April 2019: Reading Thread

[Extollager]

How are you finding it? How much had you forgotten? What has surprised you?

I last read The Lord of the Rings seven years ago. I'm enjoying it, although the movies come to mind a little and I wish they didn't. I was struck by how far off the movies were about Rohan, which should look (if someone who's never been to Europe may say so) more like rural Wiltshire than Iceland!

I think the thing that maybe surprised me the most was that Gimli says "'Wait a minute.'" I would have guessed that, if anybody in The Lord of the Rings used that expression, it would be a hobbit, but I probably would have thought it didn't appear at all. Also, in the account in The Fellowship of the Ring, in the passage where they arrive at the pool in front of Durin's Doors, etc. Tolkien uses some form of thud and plop, rather humble diction, almost suggesting comic books. Not that I see these words as blemishes necessarily. Not meaning to imply something negative, but this time around I find myself thinking more than formerly that the style of the book, so far, is more like that of The Hobbit than I was apt to regard it as being. (There's none of the avuncular asides, of course.) The Black Riders are, for most of The Fellowship, creepy but not all that formidable. So I get the sense that Tolkien really did see himself as writing "the new Hobbit book" at least for many months of the work's composition. Halfway through the work as I am, I love it, but I do see how some readers who came to it as adults, when it was first published and first coming to notice, could have felt it was a book for what we now call "young adults" (middle school, teenagers) that got out of control. I think these readers, when they criticized LotR as "juvenile," got off on the wrong foot when they objected to what they perceived as the book's lack of sex-material. That is not the point; you might as well object to a lack of sex material in The Thirty-Nine Steps, King Solomon's Mines, or Rogue Male. But the book is certainly meant to be an exciting narrative not just for grownups. It suited me very well at age 11, and I wasn't a terribly precocious kid.

I think there's much about the story that does speak more to those possessing adult experience, but Tolkien handles this with real literary art, in such a way that it doesn't spoil the book for younger readers.

 

[Hugh]

... this time around I find myself thinking more than formerly that the style of the book, so far, is more like that of The Hobbit than I was apt to regard it as being. (There's none of the avuncular asides, of course.) The Black Riders are, for most of The Fellowship, creepy but not all that formidable. So I get the sense that Tolkien really did see himself as writing "the new Hobbit book" at least for many months of the work's composition.

It did indeed "grow in the telling".

Many thanks for your comments, much appreciated.

 

[Extollager]

A couple of further observations:

1.I'm impressed by Tolkien's sheer storytelling skill, and by how he managed such a long and involved story with so many details so well, without really, so far as we know, having had much practice at it. That is, Tolkien's literary efforts had largely been given over, before he wrote LotR, to myth-making, where the outline of the action is simple. Someone might say that The Silmarillion is far from simple, with so many stories, but they are spread out along a timeline of centuries; any given story is, surely, not all that elaborate. The Hobbit is an episodic adventure story that stays with one group of characters most of whom stick together almost all the time (Bilbo is separated briefly from the Dwarves at various points). Here again the story is not one of numerous, elaborated threads. Tolkien, writing LotR, had constantly to be keeping track of proliferating details, and did so.

2.The story is episodic, but it doesn't seem to us, as we read, that the author scurries along from one dramatic incident to the next. There is plenty of development of the various journeys. I've never tried it, but I wonder if, should one open the volume(s) of LotR at random 20 times, how often something explicitly fantastic would be going on, aside from the fact that the persons of the story are imaginary beings. But when we read the story it doesn't feel like the author is just spinning it out, drawing on his powers of invention while he can and for as long as he thinks readers would have patience. rather, there's the sense that the journeys take the time that they take. It's not tedious to read about them, rather the less fantastic passages give the reader time to become ready for the next passage that is fantastic (the reader doesn't become too fatigued, as he or she might if the marvels just kept coming one after the other, as in the typical CGI movie, e.g. the Marvel comics ones).

 

[Extollager]

There's one usage that sounds odd to me, in the edition I'm reading -- which I take to be the latest text. About two pages into the chapter called "The Taming of Smeagol," Frodo says he should have traveled "'over the hard of Battle Plain.'" Use of "hard" as a noun thus sounds odd. But I checked two other editions on hand (an old Ballantine paperback, and the one-volume Houghton Mifflin edition from about 1975), and that's what it says there too, and what's more, that's what the reading is in The War of the Ring in The History of Middle-earth.

 

[hitmouse]

There is a village in the New Forest in Hampshire, near where I grew up, called Buckler's Hard. It was historically important for boat-building. I think the hard is the place by the water where boat construction happened, or where boats could be pulled up. Maybe not quite what JRR had in mind, but in a similar vein perhaps.

 

[Extollager]

Hm! Interesting. At any rate, Tolkien's usage has stood up over the years.

 

[anno]

Hard is an old English term for ‘road leading down across a foreshore’

 

[svalbard]

Blackwing by Ed McDonald

Just picked this up. It is a debut novel and has a Joe Abercrombie feel to it. I am 4 chapters in and it cracks along at a fearsome speed. Although only April this is one is shaping up to be one of my books of the year.

 

[Danny McG]

Blackwing by Ed McDonald

Just picked this up. It is a debut novel and has a Joe Abercrombie feel to it. I am 4 chapters in and it cracks along at a fearsome speed. Although only April this is one is shaping up to be one of my books of the year.

I read that not long ago (now and again I move away from sci fi and crime thrillers and try a bit of fantasy!) and I enjoyed it a lot, I've got the sequel 'Ravencry' but I need to flip my brain back to fantasy mode before I start it

 

[Rodders]

I’m just starting John Skalzi’s Ghost Brigades.

 

[svalbard]

Ravencry by Ed McDonald

The sequel to Blackwing. I powered through the debut novel in a day and instantly went out and purchased the sequel. McDonald builds believable and sympathetic characters in ruthless world. He also has a gift for snappy dialogue, strong world building and brutal descriptions of combat. It is not for the fainthearted. I will forever have the image of a 'faecal thesis' burned into my brain.

 

[Extollager]

Just as I paused, after finishing The Fellowship of the Ring, to read a couple of non-Tolkien books before reading The Two Towers, now I'm reading something else before going on to The Return of the King. The first readers of LotR had to wait months between books; I'm not taking it to that extent. I've started C. P. Snow's Homecomings, one of the novels in his Brothers and Strangers sequence.

The Two Towers was a great read. The sequence with Fangorn and the Ents could well belong to a sequel to The Hobbit, but Sam and Frodo in the Dead Marshes, in Ithilien, climbing past Minas Morgul, and in the tunnels of Cirith Ungol are having experiences surpassing, for grimness, anything in that book. (The land of Ithilien itself isn't grim, but one could say that Frodo faces a grim moral choice with regard to what to do about Gollum, etc.)

 

[HareBrain]

I've started Charles Williams: the Third Inkling by Grevel Lindop. I'm not finding myself very interested in his early life so far, but I'll carry on. I'm going to alternate it with a re-start of Rook Song by Naomi Foyle, which I now have in (much preferred) paperback.

 

[dask]

Currently reading Explorers Of The Infinite by Sam Moskowitz, a marvelous collection of mini-bios about the early "shapers of science fiction." Right now I'm reading about Philip Wylie, an author I'm aware of but haven't read yet despite having several of his books. The reason I'm posting now before finishing the book is because Moskowitz makes a statement I can't quite figure out: "Tomorrow, a novel of civil defense during an atomic war, was outdated within six months of its publication in 1954; the development of fusion weaponry destroyed its validity." Isn't the atomic bomb a fusion weapon?

 

[Dave]

The atomic bomb is fission - atoms are split as they are in nuclear power plants. The hydrogen bomb is fusion - atomic nuclei are forced together. The latter is considerably more explosive, although the former was quite adequate enough to destroy two cities, so I'm not sure of the distinction in regards to civil defence.

 

[dask]

Okay, thank you.

 

[Hugh]

Philip K. Dick & Roger Zelazny: "Deus Irae"

Good in parts, but, for me, essentially frustrating. Reads too much like a meander between two minds without enough continuity. Starts off interestingly, like a zany "Canticle for Leibowitz" as the armless, legless, artist Tibor McMasters is sent off by the Servants of Wrath (the dominant religion), closely followed by a Christian saboteur, through the post-apocalyptic landscape to track down the earthly form of the God of Wrath, the man responsible for the planetary devastation.

Annoyingly, I'm sure that a few days ago I read some comments by Zelazny detailing precisely who wrote which sections, but it seems likely that I imagined this as I can find no trace of this now.

 

[hitmouse]

Finished Calcutta by Geoffrey Moorhouse, which is a very good historyof that city, piblished in about 1971. Now reading a more recent book of the same name by Amit Chaudhuri, which is more of a personal psychogeography of the city. Chaudhuri is a professor of English Lit at East Anglia University, and a well reputed novelist. Pretty good for the first 60 pages.

 

[Hugh]

Roger Zelazny: "Bridge of Ashes"
Better than I expected, and thought it moved up a gear towards the end. However, I suspect most of his energy went into the Amber series at this time.

 

[Extollager]

Finished Calcutta by Geoffrey Moorhouse, which is a very good historyof that city, piblished in about 1971. Now reading a more recent book of the same name by Amit Chaudhuri, which is more of a personal psychogeography of the city. Chaudhuri is a professor of English Lit at East Anglia University, and a well reputed novelist. Pretty good for the first 60 pages.

Is Amit related to Nirad Chaudhuri -- whose Autobiography of an Unknown Indian I liked?

I once wrote a short story in which a planet from which radio transmissions came was Chaudhuri 541c or something like that... thinking of Nirad.