Books of 2019 Part 1: 40-31
Alright, so my usual housekeeping quickly before I dive into this as I'm aware it's no longer actually 2019 and we should forget that the year even happened. The last thing y'all want to do, I know, is spend a long time being reminded of the horrible year 2019 was. And indeed it was a tough year for me, too: a lot of anxiety at work that led to me switching jobs just before my second child was born. As such I didn't power through the reading like I often do so there are a grand total of 54 books I'll be writing up, and at least two of them are kind of cheats even to count them as 'books' at all. So feel free to ignore those two and consider it 52, whatever, I'm not Northrop Frye or anything alright?
As usual the format works like this: I start in the middle and count, in tens, all the way down to number 11. I then jump backwards to count 'up' my least favourite books of the year (from 41-54) and then count down the top ten. I'll be trying to schedule these to post one a day but I'll see what my schedule allows for. And now that's out of the way let's kick off this year's write ups with a classic...
Oh and this year I'm dispensing with my mandatory hashtags but I will include some where needed to contextualise (i.e. continuing on a series, yearly custom, or annual tradition). Assume otherwise that my reason for reading all of these is "picked this up for *insert random reason here* while browsing my local library"
40) White Fang - Jack London
This was an alright read, but I found it like a less efficient version of Call of the Wild (more on that later). In a lot of ways I guess this is a prequel to Call, but also the reverse story trajectory, of a wild dog's journey through hardship into domestication. White Fang's mentality and characterisation are well constructed by London, with plenty of interesting observations about human-animal relationships. But I sometimes found this a bit of a slog where London got a bit bogged down in too much wild animal interiorising. It's kind of his 'thing' that he seems to do, but following Call with this it just felt long and excessively detailed at times.
39) Seeing Red - Lina Meruane
This is a fairly unpleasant, challenging read. These are things I usually embrace and enjoy but I'm still a bit unsure about this. Simply put, it's a (slightly? greatly? not at all?) fictionalised version of the author experiencing diabetes-induced blindness, and her struggle to get an operation to save her sight and reverse the blindness. She struggles with her American insurance company (I raise my Medicare-sustained eyes at this), with the arguments from her Chilean family to have a cheaper, nastier operation back home and with the doctor she's staking all her hopes on. Most of all, she struggles with the dependence on her partner Ignacio who does everything he can to assist her short of being able to restore her sight. The experience of reading this claustrophobic, first-person stream of consciousness narrative can only really be described as visceral as it feels like a relentless bit of body horror as she describes the eyeball haemorrhage over and over again, the experience of having her sight taken from her and her nightmares of not getting it back. In the end I found it, and her, a bit too full-on and I could have used the tacky optimism of a triumph against the odds type midday movie where she has her happy ending. The horrifying crescendo that this story feels like is just very intense, and because it offers no empathy/perspective to the other characters - her mother, Igancio, the doctor - it ends up being just a self-absorbed nightmare with no hope or even pragmatism. It's effective in what it confronts us with but feels mired in its own obsession without offering enough from any other reality from which to judge what we're still seeing.
38) The Girl Who Played with Fire - Stieg Larsson
#ContinuingSeries
More escapist, page-turner stuff here, after the first book in the series landed at #17 in 2017. I feel like Larsson is very good at building suspense, but at the same time I can really see the gears working in this particular narrative. There are very deliberate omissions to heighten the tension, and the mystery around who committed the central murder here is almost put aside in favour of the bigger enigma of Lisbeth Salander and what part she plays in it all. This makes for entertaining, even compelling reading but I also felt like Larsson's proselytising gets a bit on the nose at times. He constantly hammers home the point that Salander has been let down by the men in her life or by the pillars holding up a phallocentric society, or that men in her life can use those pillars to their own advantage and to her detriment. It's all fairly laudable social commentary but Larsson handles it with the subtlety of a repeated brick to the teeth and it felt annoying that the point was being made so obvious to the readers but the characters in the book are kept constantly oblivious. Larsson's lack of subtlety also extends to his character construction; people are either decent, in which case they are on Salander's side or will be, or they're egotistical misogynist creeps, in which case that's all they can ever be. None of this is thematically problematic you understand, but I feel it cheapens his ultimate point when he needs to keep making it. Further, I feel that while he obviously loves Salander and wants to elevate her as his muse, there's a certain fetishisation about her as a 'kickass' heroine and I feel that Larsson's gaze on her is a little too voyeuristic, especially in the overlong opening chapters before the inciting incident. Combined with a few of the same irritatingly glaring plot holes as I found in the first book (long parenthesis alert: see my review of that for my key plot hole; but the most glaring example here is the case of the police leaks to the media. Hedstrom asks his journalist friend to make it "seem as though the leaks are coming from a woman", so the journalist uses a "she" pronoun and the trained, experienced detective/prosecutor is irrevocably convinced by this that the leak is coming from the only woman on his team who has worked as a detective for years, and never once considers the possibility that a simple pronoun is a red herring and ooh I don't know, maybe the leak could be coming from one of two external, unknown consultants brought in from outside the police force about whom nothing is known and before whose appearance these leaks didn't happen?), I'd say this is an overall lesser, less meaningful effort than the first one, but still enjoyable.
37) To Start a Fire - Jack London
This was obviously a very, very short work of about twenty pages appended to the back of the Jack London anthology that included White Fang and Call of the Wild. It's the first cheat to count it as a 'book' I read, but I'm still going to assess it. This is a good, efficient read from London. Quite dense and powerful in just a short skit of suffering in the tundra, seen through the eyes (of course) of a loyal animal who doesn't quite get what's going on. At the same time London's denouement reveals that the animal's instinct in some ways outweighs man's ability to think around problems so it's a little fable about the power of nature and how animals and their instincts are just superior to ours.
36) Somewhere a Band is Playing - Ray Bradbury
It's nice to look forward to Bradbury after he (surprisingly) landed in my top ten last year. I really find it puzzling that he's known as "Mr Fahrenheit 451" when I found that book so trite and self-righteous and frankly a big circle jerk ("books are actually quite good, AMIRITE person literally reading a book right now!!!" *high five*), but there's a great deal more imagination and quality writing elsewhere in his oeuvre, it seems. This is not his most effective either though, to be honest, but there's a good eerie mood evoked as our narrator enters this strange ghost town and gradually becomes acquainted with its inhabitants and their mysteries. It's honestly kind of Atlas Shrugged lite once the mystery becomes clearer, but I was quite intrigued by the world building and atmosphere of Bradbury's writing before it all got revealed. It ends up also a little bit trite but also bittersweet and effectively wistful.
35) Some Rain Must Fall (My Struggle, Part 5) - Karl Ove Knausgaard
#ContinuingSeries
I'm too invested in this whole series to let my problematic reading of "Dancing in the Dark" (volume 4) stop me getting through it. In many ways, this volume picks up where Dancing left off, with Knausgaard a young and arrogant yet neurotic man, obsessed with women and trying to make a stamp on the world with his writing. The difference is that in this volume (writing both, mind you, from a vantage point of years later with much more life experience) he displays a refreshing and necessary sense of self-awareness: in Dancing he seemed to embody and adopt his own 18-year-old eyes and saw his struggles trying to get laid constantly as perfectly natural and obviously central to existence. Here a lot of the problems he encounters (and brings on himself) are the same but he reflects on them as more caused by his own insecurities and sense of self-effacement; especially when his drinking gets out of control and he becomes querulous or violently impulsive. This book is primarily though about him trying to find his voice as a writer, and reading it now awash with the glow of every single (male) lit critic in the world wanting to massage Knausgaard's toes as the most important human since Aristotle, well there's a nice sense of dramatic irony which I feel is largely unintentional in this context. But reading his peers dismiss his writing as clichéd and watching him struggle to develop germs of ideas into stories, seeing his friends get accepted by publishers and Knausgaard struggling to participate in the thoughtful and provocative discussions in the cafés and bars of Bergen, it feels like we're in on this secret that Knausgaard will soon be universally (by half the population) revered as a demigod when he in fact wrestles with all the same neuroses and insecurities and counterproductive impulses as any of us. The self-awareness is also a crucial point of the autobiography-as-confession here: Knausgaard exhibits some pretty unpleasant attitudes and behaviours especially towards women here but he wallows in his own self-pity at the same time and adumbrates a sense that he will bring about his own ruin through his impetuousness. It's more compelling than the previous volume because of the more mature identity struggles he presents and the magnitude of the dilemmas he often faces here, but there is still undeniably a problematic toxic masculinity that runs through it, without being properly addressed or accounted for.
34) Leviathan 99 - Ray Bradbury
This is another interesting bit of writing. Not a hugely interesting bit of storytelling because it's quite literally and explicitly Moby Dick but the ocean is space and the whale is a comet. Beyond that it's a very condensed beat by beat recreation of the story (albeit without the hundred-page treatises on ambergris which would be a bit out of place in an outer space setting) , but he writes evocatively and does an effective job of transposing the action to a futuristic setting. The essential questions and themes remain the same, looking at the captain's mad fixation on wreaking revenge on natural forces, and Bradbury's more futuristic viewpoint ponders those questions in a more contemplative and expansive universe. This is an interesting thought experiment as we imagine space exploration and the colonisation if the universe and how we try and bend it to suit our needs. So it's an admirable thought exercise but really it's just Moby Dick in space at the end of the day.
33) Not to Disturb - Muriel Spark
This took a fair while (despite being short) to get into, considering how engaging Spark's irreverent satire usually is. Part of the issue is that the premise of a below-stairs conclave of servants gossiping about their master is quite familiar to me from the likes of Ishiguro's Remains of the Day (my #4 book of 2014) and Henry Green's Loving (Had to do a LOT of digging for this, but it was my #33 book of 2012), but also the sheer number of characters suddenly thrust upon the reader gives each one a very shallow psychology and no time at all to get to know them before the nature of the plot is actually quite far advanced. That isn't the point of the story though, to understand these individuals: rather it is to deliver the chaotic goings-on and machinations of these servants over the course of one night in the Klopstock estate. Once the machine is properly in motion it moves very fast and powerfully with some very amusing farcical sequences along the way. The treatment of "him in the attic" - the mad relative of the Baroness Klopstock who's kept restrained, yes in the attic - is a little too broad for me but Spark's indictment of the wealthy class and the part of public gossip and role of hype and hearsay in delivering narratives is very dry and subtly hilarious. I wouldn't say it's Spark's most successful mainly because it feels a little haphazard and undercooked but there's plenty of life in the pages nonetheless.
32) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
Interesting to read this so many years after I read the sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (so many years, in fact, that I don't have a "My #x book of 20xx" reference for it). Apart from the fact that Huck Finn starts by talking about the exploits of Tom in this book and spoiling the main plot points, this experience can actually be read quite easily with the vibe of a long-overdue prequel, because it does introduce a lot of the same situations and themes that the latter book branched out from and can be enjoyed as providing the detail of those plot points spoiled at the start of Huck Finn. I feel that this isn't that prequel though despite that feeling because this is more of an inchoate work, with less of a strong plot focus and more of a "scenes in the life" kind of feel. I actually found this more problematic in terms of its dealings with race than Huck Finn (despite the latter's gushing use of the n-word instead of the word 'the' or punctuation marks) just because this has a subtler, more insidious insider/outsider attitude. The main villain of the piece, Injun Joe, is offered little character or motivation but the violence and duplicitousness in his character is treated as only natural by the fact that he isn't one of the familiar white townsfolk. Of course it's all delivered through the voice of children which gives it a mildly satirical bite in that it's an indictment of the world conjured up by their own imperfect educations in this community, but it also imbues it with a certain bluntness, because there's no artifice or layered meaning behind it. In spite of the datedness (and some of the language sadly is a little coloured now by modern warping of meaning. Hate to be so immature but a couple of uses of the word "gay" and "ejaculations" just take on very unfortunate connotations in a modern context), this is an entertaining read about the adventurous spirit of youth and how that spirit can lead a boy into deep trouble but also afford opportunities to stand up and save the day.
31) The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
This was a harmless bit of fun, but it does very much feel like the sanitised kids' version of what Lord of the Rings would go on to explore. Funnily enough I wasn't clear in my mind in reading this whether this was actually written as a prequel or whether it came out before Rings. It is the latter case if you didn't know, but the main reason I wondered is because by far the most engaging sequence in this novel is Bilbo's meeting of Gollum and finding the one ring, so it felt like Tolkien leans heavily on that knowing what lore would emerge from it. I've read that 'accommodations' were made to this during or following Tolkien's writing of Rings so it's possible this sequence feels the most fleshed out for that reason. I feel like I would enjoy this more, too, if I'd read it first or as a child like Jez did, because it seems like an inchoate version of the themes of the latter trilogy with ultimately very little at stake here (yes there are lots of life and death struggles but all in the name of 'adventure' and treasure hunting rather than anything broader that affects the world), and some of the narrative is a bit glib where conflicts are dealt with swiftly and easily, in the end without any unpleasant details. It just felt like a slightly dumbed down fantasy novel that may have influenced some writing that came later but would have had far less impact if not for its younger, threefold bulkier brother.
As usual the format works like this: I start in the middle and count, in tens, all the way down to number 11. I then jump backwards to count 'up' my least favourite books of the year (from 41-54) and then count down the top ten. I'll be trying to schedule these to post one a day but I'll see what my schedule allows for. And now that's out of the way let's kick off this year's write ups with a classic...
Oh and this year I'm dispensing with my mandatory hashtags but I will include some where needed to contextualise (i.e. continuing on a series, yearly custom, or annual tradition). Assume otherwise that my reason for reading all of these is "picked this up for *insert random reason here* while browsing my local library"
40) White Fang - Jack London
This was an alright read, but I found it like a less efficient version of Call of the Wild (more on that later). In a lot of ways I guess this is a prequel to Call, but also the reverse story trajectory, of a wild dog's journey through hardship into domestication. White Fang's mentality and characterisation are well constructed by London, with plenty of interesting observations about human-animal relationships. But I sometimes found this a bit of a slog where London got a bit bogged down in too much wild animal interiorising. It's kind of his 'thing' that he seems to do, but following Call with this it just felt long and excessively detailed at times.
39) Seeing Red - Lina Meruane
This is a fairly unpleasant, challenging read. These are things I usually embrace and enjoy but I'm still a bit unsure about this. Simply put, it's a (slightly? greatly? not at all?) fictionalised version of the author experiencing diabetes-induced blindness, and her struggle to get an operation to save her sight and reverse the blindness. She struggles with her American insurance company (I raise my Medicare-sustained eyes at this), with the arguments from her Chilean family to have a cheaper, nastier operation back home and with the doctor she's staking all her hopes on. Most of all, she struggles with the dependence on her partner Ignacio who does everything he can to assist her short of being able to restore her sight. The experience of reading this claustrophobic, first-person stream of consciousness narrative can only really be described as visceral as it feels like a relentless bit of body horror as she describes the eyeball haemorrhage over and over again, the experience of having her sight taken from her and her nightmares of not getting it back. In the end I found it, and her, a bit too full-on and I could have used the tacky optimism of a triumph against the odds type midday movie where she has her happy ending. The horrifying crescendo that this story feels like is just very intense, and because it offers no empathy/perspective to the other characters - her mother, Igancio, the doctor - it ends up being just a self-absorbed nightmare with no hope or even pragmatism. It's effective in what it confronts us with but feels mired in its own obsession without offering enough from any other reality from which to judge what we're still seeing.
38) The Girl Who Played with Fire - Stieg Larsson
#ContinuingSeries
More escapist, page-turner stuff here, after the first book in the series landed at #17 in 2017. I feel like Larsson is very good at building suspense, but at the same time I can really see the gears working in this particular narrative. There are very deliberate omissions to heighten the tension, and the mystery around who committed the central murder here is almost put aside in favour of the bigger enigma of Lisbeth Salander and what part she plays in it all. This makes for entertaining, even compelling reading but I also felt like Larsson's proselytising gets a bit on the nose at times. He constantly hammers home the point that Salander has been let down by the men in her life or by the pillars holding up a phallocentric society, or that men in her life can use those pillars to their own advantage and to her detriment. It's all fairly laudable social commentary but Larsson handles it with the subtlety of a repeated brick to the teeth and it felt annoying that the point was being made so obvious to the readers but the characters in the book are kept constantly oblivious. Larsson's lack of subtlety also extends to his character construction; people are either decent, in which case they are on Salander's side or will be, or they're egotistical misogynist creeps, in which case that's all they can ever be. None of this is thematically problematic you understand, but I feel it cheapens his ultimate point when he needs to keep making it. Further, I feel that while he obviously loves Salander and wants to elevate her as his muse, there's a certain fetishisation about her as a 'kickass' heroine and I feel that Larsson's gaze on her is a little too voyeuristic, especially in the overlong opening chapters before the inciting incident. Combined with a few of the same irritatingly glaring plot holes as I found in the first book (long parenthesis alert: see my review of that for my key plot hole; but the most glaring example here is the case of the police leaks to the media. Hedstrom asks his journalist friend to make it "seem as though the leaks are coming from a woman", so the journalist uses a "she" pronoun and the trained, experienced detective/prosecutor is irrevocably convinced by this that the leak is coming from the only woman on his team who has worked as a detective for years, and never once considers the possibility that a simple pronoun is a red herring and ooh I don't know, maybe the leak could be coming from one of two external, unknown consultants brought in from outside the police force about whom nothing is known and before whose appearance these leaks didn't happen?), I'd say this is an overall lesser, less meaningful effort than the first one, but still enjoyable.
37) To Start a Fire - Jack London
This was obviously a very, very short work of about twenty pages appended to the back of the Jack London anthology that included White Fang and Call of the Wild. It's the first cheat to count it as a 'book' I read, but I'm still going to assess it. This is a good, efficient read from London. Quite dense and powerful in just a short skit of suffering in the tundra, seen through the eyes (of course) of a loyal animal who doesn't quite get what's going on. At the same time London's denouement reveals that the animal's instinct in some ways outweighs man's ability to think around problems so it's a little fable about the power of nature and how animals and their instincts are just superior to ours.
36) Somewhere a Band is Playing - Ray Bradbury
It's nice to look forward to Bradbury after he (surprisingly) landed in my top ten last year. I really find it puzzling that he's known as "Mr Fahrenheit 451" when I found that book so trite and self-righteous and frankly a big circle jerk ("books are actually quite good, AMIRITE person literally reading a book right now!!!" *high five*), but there's a great deal more imagination and quality writing elsewhere in his oeuvre, it seems. This is not his most effective either though, to be honest, but there's a good eerie mood evoked as our narrator enters this strange ghost town and gradually becomes acquainted with its inhabitants and their mysteries. It's honestly kind of Atlas Shrugged lite once the mystery becomes clearer, but I was quite intrigued by the world building and atmosphere of Bradbury's writing before it all got revealed. It ends up also a little bit trite but also bittersweet and effectively wistful.
35) Some Rain Must Fall (My Struggle, Part 5) - Karl Ove Knausgaard
#ContinuingSeries
I'm too invested in this whole series to let my problematic reading of "Dancing in the Dark" (volume 4) stop me getting through it. In many ways, this volume picks up where Dancing left off, with Knausgaard a young and arrogant yet neurotic man, obsessed with women and trying to make a stamp on the world with his writing. The difference is that in this volume (writing both, mind you, from a vantage point of years later with much more life experience) he displays a refreshing and necessary sense of self-awareness: in Dancing he seemed to embody and adopt his own 18-year-old eyes and saw his struggles trying to get laid constantly as perfectly natural and obviously central to existence. Here a lot of the problems he encounters (and brings on himself) are the same but he reflects on them as more caused by his own insecurities and sense of self-effacement; especially when his drinking gets out of control and he becomes querulous or violently impulsive. This book is primarily though about him trying to find his voice as a writer, and reading it now awash with the glow of every single (male) lit critic in the world wanting to massage Knausgaard's toes as the most important human since Aristotle, well there's a nice sense of dramatic irony which I feel is largely unintentional in this context. But reading his peers dismiss his writing as clichéd and watching him struggle to develop germs of ideas into stories, seeing his friends get accepted by publishers and Knausgaard struggling to participate in the thoughtful and provocative discussions in the cafés and bars of Bergen, it feels like we're in on this secret that Knausgaard will soon be universally (by half the population) revered as a demigod when he in fact wrestles with all the same neuroses and insecurities and counterproductive impulses as any of us. The self-awareness is also a crucial point of the autobiography-as-confession here: Knausgaard exhibits some pretty unpleasant attitudes and behaviours especially towards women here but he wallows in his own self-pity at the same time and adumbrates a sense that he will bring about his own ruin through his impetuousness. It's more compelling than the previous volume because of the more mature identity struggles he presents and the magnitude of the dilemmas he often faces here, but there is still undeniably a problematic toxic masculinity that runs through it, without being properly addressed or accounted for.
34) Leviathan 99 - Ray Bradbury
This is another interesting bit of writing. Not a hugely interesting bit of storytelling because it's quite literally and explicitly Moby Dick but the ocean is space and the whale is a comet. Beyond that it's a very condensed beat by beat recreation of the story (albeit without the hundred-page treatises on ambergris which would be a bit out of place in an outer space setting) , but he writes evocatively and does an effective job of transposing the action to a futuristic setting. The essential questions and themes remain the same, looking at the captain's mad fixation on wreaking revenge on natural forces, and Bradbury's more futuristic viewpoint ponders those questions in a more contemplative and expansive universe. This is an interesting thought experiment as we imagine space exploration and the colonisation if the universe and how we try and bend it to suit our needs. So it's an admirable thought exercise but really it's just Moby Dick in space at the end of the day.
33) Not to Disturb - Muriel Spark
This took a fair while (despite being short) to get into, considering how engaging Spark's irreverent satire usually is. Part of the issue is that the premise of a below-stairs conclave of servants gossiping about their master is quite familiar to me from the likes of Ishiguro's Remains of the Day (my #4 book of 2014) and Henry Green's Loving (Had to do a LOT of digging for this, but it was my #33 book of 2012), but also the sheer number of characters suddenly thrust upon the reader gives each one a very shallow psychology and no time at all to get to know them before the nature of the plot is actually quite far advanced. That isn't the point of the story though, to understand these individuals: rather it is to deliver the chaotic goings-on and machinations of these servants over the course of one night in the Klopstock estate. Once the machine is properly in motion it moves very fast and powerfully with some very amusing farcical sequences along the way. The treatment of "him in the attic" - the mad relative of the Baroness Klopstock who's kept restrained, yes in the attic - is a little too broad for me but Spark's indictment of the wealthy class and the part of public gossip and role of hype and hearsay in delivering narratives is very dry and subtly hilarious. I wouldn't say it's Spark's most successful mainly because it feels a little haphazard and undercooked but there's plenty of life in the pages nonetheless.
32) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
Interesting to read this so many years after I read the sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (so many years, in fact, that I don't have a "My #x book of 20xx" reference for it). Apart from the fact that Huck Finn starts by talking about the exploits of Tom in this book and spoiling the main plot points, this experience can actually be read quite easily with the vibe of a long-overdue prequel, because it does introduce a lot of the same situations and themes that the latter book branched out from and can be enjoyed as providing the detail of those plot points spoiled at the start of Huck Finn. I feel that this isn't that prequel though despite that feeling because this is more of an inchoate work, with less of a strong plot focus and more of a "scenes in the life" kind of feel. I actually found this more problematic in terms of its dealings with race than Huck Finn (despite the latter's gushing use of the n-word instead of the word 'the' or punctuation marks) just because this has a subtler, more insidious insider/outsider attitude. The main villain of the piece, Injun Joe, is offered little character or motivation but the violence and duplicitousness in his character is treated as only natural by the fact that he isn't one of the familiar white townsfolk. Of course it's all delivered through the voice of children which gives it a mildly satirical bite in that it's an indictment of the world conjured up by their own imperfect educations in this community, but it also imbues it with a certain bluntness, because there's no artifice or layered meaning behind it. In spite of the datedness (and some of the language sadly is a little coloured now by modern warping of meaning. Hate to be so immature but a couple of uses of the word "gay" and "ejaculations" just take on very unfortunate connotations in a modern context), this is an entertaining read about the adventurous spirit of youth and how that spirit can lead a boy into deep trouble but also afford opportunities to stand up and save the day.
31) The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
This was a harmless bit of fun, but it does very much feel like the sanitised kids' version of what Lord of the Rings would go on to explore. Funnily enough I wasn't clear in my mind in reading this whether this was actually written as a prequel or whether it came out before Rings. It is the latter case if you didn't know, but the main reason I wondered is because by far the most engaging sequence in this novel is Bilbo's meeting of Gollum and finding the one ring, so it felt like Tolkien leans heavily on that knowing what lore would emerge from it. I've read that 'accommodations' were made to this during or following Tolkien's writing of Rings so it's possible this sequence feels the most fleshed out for that reason. I feel like I would enjoy this more, too, if I'd read it first or as a child like Jez did, because it seems like an inchoate version of the themes of the latter trilogy with ultimately very little at stake here (yes there are lots of life and death struggles but all in the name of 'adventure' and treasure hunting rather than anything broader that affects the world), and some of the narrative is a bit glib where conflicts are dealt with swiftly and easily, in the end without any unpleasant details. It just felt like a slightly dumbed down fantasy novel that may have influenced some writing that came later but would have had far less impact if not for its younger, threefold bulkier brother.
posted by Sean's Beard at 1:40 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting to see that you'd not read The Hobbit before. And you're right, it would probably feel odd after LOTR.
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