Milton Goes to Hollywood

I'm not quite sure what to think about the news of Paradise Lost, the movie. Yup. You read that right. Hollywood is making Milton's epic poem into a feature length film. The budget is over $100 million. That's more than enough to produce quite the battle between God and Lucifer. It's live action, so I wonder who they are going to get to play Lucifer? And will God actually appear, or will the angels do all the work? And if God does appear, who will play him? I have absolutely no hope that this will be a good movie. But I'm looking forward to the Milton movie tie-in editions and the prospect of mass consumption of a poem! On a more personal book note, while I was at my library for the meeting the other day, I picked up Simon Winchester's book A Crack in the Edge of the World. My voices usually prefer I read fiction at lunch, but they told me it's their prerogative to mix things up as they see fit. Since they seem to have grasped the reins in my reading of late I had to go along. So far I am enjoying the book. I've always thought of geology as nothing other than naming rocks, but Winchester explains that it is so much more and manages to make it sound downright glamorous. My only quibble thus far is that he tends to write down to the reader on occasion. It's rather annoying to be reading merrily along and then suddenly come upon a paragraph in which I am being talked to like a sixth grader. But it's only sometimes and, at the moment at least, I am willing to overlook it. Off to read. Cloud Atlas is calling out to me.