your interest?

verbose

@Randal'Thor ha. I have no immediate intention of re-reading Paradise Regained.

Happy Diwali, all y'all. 🪔

6 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

14:11

Q: Can Sherlock Holmes be convicted of killing Dr. Grimesby Roylott?

Inspired by The Adventure of the Speckled Band. The following description contains SPOILERS. Near the end of the story, Dr. Roylott sends a venomous snake down a rope with Holmes on the other end. Holmes was expecting the snake, so he struck the rope (and possibly the snake) with a cane. Agitated...

united-kingdom legal-history law-in-fiction manslaughter

^ literary question on Law SE

7 hours later…

Tsundoku

21:39

@verbose I had forgotten that Paradise was such a bad place that regaining it isn't worth the trouble.

Are EJoshuaS and my the only ones who are reading Svetlana Alexievich?

Better to reign in Hell then serve in Paradise Regained.

Students spend Saturday reading ‘Paradise Lost’, The Observer, 23 April 2023.

> On Saturday, students and faculty gathered in the Program of Liberal Studies’ third-floor lounge in O’Shaughnessy Hall to spend approximately 10 hours with the epic poem in blank verse. Participants took turns reading aloud the text, a 17th-century rendition of Adam and Eve’s temptation in the Garden of Eden.

> “Paradise Lost” was not chosen at random. One could assume its length would be a deterrent, but organizer Steve Fallon, an English professor, said duration is the reason to pick the poem.

Bookworm

21:57

Q: Where did Anna Akhmatova write, "Half of the country imprisoning, half of the country imprisoned"?

In Chernobyl Prayer (or Voices from Chernobyl), one of the persons interviewed by Svetlana Alexievich is a historian who says, Because the zeks didn't inhabit a separate world of prisons that were far away. It was all around us. ‘Half the country imprisoning, half the country imprisoned,’ as Ann...