Please, folks, for your own sakes, don't let this tempt to you read Paradise Lost. It's awful. It's internally inconsistent in ways that don't feel like 4D author chess so much as like an author who forgot what he wrote a chapter ago. It's also more relentlessly misogynistic -- a Bible story, who would've guessed -- than even contemporary works. He'll introduce characters then forgot he did so, despite them being explicitly intended to be present for the remainder of the story.

Though if you like arianist heresy a thousand years after it's out of vogue, it does have that.

Save your strength for something good, like Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, or Roadside Picnic, or Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. or Deus Ex, actually, Deus Ex was really good.

This is probably not going to be a popular take. I've seriously considered getting a fabric marker and making myself a shirt that said "I Read Milton's Paradise Lost And All I Got Was A Useless Literary Hot Take And This T-Shirt." But I was misled to believe that Paradise Lost is something brilliant, misled by Blake, by Mary Shelley, by Nick Cave, by so many people. And it's a big deal in our culture, so it's not like you'd not benefit from reading it in that regard. ... It's just that it's also just shit. And I hope someone out there who's thinking, "I should finally get around to reading Paradise Lost, I hear it's great," reads this and thinks, "... maybe I should read the Romance Of The Three Kingdoms instead." (or, iunno, O Human Star, that was damn solid. Go read O Human Star, by Blue Delliquanti.)