“Into this wild abyss,
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
Into this wild abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage.”
~ John Milton, Paradise Lost Book 2, lines 910–920 1
Finished watching the last episode of the second season of His Dark Materials2 on HBO. I haven’t read the books and made a mental note to read them sometime next year. Also set me thinking of other YA novels that I’ve read and enjoyed. Movies made from YA novels and comics are the blockbuster movies that everyone is drawn to. There is something universally appealing about ‘coming of age’ stories and those full of adventures at every turn.
The most recent YA book/series that I read (albeit a couple of years ago) was a book from ‘Lockwood and Co’ series named ‘The Streaming Staircase’ by Jonathan Stroud. I think Jonathan Stroud’s books, especially ‘The Bartimaeus Trilogy’ are a notch above the Harry Potter series. I do like Harry Potter, though, (both the books and the movies). Other series that come to mind are ‘The Hunger Games’, ‘Twilight’ and ‘Divergent’. I’ve watched the movies. Haven’t read Hunger Games or Twilight but read the Divergent series.
The earliest coming of age book that I’ve read is Great Expectations by Dickens. I re-read it again last year and realized so many things that I had missed when I read it long ago. Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew also come to mind when I think of YA fiction. I might have read 50 to 100 Hardy boys, but don’t remember much at all. Other books that come to mind are ‘Little Women’, ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’,’ Catcher in the Rye’,’ To Kill a Mocking Bird’ and so on. Probably should make a list at a later point in time.
Back to ‘His Dark Materials’, the title is taken from a phrase in Paradise Lost by Milton3. I have the book but haven’t read it fully. I’ve read a summary of the book and read random pages. The beauty of reading Milton is that if you just read it, you’d understand it even though there may be a lot of arcane words or references that you know nothing about. You may not get the inner meaning or references to other mythology, but you’d get the gist of the scene itself. It is like what Adler says in ‘How to read a book’, one must just read a book in a flow, without stopping to look at a dictionary or other references. At least in the first reading. That is so true. There is no joy greater than sitting with a book and being completely immersed in it, going with the flow of the book.
When you read the quoted paragraph above, you can at once visualize Satan standing on the brink of the gate to hell and looking out into the abyss and feeling the distance between hell and heaven and pondering how he could make the trip to the new world created by God.
I wonder how Milton had this vision of a chaotic universe and earth being created out of the chaos. He says things will be in a perpetual state of fight until a world is created from dark matter and there is peace. Something to think about. The turmoil that we see on the earth is nothing in comparison to the heat inside the stars or the primordial earth when everything was molten.
The TV series is good, the music in the opening sequence is great, the actors are top-notch, some of the settings are breathtaking. But I’ve read that it still doesn’t fully capture that complete complexity of the novels. Hopefully will read it before the next season comes.
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Image Credit - Wikipedia - Satan struggles through hell in a Gustave Doré illustration of Paradise Lost.
