Bookish Thoughts

Good lord this book is boring. I really liked Fellowship of the Ring.  There were fun adventures and we got to meet interesting people and explore Middle Earth. The first half of The Two Towers  is like this, too. But then it just gets bleak. And in this installment there's a whole lot of war followed by way too many sappy good byes. Seriously, this book takes longer to end than the movie does, which is pretty impressive. If you like reading about war, then this book is great. There are epic battles and heroic moments. But that bores me. Not to mention that the prose comes across as biblical. I honestly can't remember if this happened in the earlier installments or if it was unique to this book. It could be the I was so disenchanted with the plot that the language was bothering me more. Or it could have really been different. Either way, this book was a struggle. I honestly almost gave it up a few times. But I'm stubborn. I couldn't just not finish thi...

As I approached the end of the second installment in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings I began to remember why it's been so long since I read this book. Why I never got around to the Appendices or The Silmarillion.  This book gets bleak and then it gets a bit boring. It's like the fourth season of Battlestar Galactica. There's only so much depression I can take before I stop connecting with the characters and lose interest. The Two Towers  is split in half. The first half focuses on the members of the fellowship who aren't continuing on to Mordor. Merry and Pippin get kidnapped by orcs and find themselves in the Entwood just in time to incite the Ents to destroying Isengard and defeating Saruman. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli get sidetracked in their attempts to rescue Merry and Pippin and drawn into a battle to protect the horse lords of Rohan. Despite being so disconnected from the main plot, I really liked this half of the book. The action jumps between the ...

The Fellowship of the Ring is the first third of JRR Tolkien's epic fantasy classic The Lord of the Rings . But you probably already knew that. These books are pervasive, especially since the release of the movies nearly a decade ago. I read this book first when I was thirteen. And I didn't quite get it. The story is fun and interesting, but the world is so rich that I got bogged down. I couldn't keep Aragorn's five names straight. I didn't quite understand that the Nazgul and the Ringwraiths were the same thing. I conflated Saruman and Sauron and processed both names as Sa__r__on which led to lots on confusion. But I liked what I understood of the story. The hobbits were awesome. The adventure was exciting. The myriad cultures were interesting. The movies started coming out a few years later and really helped with my comprehension of the story. I finally sorted everything out and understood what was happening. Now that I'm revisiting the books...

The Hobbit is a pretty awesome introduction to JJR Tolkien's Middle-Earth. It's a fun children's book with danger and adventure and cool new creatures. It's definitely lighter and less dense that The Lord of the Rings , but gets you interested in this world and what else is going on. The chapters in the first half of the book follow a fairly basic formula. Bilbo and the dwarves meet some new creature on their journey to the Lonely Mountain. These creatures include fairly benign beings like the elves, eagles, and Beorn. There are also villains, like the trolls, orcs, spiders, and Gollum. Over the course of the book, Bilbo become more confident in his skills as he goes from hiding from the trolls to defeating the spiders and saving all his friends. The back half of the book is more concerned with Smaug, whose defeat Bilbo contributes to but isn't responsible for. Then there's a battle over who gets to keep the treasure and finally Bilbo gets to go...