Guy Crouchback’s angry eruption in Men at Arms made me stop and pause; I just had to enjoy it slowly.

“Sudden wrath is always alarming, recalling as it does the awful unpredictable dooms of childhood.”

Wonderfully precise. Waugh does in fifteen or so words what would take some authors a paragraph or more.

Wanting to deepen your understanding of literature is a great thing.

But Paradise Lost is an extremely rich and allusive poem, and you absolutely should not beat yourself up for not fully comprehending it on the first read.

I want to have the skills to read a text and proficiently find an essays worth of insight within it.

Well, just to start with Milton: have you read the Bible? That’s a foundational text for LOTS of Western literature, to speak nothing of how crucial it is in understanding Paradise Lost.

Obviously the Bible has baggage. Replace it with the Iliad. Or Shakespeare. Or a sensible modern translation of Beowulf, or one that has annotations that don’t leave you feeling like a dumbass.

I guess my advice is to start by reading more widely, instead of going straight into critical analysis of dense works.

Sure, if I think I’ll return to it often.

Good-Bye to All That is a book I leaf through all the time, never rereading it in its entirety but opening at random and taking in a paragraph, a page, a chapter.

P.G. Wodehouse.

Do you like any Portuguese writers?