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What's the appeal in Lord of the Rings?
I've recently been press ganged by my friends into joining a Lord of the Rings book club and it's one of the more significant Ls I've taken in a long time. We've finished the Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Rings and I'm actually not sure I've ever read fiction this boring. Gargantuan amounts of the plot are just them wandering through the woods. The characterization is borderline nonexistent and the dialogue is so stilted that I have trouble keeping the characters apart - why are there even two characters for Mary and Pippin when as far as I can tell they're the same character? Every page feels like a slog, the only decent part is Tolkien has nice descriptions of scenery.
I'm not trying to be a dick though, I want to enjoy these books, everyone tells me they're great. What am I missing? What should I be looking for / trying to get out of them?
It's been almost a month. If you've read much more since you posted that, did whatever things we were talking about improve the reading experience?
Yeah it has actually, sort of meant to do a follow up post and never really got around to it but I've definitely been enjoying it more. @OracleOutlook's suggestion to use the Phil Dragesh audiobook was a gamechanger. I usually read history and my goal is kind of just processing information as efficiently as possiblec, which isn't so well suited here. By taking away my ability to control the speed of reading I was able to get more of an immersive experience. I feel like that's also helped me appreciate the other elements people like yourself mentioned, like all the worldbuilding and references to the world being fallen from ancient greatness.
I've also just been enjoying the Two Towers more. The Fellowship felt like a lot of build up but I've read Book III now and it feels like the plot is progressing and more action is happening. My friend sent me the ACOUP series getting into the weeds of the battles which also helped me appreciate how much background effort went into making the world belieavable/functional.
Glad to hear you're enjoying it!
Yeah, books 3 and 5 are my favorites, I think because of what you were saying, that it feels most like the plot is progressing and important things are happening.
If you like things that read more like history, you'd probably enjoy the appendices, especially appendix A, once you finish. (A, B, E, and F are the ones I enjoy more.) You'd also like most of the Silmarillion—the first two sections aren't very history-ish, but once you get to the third (which is by far the largest section), it's much more like history than Lord of the Rings, and I found it fun. It's the sort of work where you need to be regularly consulting family trees and maps to keep track of what is going on.
I'll definitely be checking out the Simarillion then! Good to hear it's rewarding because I'm pretty sure I signed up for it by accident along with the others when I joined the Book Club - I honestly hadn't realized Tolkien had written anything else.
If you kept reading at the same pace, you should have finished the book by now. How did you find it, now that you're (probably) done?
I haven't responded earlier mostly because I'm trying to think of something more intelligent to say and unfortunately I don't have a ton lol. I found the first two books pretty rough but I liked the last book the most; the battle scenes were impressive and the sense of resolution in the final sections was very satisfying. I think I came to appreciate the series more as a whole after having read the entire thing in a way that no individual book probably could have achieved, just because it all kind of builds up grand epic style. I also came to appreciate the prose more, which previously I found kind of a slog but I think helped establish the series of something that felt older or out of a different time. I listened to a lecture on Tolkien's translation of Beowulf and heard that Tolkien was interested in how Beowulf made references to other events or writings that we have no remaining records of now, and tried to sort of recreate the effect of a document that existed in a time and world separate to ours but constantly referencing or hinting at it in tantalizing ways, and I think he definitely achieved that.
Overall I'm definitely grateful to have read the series and the suggestions people like yourself offered here definitely helped me appreciate the series more, especially understanding it as a sort of shell of a former world full of magic and life. I actually am trying to read the Simarillion now as you recommended, and will report back when that's completed.
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Lemme say right at the outset that people like different things, and it's totally fine not to like a piece of art many people find great. If you've found the Hobbit boring, it seems likely that these books just aren't for you, and that's ok. Some people love Proust, some find his books boring (I'm in the latter camp). With a bit of help especially however, even the latter group can still appreciate their genius, even if it's still not their cup of tea, so to speak.
One thing I'd like to say to you right away, though, is that the Lord of the Rings is not really a trilogy - it's one book in three tomes. If you've only read the first, it's like watching the first third of a movie and deciding it's boring. Totally fine too, but you haven't seen the full thing yet. More specifically, for instance, Merry and Pippin get more fleshed out and differentiated later in the story. Characterization is more through actions than words or descriptions, and you need the full story for the picture to be complete.
The slow start, for example, is to provide a contrast and a slow escalation of a camping trip adventure into something much more epic and darker. The hobbits' return to the Shire at the end of the tale, which is one of my favorite parts of the book and mirrors the feeling of a soldier returning home after a terrible war as Tolkien did after WW1 - but this only works in the books because we've become familiar with the Shire during the slow start, so we can appreciate the contrast in the perception of the characters and the change in how the community they return to sees them in turn.
The worldbuilding, sense of wonder, and love of nature the book evokes have been covered in other replies, but I'd add that Tolkien wanted to write a story containing the core elements of Christianity and Nordic mythology, but without allegory or direct counterparts and comparisons. An original, epic tale containing the *essences *of these two views of the world, as he saw them. Even if you find the book a bit boring, this is an aspect you might find intriguing and challenging (what are these core aspects presented in the story?), just like you might find a film kinda boring but appreciate the excellent photography work.
Here's a few non-obvious things I love from the first book:
How Tolkien describes things. When the Balrog appears in Moria, you have no idea what it is and get no real explanation (although Tolkien could have provided a lore explanation in excrutiating detail, there is none). However, Legolas, who has been established as skilled, ageless, and carefree when others despair, upon seeing the Balrog drops the arrow he had been nocking and covers his face in despair. You don't know what's going on and what this new danger is, but you do understand the shit has truly hit the fan. This is an example of worldbuilding and characterization, Tolkien-style, that may not be obvious and appreciated on a first read. Firstly, his incredible restraint in providing lore (imagine building a world in excrutiating detail and then providing basically no information when an important element of it enters your tale), and secondly, how he narrates and explains the relations between mysterious things by setting up characters as being a certain way (note how unafraid Legolas is of the fury of the mountain earlier in the story) and then contrasting this with their reaction in a different situation. The reader's point of view remains that of the hobbits (they are a bit bland for a reason, too), and they/we know almost nothing of this fantastical world, looking to wiser and stronger characters to understand what things mean.
I'm very sad that Legolas' arrow-dropping scene didn't make it into the movies, incidentally.
The escalation of horror. I was incredibly captivated by the whole Moria sequence in the first book, which is when things really get serious. The whole thing is basically Lovecraftian - especially the very vague but terrible Watcher in the Water. Then there's the magnificent ruins of an ancient civilization, the journal detailing the desperate last stand of the heroic dwarves (the "THEY ARE COMING" bit still gives me shivers - and it's written in hasty elvish script, not dwarven runes, a nice bit of worldbuidling even there), the bravery of the hitherto cowardly and meek hobbits in fighting the orcs, mirroring the desperate heroism of the last stand of the dwarves, and the final confrontation between Gandalf and the Balrog, an entity that's so beyond us that even powerful characters like Aragorn and Legolas can't hope to even try to fight it but can only flee as Gandalf looses his own desperate battle against it.
Again, it's totally fine not to like stuff like Lovecraft, journal entries in a destroyed facility (System Shock/Bioshock), or archeological wonder, or if the book's way of handling them just doesn't gel with you, but I found this stuff facinating. Also note in all of this that "heroic but doomed battle against outer monstrosities of Chaos, that is heroic because it is doomed" is one of those core themes of Nordic mythology that Tolkien is incoporating here.
Finally, let's look at the death of Boromir. Boromir has succumbed to the temptation of the Ring, failed in his oaths to protect the Ringbearer and attacked him himself, failed to protect the hobbits he tried to defend against the sudden attack by the orcs, and failed in his overall mission to bring aid to his homeland of Gondor. As he dies, he says to Aragon that he has failed. But Aragorn is one of the wise characters in the books: wise characters pick their words carefully and generally have a deep and correct moral understanding of the world. And Aragorn tells Boromir, as Boromir dies, that no, he has not failed, he has conquered: few have won such a victory.
Why does Aragorn say this, if Boromir has failed utterly in all his goals? I won't go too deep into this, but for Tolkien wordly success or failure is not the main thing. What is truly important is the moral battle within our hearts and conscience, and here Boromir prevailed in the end, in the face of the terrible, insourmoutable temptation of the Ring. Elements of the core ideas of Christianity are here, of course, but also of Nordic mythology where the ultimate defeat of all the gods and heroes during Ragnarok is no repudiation of the rightness of their cause and their moral victory.
Finally, let me offer another avenue of appreciating Tolkien: historical and military realism despite the fantasy setting. Here's a series of excellent and scholarly articles on military and historical accuracy in the books: https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/
These may appeal to you even if the books don't, and they show Tolkien's deep understanding of strategy, logistics, and historical battles. The articles also help appreciate things that may not be obvious to a reader immediately - how differently battles work in Tolkien, who went through the horror of WW1, than in basically almost every other author and depiction, fantasy or otherwise. These things are not even close to being spelled out in the book, but morale and cohesion are the true decisive factors in every battle in the books, and once you appreciate how deeply that theme runs despite never being obvious, you also see how computer-gamey many other battles in media actually are (including in the LotR films).
There, I hope I've offered a bit of stuff to help answer your question :)
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I actually brought this up before back on reddit - I was in the same boat as you, I tried reading the series again after reading lore entries in the video games and thinking it deserved another look, but balking before they even leave the shire (the first time I tried reading it was as a child, that time I stopped when they were dancing naked in the forest).
The advice is received then was to just read the silmarillion. It's good advice.
But advice that requires a great deal of discernment to know whether it's applicable.
The first two sections of the Silmarillion I found hard to get through. The rest of the Silmarillion I enjoyed much more. But it definitely requires careful reading—continual consulting of the maps and family trees found at the back of the book so as not to get lost between the many people and keep track of their relationships with one another. If this isn't regularly consulted, you will in all likelihood get lost.
The Silmarillion reads much more like a history textbook than does the Lord of the Rings (not a perfect comparison). The style is very different. It's probably comparable to Appendix A of Lord of the Rings, per my recollection. Both are great.
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It's not great - it's first.
I say that as someone who grew up on Richard Rahl & The Wheel of Time and whose read parts of Malazan three time. Of course, The Sword of Truth is unbearable as an adult but it still has amazingly cool parts.
I think LOTR is fine but that's my entire opinion.
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The LOTR books are boring stories set in an amazing world.
Lord of the Rings is great because so much great fantasy fiction was written after LOTR, and all those worlds owe Tolkien for doing the heavy lifting.
Tolkien drops the façade of writing a novel all together with the The Silmarillion, finally doing what he loves best : writing encyclopedias.
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The way I would describe the Lord of the Rings books is "a few dozen pages of some of the most beautiful prose ever written in the English language surrounded by hundreds of pages narrating a camping trip in excruciating detail." As others mentioned, the hints of a larger world are a key part of the appeal, and I think for modern readers coming in having seen the Peter Jackson trilogy is a good idea, as one would already be invested in the characters and their stories and better able to appreciate the little extra details that Tolkien presents.
Regarding that larger world, it truly saddens me that the best parts of the Silmarillion are hidden behind obscurity and copyright and that their true majesty may never see the light of day. It could stand toe-to-toe with the actual historical mythologies of many cultures if given the chance, despite originating from the work of a single mind.
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I'll have to wholeheartedly agree with the comments of people about the sense of some great past that we now have only remnants of. Tolkien's really good at writing nostalgia. But then that also heightens what remnants we do have. Elrond, who has walked the earth for thousands of years, is lord of Rivendell, and the older still Galadriel of Lothlorien. Gondor still stands, the sons of the men of Numenor, and Aragorn, its heir, we are told is far more like the kings of old than any ruler has been for a long time. The civilizations are fading, a thing of the past, but what is left of them both shows the heights of what the elder days must have been like in middle earth, but also maintain a present dignity of their own. If you eventually decide you like Tolkien's worldbuilding, I can definitely recommend the appendices.
I think the other thing big thing that is a love of the things that are wholesome and honest and good. It is no accident that Tolkien is writing about hobbits, people who live essentially ordinary lives, doing ordinary things, until four of them end up on this journey. And it is no accident that songs occur in the book, even though they might often be seen as a slog by the readers, (and I suppose, often support the previous point), and that the book talks about laughter the way that it does. The hobbits are a homely and a hearty people. The fellowship, being nearly half hobbits, put the humble plainly on a level with the great.
I think it's in light of things of this sort that a lot of the things in Lord of the Rings should be seen. I think the delight in the book is maybe more in the people and peoples who are accomplishing things than in the things they accomplish.
I'm wondering if this could be some of the cause of the stilted dialogue, as you put it. Tolkien is not trying to write the way that we talk. If he were, he would be wretchedly failing. I think he is trying to make it poetic instead, and to give the right feel. Tolkien is attempting to describe characters and a world who delight in friendship and in song and in the good things of life, as they struggle onward with courage and earnestness towards a great danger, and also to portray loftiness, dignity among the great. He's not trying to imitate our world so much as make a better one. (although maybe that's put badly, as I'm quite confident he would think our world better than his.)
I think because of all this, because so much of the value in the book lies in the character of the people and places rather than in the barebones architecture of the plot, that it can be vulnerable to the problems that @OracleOutlook was talking about, and that taking care to not let that happen might help.
Oh, also, I've always found book 4 (the second part of the Two Towers) to be a drag anyway, but it sounds like you're not there yet.
I'll add also that I'm talking about the Lord of the Rings here. The Hobbit is pretty different in tone. There's clearly much less at stake in that—just a quest they're going on vs. a threat to the whole of middle earth.
Let us know if any of our thoughts affects how much you like it once you read a little further!
@Soriek I would definitely underscore this point. When he wrote LOTR, Tolkien was very consciously trying to create an English epic. He wanted something that was comparable to the epics from antiquity he studied, but written in a way that evoked his own country. So if the dialogue seems stilted, I'd say it's because he is deliberately trying to match that tone.
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I appreciate the really fleshed out response here and I’ll definitely try to read it through that angle. I think i had mostly treated the references to the older times as background noise instead of a contrast that helps define the present world, and that’s definitely something i can appreciate more.
I have actually also been trying to understand the dialogue in that same sense - not as how people talk but as sort of an epic poetry. I struggle relating to Shakespeare’s dialogue for the same reason but I can appreciate it from a distance at least.
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It took me several attempts before I made it all the way through The Lord of the Rings. For a while I enjoyed reading other people writing about Lord of the Rings without having read it myself. I liked the idea of LOTR. I liked the themes, the analysis, the motives. But I didn't like the book itself.
I eventually read it through a book club type thing - someone was reading it for the first time and blogged about it one chapter a day. I read a chapter a day alongside the blogger and made it through, though it still felt like a slog. I got through it mostly because I still enjoyed reading other people's commentaries.
A few years later, I discovered the very best way of reading the books bar none. Find a park, garden, or other naturalish place. Walk around and listen to Phil Dragash's recording of the book. Listen to it early in the morning while you watch the sunrise on your front porch. Sip coffee or tea. Listen to it while performing whatever you consider a simple pleasure in life.
I think part of the problem is I want to get through a book. I only read 30-40 books a year, and sometimes wish I could skip the reading part and just know the details of the book. LOTR takes a long time to get through, and if your eyes are skipping ahead to the next plot point you are missing most of the experience of reading it. It's not a thriller. Audiobooks are the best medium for me when it comes to this kind of slow, experience based book. I know I'm going to "lose" X hours of time to it, I'm not trying to rush through. I can work it into a routine more easily.
The first time I read LOTR was just before the movies came out, and I read Fellowship whilst in the hospital with chest pains. Reading a story of four friends on a cross-country adventure was a real comfort at the time.
(I had been trying to impress a friend by swallowing air to burp, but one painful gulp never yielded a belch. Within an hour I had chest pains. I had torn a tiny hole in my esophagus and the air was in my interstitial chest cavity, nearly collapsed a lung.)
I had seen the Rankin-Bass Return of the King and The Hobbit, so I knew how it ended but not how it began. It wasn’t until around 2008 when I saw Ralph Bakshi’s LOTR, which was just Fellowship and Two Towers.
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This is extremely similar to my own experience with reading in general. And I'll definitely have to give the Phil Dragash audio a try, thanks for the recommendation.
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As an unabashed and unrepentant Tolkien superfan, I will say that Fellowship takes off significantly once they get to Bree. If you're not there yet, definitely hold on.
It's a phenomenal tale told with beautiful prose. But really the core of the appeal of fantasy is of being transported to another place; to escape the dull, superficial reality we live in for a world that is suffused with magical unreality. Part of why Tolkien sits at the apex of the genre is that The Lord of the Rings depicts a world much grander than our own, shrunken and withered. There is a sense of longing and nostalgia for a forgotten and irrevocably lost past when we greater than we are now. I think that people very keenly feel some loss of wonder and grandeur in the world, whether that loss be cultural, intellectual, environmental, and Lord of the Rings laments that loss in a very evocative way.
I saw someone point this out very clearly the other day: we associate "post-apocalyptic" with Sci-Fi, so we don't immediately recognize the Lord of the Rings as post-apocalyptic fantasy!
There were civilizations who carved statues and skyscrapers out of mountains, who turned forests into pocket universes of magic and beauty, who uplifted other forests to sentience, who built subcontinent-spanning empires ...
And we're walking through their ruins, terrified at the likelihood that even the few remaining places that people can call home are going to be lost as well. We see remnants of magic fading away, remnants of high culture in retreat, we've been outright told that past victories were hollow and temporary, and we can see that even another victory here would be merely the beginning of hope to preserve just a part of what's left ...
And what's left is still beautiful enough to want to preserve, if only a part of it, for however long it and however much of it can last. "We have fought the long defeat", says Galadriel, but even that length itself is a form of victory.
I wouldn't call LOTR post-apocalyptic just because there was no apocalypse. The world is in a long, slow decline rather than having had a single event after which everything is inferior to what came before. Even in the beginning of the world, there are legendary deeds that can't be replicated (Yavanna can't make replacements for the Two Trees, and Fëanor can't recreate the Silmarils).
I mean, at least as the movies present it, you could call Sauron's first attack a form of Apocalypse.
And there was an even bigger attack (with a bigger defense) ages before that from Morgoth. But really, even before that the world was in decline. It's just the nature of the world Tolkien created, and it wasn't pushed into decline by any particular event.
Also, I wouldn't count the movies' depiction of anything in LOTR as being particularly meaningful. They're good movies, but Peter Jackson didn't really grok LOTR if the movies are anything to go by.
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That's a beautiful way to put it and I think that was a feature I noticed but never quite grasped when I first read them.
So much of the world is so inherently 'unimpressive' when viewed objectively. The Mines of Moria are cavernous and extensive... and (almost) completely uninhabited. But through Gimli we understand that they used to be bustling and productive on a scale that would be hard to imagine. And yet in the story's present, they're just some big caves.
The Kingdom of Rohan is legendary for its vast horseback armies. And when we first encounter it it's basically crumbling apart due to the King being decrepit.
Time and time again we encounter some amazing monument to the achievements of a bygone civilization, and the current residents are kind of just milling around in them waiting for... something. Except many of the characters are old enough to remember those bygone civilizations, and indeed have to be reminded why it might be worth fighting to preserve what is left.
It simultaneously makes the world feel extensively 'lived in' and also lends that "sense of longing and nostalgia for a forgotten and irrevocably lost past" as a thematic and atmospheric feature of the story.
This and your point below about the Tom Bombadil chapters did actually add a lot for me, and I'll try to read the books appreciating that perspective
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Matt Colville did a D&D video on dead empires and quoted this bit from Elrond.
Which really drives home that the world we see is a shadow of a shadow of what it once was.
And funny enough, this actually helps the Tom Bombadil portion of book 1 make more thematic sense to me. On first read it sticks out like a sore thumb for how 'unneeded' it is.
But the existence of Tom, his carefree attitude and isolation from the rest of the world, and the raw power he displays in an entirely flippant manner is, if I recall, the first and biggest hint the reader gets that this world used to be full of powerful entities who were capable of casual acts of both creation and destruction. And it turns out they still exist in certain pockets of the world, but they're so rare that they have faded mostly into mythic status.
So he plugs into the greater story as a simple example of the what the world used to be like, where entities like Tom or the Balrog or, I guess Shelob counts, were commonly encountered and together created a much richer, more dynamic world than the one we find them in, where they're hemmed in to their little corner having very little influence on the course of events. Doesn't make the Bombadil chapters any less weird, but you can see what Tolkein was trying to get across to the readers early on.
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I saw you say in another comment that you expect to get crucified, but I don't think people are going to be mad or anything. Not everything is for everyone. That said, I disagree with you and I think that LOTR is excellent. Here are reasons why I think the book is great:
It's the OG high fantasy book. Basically every fantasy book you've ever read was influenced by it in some way, even if that was by way of the author disliking LOTR and consciously making something different. That alone qualifies it as one of the all time greats.
The book is genuinely good on its own merits. The plot is interesting and makes you want to know how it ends. The prose is enjoyable to read (I still get chills when I read some of the passages in that book because they're just so well written). The characters are fun to see go on an adventure. Basically, this book does the things that books are supposed to.
The book has a really well thought out world that it hints at but doesn't directly tell you about. When I first read LOTR, I was fascinated by these little glimpses of a larger world that the plot exists in (e.g. mentions of Fëanor), and it made me positively hungry to learn more. Which of course was by design - years later I read a bit where Tolkien talked about how he showed a bit of scenery on the horizon, so to speak, to make the reader curious what's over there and want to learn more. But this makes the book really interesting to me.
If you're not feeling it, I don't think there's something wrong with you or anything like that. But for my money, LOTR really is as good as they say, and stands head and shoulders above the movies (which were good movies in their own right but terrible adaptations).
I'll give a qualified admission that I've never been super gripped by fantasy in general, so it might just be a personal taste thing. That is another element to this though, I've already encountered all the tropes that Tolkien created done in a dozen different contexts; I'm trying to imagine experiencing them freshly the way new readers would but it's a challenge.
There was a section that did it for me at the end of the first book, where Frodo goes to the top of the hill with the ring and has the vision. I'm not sure why that scene wasn't in the movie, it seemed pretty cinema-ready.
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It is really something that blew my mind as a 9 year old; there are all these references in the text to some greater shared culture that the reader is not a part of. It makes it really feel like an alien world, that their touchstones are something unknown and unknowable to us. It's very much a contrast to other mediocre sci-fi/fantasy which often does a poor job of creating that second world, such that their cultural memory and way of speaking is still very much that of a person living in modern-day North America or Europe. You know, like when a character in the year 48032 speaks of "the 20th century band The Beatles". And it's just cooler when the text doesn't trip over itself to keep its reader in the know. 9 year old me thought it was really cool that the battering ram Grond was named after the "Hammer of the Underworld", but it was even more awesome that Tolkien then made no attempt to explain what that meant.
(Of course this was all largely accidental: Tolkien meant for The Silmarillion to be published alongside The Lord of the Rings so that all these unexplained references would be filled in by the accompanying backstories. But I think it ended up working great as it turned out)
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I read the books when I was a child and was profoundly unimpressed, and consider the movies to be at least visually striking.
It just seems grossly overrated to me, autistically obsessive conlanging isn't my thing, and it just isn't my cup of tea.
It has actually been a huge relief hearing I'm not alone here. Kinda thought I'd get crucified for this one.
I feel you, there are plenty of people here who swear by them, and even Scott himself is pretty damn fond of it!
It's hard for me to articulate why I'm utterly underwhelmed, especially when it's been more than a decade since I read them, but on reflection I'm not fond of the anti-industrialism, the sheer black and white nature of the setting, cop-outs like the eagles, overly indulgent prose etc.
Each to their own I suppose!
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"Seinfeld" Is Unfunny
It was first published in 1954 and has been very influential. The problem is that you won't find anything new there now if you've already read other fantasy books.
Yeah that's probably a huge part of it. I'm trying to experience it as though I'm someone encountering all these tropes for the first time but I'm probably so used to them that I can't experience the same novelty and wonder as a first timer.
It’s ironic that I’d been a lifelong lover of science fiction and didn’t read fantasy (other than Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept, which barely counts). LOTR was the first fantasy book series I read, and so I got it all firsthand.
I feel like the two genres get bundled together but for some people scratch different itches. I’ve never been a major scifi guy but always took to it more easily than fantasy, and I absolutely love the cyberpunk subgenre
My Triessentialist view is that SF/F as a mega-genre addresses three itches which realistic fiction has to try harder to scratch:
The What - The desire to see or imagine amazing and impossible things, and see other species or peoples in fascinating and unique garb - Science Fiction or Fantasy
The How - The desire to understand a world or a society which functions in fascinating yet logical ways - Science Fiction or Fantasy
The Why - The desire to have unique or intoxicatingly different feelings as members of or visitors to fantastic societies and their rituals, goals, and folkways - Science Fiction or Fantasy
Or, in familiar words, "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."
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LOTR is the exceedingly rare case where I prefer the movie adaptation over the book. I found the Hobbit and Fellowship books enjoyable, but the Frodo sections of Two Towers and ROTK were... difficult to push through. Movie Two Towers made the right decision to interweave Aragorn's story with Frodo's, instead of hitting you with it all in one uninterrupted block.
For real, Peter Jackson made tons of canny revisions and cutdowns. I read the books first. The movies were better. So much of the LOTR screams "this author can't kill his darlings", with all the poetry and digressions into the Middle Earth history and Tom Bombadil sidestories. Furthermore, Jackson made the brilliant decision to add scenes from the villains' POV, creating opportunities for tense foreshadowing of the threats the fellowship will soon face.
The good professor Tokien of course remains a legend and a trailblazer, but only in the same way Newton is. Everyone respects Newton. No one thinks he was right about everything.
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Don't try to force yourself to read them if you aren't enjoying it. Maybe it is something in the old writing style that doesn't agree with you. I remember when Dan Brown was all the rage and I really wanted to like the books but... I only managed read Digital Fortress to completion and I hated it. There are so many other books and authors out there to read. I might be getting back into reading the Three Body Problem trilogy again, I needed a break after the first book since it gave me a bit of existential angst.
Unfortunately I think that the trilogy goes down in quality with every successive entry. The Three Body Problem is amazing, on par with the classics imo. The Dark Forest is still good, but not as brilliant as the first book was. Death's End is... not that good. It's not awful, but it's not particularly good either. I wouldn't say to not finish the series, but I would say to not necessarily expect the same level of brilliance to keep up.
I hear you about the existential angst though. Those books are so depressing. If I learned anything reading the series, it's that Cixin Liu really needs a hug.
I haven't read "The Three Body Problem" yet, so idk if I'm talking about a similar feeling, but Charles Stross' "Palimpsest" put me into a very strange state of mind closer to the end. It begins as a straight up rewrite of Asimov's "The End of Eternity" (which Stross freely admits) but then goes elsewhere.
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Actually what he really needs is to be pinned down in the playground and have his nipples twisted, for tricking me into reading that terrible fanfic with his endorsement.
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Actually I'm just about to start Dark Forest, hoping it won't disappoint too much. I've heard a lot of people weren't happy with the different translator.
I thought the different translator was fine. It's a bit different, yeah, but it's not bad or anything.
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I was a kid when I read his books, and I actually took the claims of technical and scientific accuracy seriously at the time. On reflection, the sheer stupidity of the depiction of things like encryption just makes me cringe. Magically self-reassembling cryptography anyone?
I think the only novel that somewhat holds up is the one set in the poles, the whole intrigue bit about fabricated discoveries was pretty cool, if nothing else.
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