Rating: 
Summary: How am I supposed to get any studying done??
Review: Well, I decided to read this book once more before going to see the movie. It would have only been twice, but I still needed to refresh my memory badly. Was I ever glad that I did! This story is so full of adventure, danger, and mystery it's not even funny. Each page opens up into a new world with things never even imagined by this reader. Reading about the dark lord Sauron sent chills down my spine because this is one of the most evil characters ever created. I can't believe some people say the characters are one dimensional! Every single character has their own distinct personality, and by the end I had grown to love them all. Unfortunately I wound up in the climax during finals week. I couldn't get any studying done because I couldn't put this amazing book down! If you pick up this book and find the first 100 pages or so slow, keep reading...it really starts to pick up. Read this...60 years later it can still thrill, amaze, delight, and even sometimes, cause a laugh. In case you don't know, the story is about a fellowship of hobbits, humans, and other creatures who must take the one ring to be destroyed in the one place where it can be destroyed: In the middle of evil Sauron's vast land. If Sauron got ahold of it, he would be able to rule all of middle earth with it...and make everyone his slave...this ring is the most powerful of all rings. I recommend reading before seeing the movie, but if you don't, by all means, read it anyway when the movie's over. Then, pick up the next two!
Rating:
Summary: Only the best book ever written.....
Review: If you don't like this book, then you just don't get it. Tolkien has created a world unlike any ever seen in literature before. The story is amazing and has everything: good vs. evil, rousing adventure, magic, friendship, loyalty, an unlikely hero and the most amazing characters ever created by a fantasy writer. If you haven't read this book, where have you been? This is where J.K. Rowling, Brian Jacques, Susan Cooper and Philip Pullman all got their inspiration. If you have ever loved a fantasy book, fantasy movie, or just love a great story, then you need to read this book. Tolkien started it all.
Rating:
Summary: The Fellowship of the Ring
Review: The "Fellowship of the Ring" is the first novel in the series "The Lord of the Rings". Lord of the Rings is a story set in a fake place called the middle earth, the middle earth is where bag-end is. Like Thomasville is in the United States. The actual Lord of the Rings is Sauron, the Dark Lord, who lost the One Ring that had most of his strength. He wants to get the ring back and make all the people in the middle earth slaves. In a very strange turn of events, the ring somehow ended up in the little hands of Frodo Baggins, who is a simple hobbit. Hobbits are little tiny people who are about half the size of normal people. They have big hairy feet and they are short and stout. Frodo is the nephew of the famous Bilbo Baggins. But somehow the fate of the entire middle earth rests in Frodo Baggins hands. With Gandalf, the powerful wizard as their leader, Frodo and three of his friends, Sam Gamgee, Pippin Took,and Merry Brandybuck set out to keep the ring from Saurons hands but destroying the ring by taking it to the cracks of doom, the only place that it can be destroyed. First the set out for Rivendell, a home of elves. on their way they are chased by nine ringwraths, but are helped but a man named Strider. They make it to Rivendell and with the help of elrond, an elf, Frodo accepts the challenge of taking the ring to the cracks of doom, in the the fiery of Orodruin, inside the realm of Mordor. They head south with all of the members of the Fellowship to take the ring. They meet a demon on the way, and Gandalf is no longer the leader of the group. then Frodo and one of his friends decide to head on to the Cracks of doom buy themselves. In the end they make it through many struggles and destroy the ONE ring and save all of the Middle Earth.
Rating:
Summary: Best Fiction Ever Written
Review: I had to write this review due to the one star reviews of people saying the book was too detailed for them. Go back to reading Harry Potter. This isn't a novel, it's literature. It may be above your head, but don't deny it for that. It's not the book's fault. Simply put, these books defined fantasy. Very few fantasies out today haven't lifted a page from Tolkien. If you can't handle the book because it's deeper than Xena, fine. But, respect it for what it is.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Fantasy, Great Story
Review: There used to be two ways to read The Lord of The Rings, now there will be three. It used to be that you either read this book before or after you read the Silmarillion and the Hobbit. Now it will also be either before or after you've seen the movies which you saw before or after you read the Silmarillion and the Hobbit. However you arrive you will not be disappointed. If you come from 'The Hobbit' it continues the story of the One Ring as it passes from Bilbo to Frodo, and as they, Gandalf, and the world become more aware of what has happened and what the ring really means. While reading this book you'll hear clues to many other, older, stories and myths of ages gone by (the three ages of Middle Earth) and at first you'll pass over them, and you'll enjoy the adventure of Frodo and the fellowship facing their collective and individual destinies. If, however, you read the Silmarillion before reading this book, you'll immediately recognize people, places, and things that carry a much greater history, which can add greatly to your enjoyment. The meaning of places and items encountered will carry the wealth of meaning associated with mythology in our literature. It has been said that these stories all grew out of Tolkien's attempt to invent a language, and his awareness that you can't invent a language without inventing a mythology and history to go along with it. Another option is to read all of them several times, and the good news is that they hold up. These books are all good enough to be enjoyed with several readings. Which leads to the further temptation of all those other Middle Earth books that Christopher Tolkien has been editing. For now, if you're just starting, start with 'The Hobbit', it's an easy read, it introduces many characters that are referenced in 'The Lord Of The Rings' and gives you a general introduction to the land and people of Middle Earth. Then 'The Lord of The Rings'. As much as you may like to read just one, the three all go together and they are a compelling tale. Then, if you really want to know more about those characters, and the history that precedes them, The Silmarillion. By that time you'll be a true fan and can decide on your own whether to go back to the beginning or on through all the other bits and pieces that are being discovered. This is a really rich fable. It's been written out of a deep love of language, literature, history, and religion, and the more you read the more you'll wonder about the mind that could invent it, and the man that would keep working on it for so long without passing it on. There is a great love here and bit of it rubbs off on each of us while reading it.
Rating: 
Summary: I expected it to be a lot better.....
Review: First of all, let me say that I love fantasy novels a lot. I assumed that I would like Lord of the Rings a lot after reading the back cover and hearing friends talk about it. However, I must be missing something, because I found very little in this book that would even come close to living up to my expectations of a good fantasy book. For one thing, there is no character development at all. I didn't identify with any of the characters, nor did I care whether any of them lived or died. Also, it moved very slowly. I read through the entire book, waiting for something to happen. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Of all the fantasy books I have read (which is quite a few), this had to be one of the dullest. Maybe if all three books were shortened and condensed into one, it would be faster moving and more bearable. Lord of the Rings did not have as much action as I expected, nor did it contain any characters that I actually liked. I would recommend the Harry Potter series or Anne McCaffrey if you like books of this genre because they are more entertaining and faster paced than The Lord of the Rings.
Rating:
Summary: A Welcome Anachronism
Review: There's irony in the aspersions cast against The Fellowship of the Ring. The criticisms most often raised- that its pace founders, that its heroes and villains are vapid, that its prose is effete- simply take a fractured view on the book's greatest merits. Such criticism is symptomatic of our age: Tolkien's pacing incenses readers reared on cartoon adventures, on entertainment calculated to induce adrenaline rushes each instant; Tolkien dares to paint characters unequivocally good or evil, anathema to a society that wonders whether the World Trade Center should still stand; nor does Tolkien condescend to the reader- he renders his epic through epic language. To a culture whose conception of male relationships is a duo of sitcom characters slinging insults and competing for females, the Fellowship's comradeship and nobility, even the genuine love among its members, is a jarring anachronism, but a welcome one. If this review smacks of falsehood, I'll concede that logical gaps should be expected in an argument for a book that I decided was the best ever written while in the first grade. I read Lord of the Rings again recently, though, and my admiration for the book soared. Its author insists that he meant for the tale to stand on its own merits, that it offered no commentary on World War II or on religion, and it does so commendably. It does more, however- it suggests on every page the transience of existence, that all things, beautiful and plain, strong and feeble, must give way to the new. Tolkien's Middle Earth, styled with abundant implications for our own world, nonetheless exists self-sufficiently. No book can boast of a factitious reality so unflinchingly realized. Every song, every sunset, every smoke-ring completes Tolkien's envisaged world, and brilliantly intensifies the conflict. Through profuse detail, we learn exactly what odds face the Fellowship, and what lies at stake. Each step on the journey, then, and each battle acquires gravity unattainable to a tale less completely realized. The opening chapters and subsequent exposition are not impediments to the conflict ahead- they, rather, are integral to it. The Fellowship of the Ring and its companion volumes could imbue all humanity with pride in their nobility. We instead seethe against its idealism. Lord of the Rings becomes, curiously, an exclusionary book. It has nothing to say to post-modernists who find perverse vindication in depictions of people as frail as they. It offers nothing to self-hating intellects who equate "human" with "impotent," and "ideal" with "delusion." J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings expertly lends us a view of life as one ought to live it.
Rating: 
Summary: A Clssic? Hummm, let's talk about this, shall we?
Review: There is so much to be said against The Lord Of The Rings that it shouldn't be worth the effort. A book that, judged by conventional standards, contains so many appalling lapses of taste and so much coarse vulgarity really ought, by now, to have faded from sight.
From many points of view, it has dated badly, and its aesthetics and politics are now so odd that you might be forgiven for thinking, as Peter Jackson's new trilogy of movies rapidly approaches, that its appeal, after all, is one of a delicious period piece.
But all judgements have always been confounded by this extraordinary book. It ought to be too long, and too pointlessly abstruse, to command wide popularity; it is not a book for children, and yet not a book for adults either; its style is too elevated for popular literature, but too coarse for "high" literature. There is no reason on earth for anyone to like it, and there are plenty of readers who still think that the judgement of JRR Tolkien's first publisher - who was surprised when it started to look as if the book might make as much as £1,000 - was much sounder than the people who, in the past 50 years, have bought more than 100 million copies of the book.
However, by now, The Lord Of The Rings is unarguably a part of English literature. Contrary to popular belief, 100 million readers can perfectly well be wrong; but the continuing life of the book cannot just be ignored. It is just there, massively.
But, in many ways, it is just awful. It is amazingly humourless, and Tolkien knows it - over and over again, he writes " 'Come, master Pippin!' Gandalf laughed" - a very bad sign, all those laughing wizards. You don't have to be politically correct to be mildly alarmed by some aspects of it. Apart from Eowyn, the women in it are not madly significant, or allowed to do anything much. There is Galadriel, who stays at home being Wise; there are Goldberry or Rose, who stay at home being Patient Helpmeets; there are Lobelia Sackville Baggins and Shelob, who stay at home being completely ghastly.
It is an appallingly naïve fantasy of good and evil races; mostly, the good people are tall and blond and speak Nordic or Celtic languages, and the bad ones are dark and hairy and talk a sort of Persian - those guttural dwarves are allowed a sort of virtue, but it is rather grudging in tone. Sam Gamgee is a loyal retainer of the most frightful variety, still "Mr Frodo-ing" away and knowing his place 1,000 pages in; basically, he is Dickens's Sam Weller, and Tolkien couldn't even be bothered to change his name.
Tolkien probably knew as much about language as anyone, but it would be fair to say that his interest stopped at grammatical inflection. The Lord of the Rings, by ordinary standards, is just badly written. Great swathes of it are in a sort of Ben-Hur biblical: "And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them... until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords..."
There are endless mock subtleties of the "It seemed to Sam that he saw..." variety. And there is, too, that infallible sign of a really bad writer, the overuse of the word "suddenly". Everything in The Lord of the Rings happens suddenly, dozens of times a chapter. And yet it is one of those very rare books that confounds all objections, all standards, and which in the end may make its own standards. Nobody, I think, has ever produced anything with the imaginative density and intricacy of the book. The reviewer's cliché is, for once, apt here; he really created a world.
The power and resonance of the book come in part from an ethical debate that is much more adult than one remembers - it is haunted by the cruelty of its age, and is not, in fact, just about the alternative of Good and Evil, the elves and the orcs, but largely about the possibility of becoming evil through the best intentions. It is really about slow corruption, and is at its finest in the portraits of Saruman and Denethor, characters who it is not difficult to parallel in 20th-century history.
But its claim on real greatness comes from the sense of huge, half-glimpsed vistas of history and language, the illusion (which may not be an illusion) that its author knew exactly the languages each of its characters would have spoken and understood the events of ancient history that lead all of them to act as they do.
In a realistic novelist, writing about a real war, this would be a remarkable feat of intelligence; when you consider that Tolkien invented absolutely everything - the backstory, the languages, the geography - it quickly becomes almost incredible. At some point, the critics and the literati have to admit that they were just wrong, and, by now, it is probably time to start considering his extraordinary flight of imagination as one of the key works of modern literature.
Rating:
Summary: Overrated, overblown, overwritten
Review: Tedious. Plodding. Boring. Painful. One-dimensional characters set in a ludicrously detailed, needlessly complicated environment (and lousy maps to boot). A classic? I've read soupcan ingredient lists more interesting, and product warranty cards more expertly written. As if the prose weren't painful enough, it's constantly interrupted by schoolboy poems and pseudo-mystical "songs". I found myself skipping paragraphs to avoid (repetitive and) trite sunrises, sunsets, snowstorms, dark passages, warm fireplaces, etc. Hello? Can anyone say "editor" please? I finally picked up The Hobbit and the Fellowship in order to read them before the Fellowship movie comes out. I will only complete the trilogy because I have never NOT finished a book...although this garbage is putting me to the test. I just hope they all die soon so I can get back to reading about interesting characters in other books. Is this really the best of the fantasy genre, as my friends seem to think? Please tell me there's some unheralded author out there whose prose dances around Tolkien's before I swear to never pick up another fantasy book again. And to think I played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid. The only question left: do I save the $10 and skip the movie?
Rating:
Summary: Moves as slow as cold molasses. Pointless
Review: The best review I ever read of this book was by one of Tolkien's own circle of friends. After hearing Tolkien read aloud yet another chapter of the Ring trilogy, the visitor exclaimed "Not another goddam elf!!??". Tolkien's work is so dense and slow moving you wonder if it is an adventure or a still photograph. He has no concept of moving the narrative ahead. His dialogue is wooden. The Hobbits sound like robots. His poetry is leaden. What is the point of this book? I can't figure out why people praise it so! And why is it that whenever anyone does a take on a mythically powerful ring, they need such absurdly great lengths to do it (hello Richard Wagner). I am utterly puzzled by the enthusiasm this book stirs up in people. To me, it is a mindless, poorly written, utter bore.
|
