So. It's come to this.
For this part of the challenge, I've decided to finally tackle J. R. R. Tolkien's classic, Lord of the Rings. Why does this book intimidate me, you might ask? It's not the length, I can assure you of that. I was in elementary school for the first half of the Harry Potter series, and the length was no issue back then. In fact, the reason this book intimidates me dates back to elementary school...
A friend of mine was a huge Tolkien fan. For his birthday party, his family recreated the Unexpected Party from The Hobbit and we dined as the dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf did (replacing wine and beer with punch and root beer, of course). The games that we played included a scavenger hunt for The Ring, and whacking a giant spider pinata that was laid out in a web made of rope. I'd never read The Hobbit, so some of the magic was a bit lost on me, but it was an amazing party all the same. This friend recommended - demanded, really - that I read Lord of the Rings if I liked Harry Potter so much. The first movie had come out recently, and I'd seen and enjoyed it. Why not read the book, I thought? So my parents bought me a very nice box set of the books (really, it's one huge book, but it's generally broken up into three when it's published) and I started out on my adventure through Middle Earth.
Oh. my. gosh. The book was so far above my reading level. I could barely get through it. I remember complaining to my teacher that the Council of Elrond chapter was unbearably slow. (The scene in the movie had been so short! How was I to know that in the book, they sat and talked for like 300 years?!) She suggested that I read the first few sentences of a paragraph and then skip it if it seemed unimportant. But the paragraphs were all a whole page long. And the text was small, so small, that a page unbroken by line breaks and paragraph indentations took me half an hour to drag through.
Somehow, I managed to get through the whole book. I'm fairly sure that I got at least part way through the second book before giving up. I have no memory of the second book - even the first book is proving to seem mostly new to me, except for the general flow of events which I know from the movie. For years, I told myself that I'd try the books again some day.
And then I read The Hobbit in the 8th grade (three years after struggling through LotR). I'd heard that that book was written in much easier language, intended for a slightly younger audience. I figured I could handle it - and my sisters probably forced it on me, fed up with me rereading Harry Potter yet again. But even that one was hard for me to get through. I did finish it, but when the first movie came out around eight years later, I was like, huh, I don't really remember much about this at all. When I heard that the movie was incorporating a lot of Middle Earth history, mainly from The Silmarillion, I headed out to the bookstore and bought both The Hobbit and The Silmarillion.
That summer, I read The Hobbit. It was quite enjoyable, the experience made even better by the fact that I read it at my apartment's poolside, in the late summer when very few students were around making lots of noise. (Can you tell what kind of college student I was?) I started the Silmarillion during the following school year, but gave up after a few pages. This needed to wait until I didn't have homework, classes, work, and film shoots hanging over my head.
It's been almost four years now. In that time, I've thought about re-tackling Lord of the Rings, but it's just kind of sat there in my mind, all dark and mysterious and full of very long sentences and difficult language and the world's most boring chapter ever.
Well, that was then. I'm about halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring (and they're NOT EVEN IN RIVENDELL YET), and while it is a bit sticky for me, I'm definitely enjoying it! My edition of the book has an introduction written by Tolkien himself, and he admits to being more interested in the linguistics and history of Middle Earth than the action. That is very obvious when you read the book. I can follow his sentences much better now that my reading level has improved, but the action is definitely slow. I don't blame the movie for making the journey from Hobbiton to Rivendell seem to take only a day or two, because it's been almost two months since Frodo and friends left Hobbiton, and they're not yet in Rivendell after 206 pages. A great many days of those two months has been described in great detail, even if nothing more happens than the hobbits walk a long distance and are very hungry, tired, and scared.
So, I'm getting through the book. Not as easily as I flew through the last book in my challenge, but much more easily than I did at the age of 10. Tolkien's writing style doesn't intimidate me the way it used to, but it certainly does seem to drag compared to the pace at which I'm used to action rolling out in books.
I know that so far for this challenge, I've been writing a post about a book only after I finish it, but I have a feeling that I'm going to write a few more posts as I go through this series. I have lots of thoughts that I like to write down, and I get the feeling that I'll be too impatient to write them all in a draft and publish them all at once. In any case, I'm only halfway through the first third of the book, and look how much I've already rambled! I'm sure that anyone reading this would hate to read all of my thoughts for the next 1,012 pages!
