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When I was a teenager, my mum suggested I read Lord of the Rings. Or perhaps it was The Hobbit. Whatever. There were some guys on horses, and maybe a spider. Th
by tom_ 3y ago
When I was a teenager, my mum suggested I read Lord of the Rings. Or perhaps it was The Hobbit. Whatever. There were some guys on horses, and maybe a spider. That's all I remember. It was boring as fuck, and I gave up at about page 70,000 - or so it felt like. I was still young enough that I hadn't realised that you could just give up at page 2 if you wanted.
Anyway, dear reader, I guess my point is: if you hate this fucking shit too, you are not alone.
- zabzonk 3y agoWell, what kind of novels do you like?
- tremon 3y agoI never could get past the first chapter of The Hobbit. An Unexpected Party just drones on and on. The Lord Of The Rings also had its long slow introduction, but at least it wasn't as tedious as The Hobbit's.
- jamincan 3y agoYou might enjoy the comic version of The Hobbit by David Wenzel more than Tolkien's original. It was how I was introduced to Tolkien, and was, frankly, the high-point of Tolkien for me personally.
- hotnfresh 3y agoI bailed on Fellowship about 50 pages from the end, I think. Gandalf had just fallen a few pages back. Hated it, enjoyed basically zero pages I’d read. And I’ve read and enjoyed plenty of other fantasy, and routinely read long fiction books (mostly “classics”) that’d bore a lot of folks to tears. My favorite book is To the Lighthouse and about a third of it’s about an empty house. I finished every page of Lichteim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature (all three volumes!) and hot damn was a lot of that boring. I like the Telemachus books of The Odyssey. LOTR, though, was too boring for me, just couldn’t keep going. I couldn’t stomach one more elf song or backstory of a tree. Though I acknowledge that’s probably some very-specific pathology of mine, rather than the book’s fault. I do seem to be wrong, in a sense, in this judgement. Oddly enough, I later read The Hobbit, and loved that. I do enjoy the Peter Jackson films (extended, especially for ROTK, which kinda sucks in its theatrical cut)
- musicale 3y agoI imagine Peter Jackson's screenplays for The Hobbit are longer than the original novel by some margin.
- musicale 3y agoHaving recently slogged through some fantasy/sf tomes weighing in at 900 pages or more, I have to say that they make Tolkien - or Dickens for that matter - seem terse by comparison. To make matters worse, some of these monstrosities aren't even complete in themselves but are the first (or Nth) volume in an excessively long series. Perhaps novellas aren't commercially viable anymore, but I miss them.
- piaste 3y agoIt is difficult to tell a coherent story that ends in a satisfactory manner within a preset number of pages. Endings, outside of "and this is how everyone died", are inherently arbitrary and artificial, and it's tricky to disguise that. And if you're blessed with imagination, there is always one more character to do justice to, one more neighbourhood to explore. (Or, if you're Tolkien, one more etymology to plant.) At the same time, there is a certain type of curious, intelligent, often young reader that delights in those details. They want to know more about that character who spoke two sentences but made a big impression; they want to know how the neighbourhood the protagonist walked through came to be so peculiar. The market for massive 18-book series is a product of the happy match of that type of writer with that type of reader. But it's totally OK to not be that type of reader.
- musicale 3y ago> there is a certain type of curious, intelligent, often young reader that delights in those details > The market for massive 18-book series is a product of the happy match of that type of writer with that type of reader. But it's totally OK to not be that type of reader. Indifferent/stupid/old readers should probably keep reading Tolkien, Dickens and other authors known for published brevity - Melville or Tolstoy perhaps.