Just re-read The Lord Of The Rings. Think I'd last re-read it just before the films came out. Re-reading the books has been a self-indulgence and a comfort coming up on 3 decades now. Some observations:
This time I re-read on the iPad, instead of my still-surviving 30 yr-old prints. This was more convenient but I realized partway in that some of the comfort derives from those old physical artifacts, with the age-darkened pages and that particular typeset.
Shadowfax. Good lord do they go on and on about that damn horse. Seriously, wtf?
I forgive the movies a lot of sins, but the egregious modernization of Faramir is still appalling. Tolkien's heroes were pre-modern, and I get that Jackson felt the misguided urge to make them modern [most of them, that is; Karl Urban's Eomer was still allowed to be awesome, because nobody fucks with Norse horsemen]. This business of feminizing the heroes was a shame for Aragorn, but he was still excellently played by Viggo Mortensen, and he got his moments. With Faramir, there was nowhere for the acting to go. He's all kinds of awesome in the book. It would have been more merciful to cut him from the film.
The palpable sense of loss that pervades and defines the books is still heartbreaking and wonderful.
6 comments:
my xmas gift to Peter is a set of LOTR paperbacks from the 50's.
i gave him a copy of the Hobbit earlier this year -- i hope he's read it!
Is he old enough for the LOTR? The Hobbit is clearly a kids book, but LOTR is written in a completely different style.
i am no judge of these things. when did your oldest read them? Peter's 1 year behind him.
Maybe that's fine. He's not read them yet.
Jackson's Faramir was a let down, for sure.
I think Tolkien had stables, and his love of the equine comes out oozingly in the mythical Shadowfax.
My eyes are failing me.... I need printed books to read, clearly. The Rx glasses I've got make my head spin - I don't think I'll ever get used to bifocals, so I just don't wear them.
With ebooks you can make the print as small or large as you want, that's one nice advantage. With my contacts in low light I have a hard time reading a lot of print books.
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