h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Don't even compare Tolkien with Dickens!!! But I'm not looking for a fight...honestly.

Dylan...? Did someone say Dylan?

If LOTR is the canon then I say 'fire!' Not that it's worth the powder... Incestuous academic... b*****y do...

Winnie the Pooh is all the mythology anyone needs.

Fantasy (by definition a flight of the imagination) is best in the visual media - comix, cartoons, films, VR. LOTR - too long for a single film - would make an interesting TV series. Then those boring descriptions of blades of grass would just 'be there' in the background and not interupt the 'action'.
Or was that the Smurfs?

No wonder my homebrew is sinking fast...have you been helping yourself?

Just to address MaW's (and others') point about LotR being slow going; yep it is indeed, but that's the *point*.

Epic journeys to save the world are, well, epic in scope, and the way Tolkien chose to depict this is through detail.

Moreover, Frodo's progress through Gondor, Mordor and the nasty bits on the way to Mt Doom reflects Frodo's own pain and anguish with each step by making the reader experience some of that themselves by making the description of the journey as excruciating and drawn-out as possible. It's not supposed to be pleasant reading.

Personally, I do like the books very much. As an English graduate, though, I am more than aware that the Middle-Earth series is portentous, humourless, overblown, intentionally over-archaic and tortuous to read.

Just like the myths and sagas of which Tolkien was a scholar.

NexusSeven said:

"Moreover, Frodo's progress through Gondor, Mordor and the nasty bits on the way to Mt Doom reflects Frodo's own pain and anguish with each step by making the reader experience some of that themselves by making the description of the journey as excruciating and drawn-out as possible. It's not supposed to be pleasant reading."

Fair enough, maybe, but then how do you explain the rest of the books? It's ALL boring, drawn-out journeys.

Nope!!!

Just like my life, really. I do NOT want to take a taxi, and a train, and a bus, and an aeroplane, and a train, and another train tomorrow....

I do remember that recurring phrase about tightening belts. And it irritated me at the time.

A traveller called Ben

The Harry Potter series is very well written! What I like about it is the depth of the story. You find out things in the first book that you don't realize are clues to, for example, the fourth, until you go back and re-read it.

-Twinkle
(um, is this topic drift?)

Just slightly love
we will start a thred all about harry potter for you

and I dont think any one said that there was nothing about the book that was good..but in haw evermany hundred pages it is if there are only 30 or so decend pages it kind of makes for a bad book.

*normally not very pedantic but*
N7 - please tell me you meant pretentious not portentious.

Yeah, the Olde Sagas are better. It takes a bit of work to translate and get into them but at least there's not a lot of peer pressure insisting on it. And their intent was to inform and entertain a lay audience not to bedazzle fellow scholars.

What's the sense in condemning something?
Haven't you noticed your tastes where subject to change?
Besides I wouldn't claim too loud that I found a book boring. I'd be afraid of having missed the point or, what's even worse, of being judged the kind of person who find books to be boring.


Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate;
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

if you are really that botherd about how other people see you any way.
I mean I have always ben seen as weird (to tell you the truth I like it tha way people leave me in pece) because In high school I was reading well I read LOTR and another book called the assins aprentice. and now I take my guitare co collage (alright if you are a music corse but I am doing nursing ) but I do those things to unwind and what they think dosent matter.

is it such a crime to not like books any way??

No it is no crime not to like books.
And it's not a crime to be limited.
I am limited. We all are. I'm just glad that in my case it's not about books.
Yes I really am bothered about how other people see me.
But I don't think that's the topic, is it?

A CRIME NOT TO LIKE BOOKS!!!

Let me check. Yes it is! dammit, it's better than sitting in the living room watching a box full of colored dots.

Class, Let us open our books to page 1 in Farenheit 451...

Ah! Now there's a book I can appreciate...

F-451 (yay) Great book. A hot book. The movie didn't do it justice.

But some books - like LOTR - will only work to a mass audience as film or TV. The self-indulgent academic structure of the book only produces the worst kind of peer-pressure-induced self-flagellation for any 'sophomoron' who feels compelled to wade through it. The intended audience was the stuffiest of old academics - the kind who have their noses in old books all day and night anyway - for whom it must be a droll ray of sunshine.

This is a reply to Typolifi's first post.

Typolifi said:

"Besides I wouldn't claim too loud that I found a book boring. I'd be afraid of having missed the point or, what's even worse, of being judged the kind of person who find books to be boring."

If I find a book to be boring, I will say so. I do not care if other people agree or disagree with me, or whatever their opinions may be, because I am my own person. As for missing the point - aren't you being fantastically paranoid? Finally, who can judge you? Furthermore, even if someone does 'judge' you, why should you care?

I've read a lot in here about how slow, and pretentious, and overblown LotR is...and I just want to ask a question back - Why is that automatically assumed to be a bad thing? The words aren't always just there to carry the story - sometimes the language used *is* part of the story, and that is very definitely the case with LotR. It seems that many of the people who react unfavourably to LotR, at least in this forum, are complaining that the language gets in the way, without pausing to consider that there are people who may like to wallow in the rich descriptions and "high" style that Tolkien employs. My point, then, is that this aspect, which has been derided so much in this forum, is an aspect of the work that some people actually enjoy.

I'm not sure that this adds a whole lot to the discussion, but if you feel it will add absolutely nothing to your intellectual growth you have the right to say whether you want to read it or not...

I haven't read the great three for a while so maybe I'm in no position to say this, but I enjoyed it best when Tolkien described things which would generally be recognised as animate. These descriptions really were good, and I think he put a bit much effort into trying to convince us about all the marvellous (or not so) things that the mountain held in its slightly softened heart of mined stone etc. That all may have had something to do with the fact that I was only about nine years old when I read them last...I'll just leave now I think. *tiptoes out door*