The Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkien
This book took me forever to read. Or, it did if you consider I technically started it 2 years ago and put it aside and just left it. But man, you have to be in the mood for The Lord of the Rings. These are no before bed books. One paragraph about trees and the sky and the landscape and I'm out.
I get that Tolkien was going for something with all his description, he was trying to recreate Middle Earth so we (the readers) could be completely immersed in the world he created. And I'm sure it worked for a lot of people. I know Mordor was scary and Hobbiton was quaint and lovely but I can only read about the landscape for so long. Once we've hit a few lines of this, I'm done. The trees, the sky, the water, the clouds, the stars, the lack thereof... oi.
So I'm going to start looking for an abridged version of these books. Because they're great. The story is really wonderful and the characters are amazing and I, of course, found myself crying at the end of The Return of the King because it made me just that happy and sad all at once. But I can't enjoy them when entire chapters are dedicated to traveling and telling me how bleak everything was.
You're braver than I... I won't even attempt them.
ReplyDeleteMike likes them though.