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NottaSackville
Doriath
Nov 12, 1:45pm
Post #1 of 7
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It's the random pop-up reading thread! What are you reading?
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Our wonderful Lily is currently recovering for a bit (we wish you the fastest, speediest, and most successful recovery, Ms. Fairbairn!), but I've started a fun read so I thought I'd post a random reading thread.
What's my fun read? Oh, just a little book called The Hobbit!
I used to re-read the Hobbit and LOTR every 3-4 years starting back when I was 12 or so - as soon as the details started to fade I'd renew my acquaintance with Bilbo, Frodo, Sam and the rest.
But a funny thing happened along the way - something I did not intend, the movies started coming out, I joined TORN and all the wonderful discussions, started treating Tolkien as more of a scholarly pursuit than a fun escape, my kids watched and rewatched and rewatched the movies, and.....it's not that I got burned out, but I did lose some of the joyful wonder of rediscovery.
Sooo, I stopped going into the reading & movie rooms, put the books away, haven't rewatched the movies in years, and thanks to my terrible memory, have finally decided that enough of the details, well, haven't exactly been forgotten, but have definitely gotten a bit dusty. Yay! Really looking forward to this first re-read in probably...almost 20 years?
(And no - this isn't a commitment on my part to post this thread regularly, anyone should feel free to start a new one until Lily comes back!)
Happiness: money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important and so are friends, while envy is toxic -- and so is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude. - The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner as summarized by Lily Fairbairn. And a bit of the Hobbit reading thrown in never hurts. - NottaSackville
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cats16
Gondolin
Nov 13, 12:51am
Post #2 of 7
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I completely understand that kind of journey in your relationship to the books and movies. I've gone through a couple of cycles of burnout (for lack of a better term), and as a result tried to keep enough of a distance so as to be able to come back to them with fresher eyes and ears. Sometimes that's just a year, sometimes it's longer. A couple of years ago, I read LOTR with a friend who hadn't read it before, and we did a chapter-by-chapter email thread discussing it and sharing the experience. It was really great and invigorating!
But glad you're taking the plunge, I hope it's a very fun experience diving back in.
In other non-Tolkien reading news, I finished reading an edited compilation of "miscellany" by Charles Portis, which included everything from short stories to interviews and even news articles he wrote during the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South.
I'm currently about halfway through Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. It's my first read of Pynchon, and it was very overdue, but the timing felt right given the recent release of the movie One Battle After Another, which was loosely inspired by Vineland. Somehow Pynchon is exactly what I expected, yet that's not at all a negative thing! I think I had a really good idea of what I was jumping into and am enjoying myself.
And keeping Lily in my thoughts, I hope she's on the mend!
Join us every weekend in the Hobbit movie forum for this week's CHOW (Chapter of the Week) discussion!
(This post was edited by cats16 on Nov 13, 12:52am)
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Annael
Elvenhome
Nov 13, 6:30pm
Post #3 of 7
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as I plug slowly away at my novel. It was reommended to me to get In the Upper Country by Kai Thomas which is mostly about the Underground Railroad but dips into the complicated relationship between Blacks and Natives during the War of 1812, and I'm also still working through The Civil War of 1812 by Alan Taylor. I'm also reading Dara Marks's excellent book Inside Story about how to craft a compelling narrative and on the fiction side, Homeseeking by Karissa Chen, a story of two Chinese immigrants who loved each other as teens, emigrated separately to America, and meet up again decades later. Finally, for my bedtime light reading, I re-read The Toll-Gate by Georgette Heyer: a soldier recently returned from the Napoleonic Wars gets lost on the moors in a storm, finds himself in a tiny village, takes refuge at the hut of the toll gatekeeper who has gone mysteriously missing; seeking adventure, he pretends to be the man's replacement while he sniffs out an increasingly convoluted plot and also falls in love with the local squire's independent daughter. Darker than most of Heyer's work but still lots of fun.
I am a dreamer of words, of written words.
-- Gaston Bachelard
* * * * * * * * * *
NARF and member of Deplorable Cultus since 1967
(This post was edited by Annael on Nov 13, 6:34pm)
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Ioreth
Ossiriand
Nov 15, 8:39pm
Post #4 of 7
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Jane Austen's letters in Swedish translation :)
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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
Nov 17, 11:39pm
Post #5 of 7
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The Three-Body Problem + sequels
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I finally got around to reading the trilogy by Liu Cixin:
1. The Three-Body Problem
2. The Dark Forest
3. Death's End
It was a mixed experience all over. Liu Cixin is an idea writer first and foremost. Plot and characters have... issues. Overall I thought the second book was the best and the most enjoyable. I thought the second book had the best characterization too. Luo Ji was my favorite. He actually had some depth to him.
On the other hand, I found Cheng Xin in the third book an unbearably boring and shallow character. It was difficult to keep reading whenever the plot threatened to become all about her and her life, but luckily those moments passed quickly to make way for more interesting events. Cheng Xin's friend AA has even less personality to the point of not really having any at all. It's amazing, really. AA hangs around for such a big stretch of the plot but is nevertheless such a zero-dimensional entity. That kind of thing feels intentional in a story that talks about dimensions. The second book had all that stuff about imaginary perfect girlfriends too, which sounds like it might be thematically related.
The plot gets all over the place. It might seem impossible to have something with clear influences from sources as diverse as Flatland, Tau Zero, Contact, and Roadside Picnic (among others) but Liu Cixin somehow crams the history of science fiction into one trilogy, arranged in order of groundedness and metamorphosed. It keeps the plot moving and varied, I suppose, though the end result is uneven. There even appear to be some Tolkien influences in the third book.
There would appear to be a lot of plot holes, but I suspect those aren't really plot holes and that the reader is meant to think about what is really going on in the plot. The story indeed goes on to confirm that some things said much earlier were lies... just like I had suspected because of the glaring plot holes that arise from accepting those things as the truth. I think the reader is meant to use that precedent of lies to examine the story and figure out the real truth that makes the plot holes vanish.
The dark forest solution to the Fermi paradox (described in the second book) features prominently in the story and has gained a lot of attention because of the trilogy. Nevertheless, I don't think the things are so simple as they appear. I think the story deep down is more supportive of various other explanations, which are showcased through the narrative without mentioning them by name, but a detailed discussion of those would get into the spoiler territory.
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NottaSackville
Doriath
Nov 20, 1:57pm
Post #6 of 7
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Hey - that Hobbit book is pretty good!
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Seems mostly like a Dungeons & Dragons ripoff. Sure, it calls them Hobbits instead of Halflings, but so did D&D at the beginning. Glowing magic swords, wizards, elves, dwarves, goblins, werebears, invisibility rings, giant spiders, sleep spells, even the lifespan of the various races - it's like a collection of D&D's biggest tropes with a cover slapped on. The two obviously share the same root somewhere...
But still, I enjoyed it in a "someone wrote up the story of their D&D campaign" kind of way.
Notta (yes, tongue FIRMLY planted in cheek....)
Happiness: money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important and so are friends, while envy is toxic -- and so is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude. - The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner as summarized by Lily Fairbairn. And a bit of the Hobbit reading thrown in never hurts. - NottaSackville
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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
Mon, 4:11pm
Post #7 of 7
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I read The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson (better known for the more approachable novel The House on the Borderland, which I'm also planning on rereading at some point). I would classify The Night Land as a flawed masterpiece. I had already it once before, but the passage of time allowed me to see deeper levels that I had not perceived there before.
The Night Land is a novel that takes place in a world in which the Sun has died and the survivors of humanity live inside a massive fortress, surrounded by a monster-filled wasteland, the Night Land of the title. The unique worldbuilding and the atmosphere are the definite highlights that make the book something special.
Ordinarily there are two big things have potential to interfere with someone's enjoyment of The Night Land:
- The writing style
- The romance
This time I found that unusual writing style with its deliberate archaisms didn't bother me at all and instead gave a nice sense of distance. The style issues had felt a bit of a chore on my first reading but now the reading felt smooth now in that respect.
The romance part however was the opposite. I didn't like the romance even before, but now I liked the romance much less. However this time I thought deeper about the character dynamic presented and started to think if I was looking at just a bad, self-indulgent romance starring the author's self insert and the author's individual idea of the perfect girl (a trouble-maker) or if there was a deeper layer to it. The deeper layer changes the story quite a bit, though it still doesn't make the romance parts enjoyable to read. I also noticed some hidden Christian themes in the book.
I also started thinking about is what is going to happen next after the last chapter. There are a few options, but I cannot really talk about it here because of spoilers.
Here is a link to the full text of The Night Land:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Night_Land
Also, the book has a fansite (not by me, and I don't necessarily agree with everything there):
https://nightland.website/
Anyway, I think The Night Land was a major (really major) overlooked influence to Tolkien. I wrote a post in the Reading Room forum detailing this theory, which I find highly plausible. The Reading Room post contains spoilers, including many details of the worldbuilding and some more about the romance, but I didn't allow myself to spoil the ending:
http://newboards.theonering.net/...rum.cgi?post=1020982
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