The Secretary of State Book

This is an over-long book full of untranslated blocks of French and Latin with some surprisingly good points, let me summarize them (the good points) for you:

1) Milton tries to educate the reader through PL by repeatedly 'tempting' them to misinterpret the poem then showing them how they're wrong through the epic voice or God's speeches
2) God has to be such a boring character because He was to be authoritative and fun rhetoric is not authoritative
3) the epic voice is not always reliable
4) Milton uses some words (e.g. 'fallen', 'wand'ring', etc) repeatedly very different contexts, it's useful to keep an eye on them
5) the corruption of language after the Fall is shown through double-entendres in Adam and Eve's speeches
6) the War in Heaven is a mock-epic meant to show the superiority of Christian heroism over conventional epic poems / 'pagan' heroism
7) rereading Paradise Lost (and Milton's other texts) does a lot more to help your understanding of the poem than reading a book about it.

The fact that the chapters (more or less) follow the chronology of the poem and make it easier to read this alongside PL almost gained Fish an extra star, but then I remembered the appalling formatting of my edition.