- Tuesday, March 26, 2019
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It has been a long road—The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and now finally The Return of the King. Of course, I also need to reread The Tolkien Reader and I’m still debating whether or not to read The Book of Lost Tales… but we’re not going to worry about that today. For now, just enjoy this weird, emotional review.
- Tuesday, February 19, 2019
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It’s been such a long time since I reviewed The Fellowship of the Ring! I hate leaving you guys hanging like that, but the six months I spent not reading Tolkien did my brain a lot of good—I had enough time to miss him and Middle Earth. By the time I got back to The Two Towers, I needed another vacation in a picturesque imaginary location. Since my introduction to The Fellowship of the Ring review included my entire Lord of the Rings backstory, we’re just going to skip that and jump straight into The Two Towers.
- Tuesday, February 12, 2019
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When I was little, my grandparents had two guest rooms. One was pretty typical: a double bed, nightstands, and a chest full of extra quilts. The other was the grandkid room. It had a hideous woven tweed hide-a-bed couch, a closet with a tub of plastic toys, a hexagon end table full of VHS tapes, and a TV. My brother and I would lay on the hide-a-bed, eat ice cream out of vintage Corelle teacups, and watch movies before going to sleep. The Wizard of Oz and Land Before Time 2-4 were our top picks. Why not the original Land Before Time? She didn’t have it. But that is neither here nor there—today I discuss my first and second read-throughs of L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and how it struck me as someone who grew up with the film.
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- Tuesday, January 22, 2019
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After finishing The Man in the Iron Mask (the final section of The Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later) I took a break from Alexandre Dumas for 40 days. I totally thought it was going to be longer, but I burned through my backlog of podcasts and needed something to listen to at work. I already had The Count of Monte Cristo on my MP3 player, so it was my default choice. Within a few chapters, I was hooked.
- Tuesday, January 15, 2019
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My freshman year was a rocky one, some reasons for which I’ll get to in a moment. At the time, my Mom babysat my oldest niece, who took a nap every day from 3-6 P.M. Even then, the transition to waking was unpleasant. I have never met such a hardcore napper.
That year I had a nasty cold for months but went to school anyway. If I didn’t, I’d have to take a lower grade in P.E. or stay after and do makeups on the elliptical, which would cause me to miss the bus home. I lived ten miles from my high school, so walking wasn’t an option either. If I wanted to do P.E. makeups, I’d have to get Mom to wake the sleeping dragon baby and come pick me up.
Most of the time, staying home was simply not worth it. I would push on through the week and swear to get more sleep over the weekend. One Friday during lunch I learned that we were going to have the pacer test in P.E. that day, and decided it was time to go home. I’d nearly died doing it the last time, when I was healthy-ish. Doing it with a cold was a recipe for hospitalization, or at least vomit.
Once in the school office and holding the phone, I realized that I couldn’t remember my new home phone number (we'd just started getting our phone service through an MLM). Dangit cold brain! Finally, I remembered my mom’s cell number and she came to get me. It was early enough in the day that baby dragon was not yet sleepy and cranky.
When we got home, my mom gave me a pack of cold medicine. She sent me to bed, telling me the dose was two tablets. I took them and slept for fourteen consecutive hours. Upon waking, I discovered that the label read “New single-tablet dose!” Never listen to your mother. Always read the directions on the medicine.
While I recovered, I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. I would read a couple of chapters, then take a nap. I did that over and over again until I finished the books. By the time I was done, I wasn’t sure how much of what I remembered came from the books themselves, and how much was from my own delirious dreams of growing and shrinking.
That was almost nine years ago. On this reread I was pleased to discover that everything I remembered from the books is still there, though not necessarily in the order I thought it was. (I blame the influence of the Disney and Tim Burton film adaptations.) Now let’s dive down the rabbit hole!
- Tuesday, November 20, 2018
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You may have noticed that I’ve been avoiding the final installment of the d’Artagnan Romances. Or maybe not; it’s easy to miss things that never show up. It’s not that I wasn’t looking forward to it—really, I was! But when I added up the story segments, it was almost 80 hours long. Who has 80 hours to devote to a book? How can you keep that much story in your head over the sheer span of time it would take to read such a behemoth tome? Could it even keep a person’s attention for so long?
I debated reading and reviewing it in sections, but since there is no universal agreement on how the story should be divided (there are three, four, and five-volume versions), I concluded that it must not divide well. I wasn't totally right, but we'll get to that later.
So I did what every serious book nerd does: I procrastinated. I tried to start it once but only got a few chapters into the story before I got distracted by something else. It sat untouched on my mp3 player for four months. Finally, our move left me with enough hours of tedious packing, unpacking, and cleaning that I could not only justify listening to such a ridiculously massive book, I actually looked forward to it.
- Tuesday, November 13, 2018
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I started reading and reviewing The Chronicles of Narnia books individually, but later I realized how silly that is for a series with this many short books. So instead of continuing to review one book at a time, I’m going to tackle the series overall today. Wish me luck.
- Tuesday, September 18, 2018
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In middle school, I had a friend who had a wardrobe. When she got fed up with everything, she’d say, “Screw it. I’m going to Narnia,” and climb into said wardrobe. Except that she dropped the F-bomb instead of the nicey-nice version I’ve written out for you…
I’m not sure exactly how old I was when I first read The Chronicles of Narnia. It might have been fourth or fifth grade—definitely before this incident and before the film came out in 2005. Today I reveal my thoughts on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe after my third or fourth read-through, now as a twenty-four-year-old.
- Tuesday, July 24, 2018
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At a used book sale back in April, I picked up a copy of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. When I first saw the title, my reaction was “Either this is a classic and it sounds familiar because I’ve heard people mention it before, or it sounds familiar because it has a really generic-sounding fantasy title.” After reading it, I can say that it definitely is a classic, but I also have a lot of mixed feelings about it, which I am going to lay out for you today.
- Tuesday, July 10, 2018
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This must be the year of the reread. I swear I read new books sometimes! But recently I’ve enjoyed digging into old favorites, seeing how they’ve shaped me as a writer, and trying to figure out what made them so good. While I chip away at longer books and wait to get others from the library, I'm starting a new series on The Chronicles of Narnia. In today’s post, I fangirl over The Magician’s Nephew and try to explain why the book is so enchanting that I’ve read it three or four times.
- Tuesday, June 26, 2018
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This is the second installment in my series on the BBC Radio dramatizations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which began as an accident. You can read more about the backstory here.
The complete BBC Radio Broadcast of The Lord of the Rings, written by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell, aired on BBC Radio 4 from March to August 1981. There were 26 half-hour episodes.
Today’s post will focus on the portion of the story considered equivalent to The Fellowship of the Ring.
- Tuesday, June 05, 2018
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I first read The Lord of the Rings when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. It was spring break and my family was on vacation. Like every family vacation from the time I was ten, I was sick. So while my family visited tourist traps and went swimming and whatever else people do on vacation, I was curled up on the couch by the gas fireplace with a book, a blanket, and a box of tissues. My options were to read or sleep. I chose reading. My reading options were…The Lord of the Rings, because those were the only books I had brought.
A couple of years later I tried to reread them and found that, under more normal circumstances, they were difficult to finish. I managed to reread The Fellowship of the Ring and the first couple chapters of The Two Towers before I lost patience and moved on to something else.
Was my lack of patience warranted? Was I just a too-busy teenager whose already taxed CP/AP brain couldn’t deal with another serious work of literature in her off time? Was the digital age destroying my ability to appreciate long books?
Today I discuss my third read-through of The Fellowship of the Ring, this time as an adult and a writer. Where appropriate, I make generalizations about LOTR or J.R.R. Tolkien overall, but some things are specific to Volume I.
Description
Bilbo Baggins has lived in the Shire quite comfortably since his adventure with the thirteen dwarves. But on the day Bilbo turns 111, he leaves.
He bequeaths nearly everything to his young cousin Frodo, including a mysterious ring that makes the wearer disappear. Bilbo’s old friend Gandalf the wizard cautions Frodo not to use it.
In the years that follow, Gandalf uncovers the ring’s dark secret and urges Frodo to take it from the Shire. They arrange a date and plan Frodo’s transition.
But they may be too late. Already dark figures ask about Baggins, and their horses move swifter than hairy hobbit feet.
- Tuesday, May 29, 2018
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Now, I don’t have much time to sit down and read, so even though I have all of the books in paperback, my first thought was “I’ll borrow the audiobooks from the library.”
This is where I made a mistake. Instead of looking them up on my library’s website, I looked them up in Overdrive. My library service had access to two versions of each title, a BBC dramatization, and an American dramatization. I placed holds the BBC versions, because Tolkien was English, and English accents are awesome.
So I waited. And waited. And waited. In the meantime, I came up with the idea to write book reviews for this blog. I read The Three Musketeers and The Silmarillion. I wrote their reviews.
When I finally got The Hobbit, it was awesome. It also wasn’t an audiobook. Instead, I had checked out a radio broadcast adaptation, which simply would not do. These are supposed to be book reviews, damn it! But in the end, I thought the broadcast was worth writing about too. So I finished the broadcast, took some notes, and then read my paperback.
- Tuesday, May 15, 2018
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Any time I start The Lord of the Rings, I feel obligated to read the whole trilogy—which is why I’ve only read it once in its entirety. Not so with The Hobbit. I can read one book and then move on to something else. It isn’t as big of a commitment, and I appreciate that. This is at least my third time reading it, maybe my fourth or fifth—I don’t remember.
I used to tell people interested in The Lord of the Rings to check out The Hobbit first, but as I’ve been rereading the books this time, I realize that LOTR and The Hobbit have some important differences that could make them appeal to different people. Today I’m going to get into some of the features of The Hobbit, who might like it, and who would do better to go straight to LOTR.
- Tuesday, May 08, 2018
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Twenty Years After is the second of the d’Artagnan Romances by Alexandre Dumas. If you're new to the series, check out my review of The Three Musketeers instead, because this review will include spoilers for what came before.
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- Tuesday, May 01, 2018
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This is going to be one of my weirder fantasy book reviews. When I first thought to alternate between classics and fantasy, I assumed that the fantasy stories would have shorter, less academic-sounding reviews than the classics. Now I realize it all depends on the book. The Three Musketeers is a fun high-adventure story, so it got a fun review showcasing its best features. This week we're diving into one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s dense, not-so-popular works. I’ll reflect on my own experience with the book and give helpful tips and strategies for those who want to read it.
Why I Read The Silmarillion:
A little over a year ago, I nagged a friend into giving me a book recommendation. He chose Dies the Fire, the first in S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse series.So what does that have to do with The Silmarillion?
The series has tons of winks for Tolkien nerds, but my favorite is an eccentric girl named Astrid Larson. At age thirteen, she was already an archer and spoke fluent Sindarin. Traumatic events in the story drive her mind deeper into Middle-earth as a coping mechanism. Basically, everything goes to hell, and she goes bonkers. When they're rebuilding society after the Change, Astrid creates her own mercenary mini-country, the Dúnedain Rangers, where new recruits must learn both Sindarin and sign language. Throughout most of the books I read, Astrid is an entertaining major side character with a religious fanaticism for all things Middle-Earth. To a certain extent, I read The Silmarillion because I wanted to hang out with her just a little longer.
Also, my brother has read The Silmarillion—and he doesn’t read! That’s kind of embarrassing for me as a person who writes high fantasy novels.
- Tuesday, April 17, 2018
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I started reading classics because school teachers, published authors, and various other pedagogical authority figures told me I should. In the last few years, I’ve read a number of them, ranging from The Importance of Being Earnest to Crime and Punishment. Some I’ve loved, some I’ve hated, and some I kept hoping would get better later in the story (they usually didn’t). The Three Musketeers isn't one of those classics. It’s a classic for a long list of reasons, most of which would spoil the story or make this post way too long. You should read The Three Musketeers, not because it’s a “classic,” but because it is a great freaking book.
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- Tuesday, April 10, 2018
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