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.

Today’s post is going to be two separate but related reviews of Ella Enchanted and Fairest by Gail Carson Levine, but first I want to tell you all about a recent-ish trip to the doctor. It’s totally connected—pinky swear. If you want to skip this, head down to the Ella Enchanted header.

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.

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.

Description

Several months ago I decided to reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It had been a few years since I last read The Hobbit, and maybe 8-10 since I read LOTR. My memory of the details was getting rusty, and since so many writing websites take their examples from books I haven’t read or movies I haven’t seen, regrounding myself in one of the few popular stories I have read seemed like a good idea.

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.

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.

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.