Done and Done

Yesterday I finally finished reading and seeing some stuff I'd wanted to read and see.

Reading was The Lord of the Rings series. Yes, I'd never read it before. Weird, as when I was in high school I read The Hobbit and loved it. But for some reason I never moved onto the other books.

Then when the first movie came out I so liked it that I decided to read the book. But everyone else here was reading it, and many didn’t like it. "Too much singing and wandering around in the woods," they said. Hmmm, that didn't seem like the movie. Most of the people I knew never finished the first book.

But then the second movie came out, and I liked it more than the first. So I thought I would read them, but I'd wait until after the third movie came out so that I could enjoy it without knowing anything about what happens.

Well after the third movie I really wanted to read them. But I thought I'd revisit The Hobbit first. It was just as enjoyable as when I was a kid. But now I could appreciate the writing more.

I moved onto The Fellowship of the Ring and found that while I could understand why some people didn't enjoy the slower parts, I found that the characters, imagination, and the writing just swept me right through them. I couldn't wait for The Two Towers.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to Middle Earth. I'd bought The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring separately, but they were part of a set. They had the same neat black covers with runes, and the fannish collector in me wanted The Two Towers and The Return of the King to match. It shouldn't have been too hard, yet whenever I checked in a bookstore I wasn't finding them. Sure other printings were there, but I wanted my black covered ones.

Finally I found them about six months ago. But I was busy doing other stuff and so put them on the bookshelf to read when I had more time. Time, in its fashion, never materialized, but just kept moseying on by, and I forgot to read them. Then about a month ago I saw them and decided I had better make some time. I had been using my train rides for Japanese study, but now this become LotR time.

I'm a pretty slow reader, and I don't help this by rereading a sentence, paragraph or page if I didn't understand it, or I really liked it. This last foible was a major problem for these books. Yes, the prose is sometimes pretty purple, more so in the last book where Aragon becomes almost unbearably pompous, but that's part of the enjoyment. The writing just evokes high fantasy. Real people don't talk like that (except for some fanboy role-players), but it just fits in these books.

And so for the last month my train rides have taken me to Middle Earth rather than to locales around Tokyo. It was almost disappointing to yesterday finish Return of the King, because now the story is over, and I really want it to continue.

And if anything the movies have grown in my appreciation. While the movies changed, added to, and reinterpreted parts of the books, I still feel that breadth of imagination in them. I'm glad that the films aren't slavish to the books.

Wow, I have rambled, and I haven't even finished what I wanted to say. Still I'd better move onto Doctor Who before bedtime, which is just around the corner.

Against all expectations I got to see episode 2 and 4 of the new series. I really enjoyed them. They were piss funny. It was like watching Doctor Who again, but revamped in a good way. I do hope though that it moves away from having one story per show, as even after viewing only 2 shows the format made the pacing a little predictable. But this minor grumble is just because I'm an old fart who has to grumble about something.

New Doctor Who. Watch it, it's good.

And another thing about LotR...