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vicardave 's review for:

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
5.0

A few non-exhaustive, random and disordered thoughts on revisiting the book many years on from the first encounter...

1) Like The Hobbit, the songs just get in the way for me. I understand the literary and thematic reasons they are there ... I just don't like them and find them a little awkward.

2) It's a just story - the little and the overlooked are key players, the great and the famous are often unreliable and capricious.

3) Treebeard and Tom Bombadil are frustrating

4) There's quite a bit of space used up by characters updating each other with what we already know. Sometimes it's annoying; other times the nuanced changes in what's reported are important character development.

5) It's a masterpiece.

6) Getting coherent and enjoyable and accessible films out of it was verging on the miraculous.

7) It all goes to show the importance of having a coherent fictional world in the author's mind, even if it's not all evident in the text. It makes for a truly rich and satisfying read.

8) It's partially about the importance of stories - telling the stories of the ordinary as well as the extraodinary; indeed the great stories can be the most normal and everyday.