Saturday, January 17, 2009

Faves: Paradise Lost

Watercolour illustration of Paradise Lost by William Blake

I downloaded an audio book of Paradise Lost by John Milton.  This is the kind of thing I'd never read as the language is too difficult and obscure.  What put it in mind was news of a new translation of the work, into English.  Anyway, listening is a lot easier than reading.  Its an amazing work of imagination.  Describe the Fall of Man in 240 pages of blank verse.  Milton takes paragraphs from The Bible and spins them into pages of story. The book's reader was very good as well.  The torrent can be found here .  Interestingly, I found it because it was on Pirate Bay's Hot 100 audio books.  There was an enormous interest in the torrent.  The 139MB download generated more than 1GB of upload in three days.  This may be the most popular audio book on The Pirate Bay.  This audio book is not readily available through Amazon or other online retailers.  It would appear that downloading is the only way to get it.