The Lord of the Rings

I saw the movies first, like most people my age did, and always figured I basically knew the book already. Rereading it properly as an adult corrected that pretty fast. The films colored my memory of this more than I realized, for good and for bad, and going back I kept running into whole stretches, whole characters, that the adaptation just quietly dropped or compressed, Tom Bombadil obviously, but also just how much history and lineage Tolkien folds into scenes the movies play as pure action.

I won’t pretend every page moves. There’s a real complaint out there that the closing stretch after the Ring is gone drags, everyone’s just processing and grieving and the plot momentum that carried the first two books mostly evaporates. I didn’t hate that section the way some readers clearly do, comma comma, I actually think it’s doing real work, letting the cost of the whole journey land instead of cutting straight to a victory parade, but I understand why after six hundred pages of momentum some readers want the book to just end already once the Ring is destroyed.

I did the audiobook for my second pass through, Rob Inglis narrating, and the detail that got me is he actually sings every song in the text instead of just reading the lyrics flat. Small thing, but it changes how those sections land completely, they stop feeling like the parts you skim.

Five stars. Slower than the movies trained me to expect, richer for it every time.