Rating: 
Summary: Not Bored Of The Rings
Review: i have a question, how could you make fun of the lord of the rings, its one of the best books ive ever read, and a classic, this book doesnt have anything to do with the lord of the rings and most of the jokes are basically stupid and they dont make sense . dont get this book, youll waste your time.
Rating: 
Summary: Can I give it fifteen stars?
Review: This ingenious novelette was the work of Henry Beard, Doug Kenney and other editors of the Harvard Lampoon just prior to their launch of the ground-breaking National Lampoon magazine."Bored of the Rings" is, quite simply, the best and funniest work of satire ever written (IMHO :-). The prologue alone (entitled "Concerning Boggies", a hysterical attack on Hobbits whom the Lampoon calls Boggies) is worth the price of the book. The attention to satiric detail is amazing and some snippets are needed to do it justice: "It is plain the boggies are relatives of ours, standing somewhere along the evolutionary line that leads from rats to wolverines and eventually to Italians, but what our exact relationship is cannot be told. Their beginnings lie far back in the Good Old Days when the planet was populated with the kind of colorful creatures you have to drink a quart of Old Overcoat to see nowadays... This was all in the Third, or Sheet-Metal, Age of Lower Middle Earth,... While there was still a King at Ribroast, the Boggies remained nominally his subjects. And to the last battle at Ribroast with the Slumlord of Borax, they sent some snipers, though who they sided with is unclear." If you have even the slightest appreciation for Tolkien, this work should reside next to your copy of the trilogy.
Rating: 
Summary: Just what "the original" deserved.
Review: Having struggled through the immense tome of Lord of the Rings, finding most of it rather dull, and the climactic battle scenes rather anti-so, I think this book only looks better when compared with the original. Now that I've read BOTR, I'd have to agree with the reader who said, the only reason to read LOTR is so you can read BOTR (well, those aren't the exact words...and a lot of Tolkien fans would disagree...but...who cares). This book is just what Lord of the Rings deserved; in fact it's the only thing that makes LOTR worth reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Kaboom! they went, and yet the great bird flew on
Review: This brutal parody of cuddly old Prof Tolkien's doorstop of a novel is mostly of interest to Tolkien fans with a well-developed sense of humour, and anybody who just hates anything hobbit-related. It has to be said that, if you read this at a tender age, it could seriously spoil your enjoyment of LOTR; it could, but it might not. Some of the parody is really about Tolkien fans rather than the book itself - Tom Bombadil becomes a burned-out acidhead with an equally spacy girlfriend, and there's a general air about the whole thing of preppy Harvard types who've listened to too many comedy records, sniggering at the counterculture. (A lot of the jokes turn on replacing names with brandnames - Frodo becomes Frito, Saruman Serutan, etc. I just didn't get any of these, because these products are only sold in the USA.) The really cruelly accurate stuff is deeper and more subtle. Tolkien fans may or may not have noted that Aragorn, military leader of more or less the whole novel, seldom seems to do any actual fighting. This is beadily observed by the authors, who represent him as an incompetent blowhard - after a battle, they list all the feats of valour by Gimlet and Legolam (sic) and add "and Strider (sic again) was off somewhere probably doing something pretty much brave." "Lord of the Rings", whatever its other virtues, isn't exactly a great laff, and this book is certainly a hoot once or twice round. But overall it's a bit thin and clever-clever, and its republication now, with the movie coming out, is just as brazenly cynical as its original publication during the initial wave of Tolkien Frenzy. But so what? If it had pulled more punches, it wouldn't be as funny. And so it goes on, clinging to its mighty (and largely oblivious) host like a demented remora. Ah, the fortunes of satire...
Rating:
Summary: The best parody of a series ever produced
Review: Unabashed fans of Tolkien who can't take a joke might deeply resent the lengths this book goes to make fun of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. For the rest of us with a sense of humor, this is beyond a shadow of a doubt the funniest parody ever produced. *Everything* is funny. The prelude and introduction alone are worth buying the book a fragment of the introduction I remember: "Armed with enough Dr. Pepper and Fritos to choke a small horse (actually the eventual publishing of this book did *involve* the choking of a small horse but that's another story..."). You simply can't do better than this as far as good fun is concerned. My original copy is worn down to nothing as repeated readings will occur. This one deserves a sixth star, it is truly brilliant.
Rating:
Summary: Hysterically funny satire... but some references are dated
Review: This is an extremely funny parody of _The Lord of the Rings_. The most impressive think about it is the degree to which the details (parodized, of course) correspond to details in the original. I'm not just talking about characters, names, plot events either-- even style, phrasings, and rhythm and rhyme (in the poems) are satirized here. The book, however, does have two shortcomings. First,this was written three decades ago and a lot of the language and references are very dated. It's still quite funny to see characters saying "Groovy", of course, but it's a different kind of funny-- a nostalgic funny like Austin Powers. The dated references (including many to commercial products no longer around)are a little more difficult... older readers will get them, but younger readers may end up just scratching their heads as to what some of these 'arcane' references are. The second is that it doesn't go quite all the way and include a satire of the appendices of _Lord of the Rings_ as well. Still, these are minor complaints about an otherwise very funny book. Finally, one word of caution. Although this is a very funny book, I think it's humor can only really be appreciated by Tolkien fans-- by folks who've actually read the originals well enough that they can follow what's being satirized. There are, however, some Tolkien fans who still won't appreciate _Bored of the Rings_. I'm talking here about those folks who view _The Lord of the Rings_ in the way that fundamentalists view the Bible. So, if the very *idea* of an irreverent parody of Tolkien's fiction strikes you as offensive, insulting, or even blasphemous (don't laugh-- such people do exist), I'd recommend giving this book a wide berth-- it's not written for you, and you won't enjoy it.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Hilarious
Review: Whatever you do, don't let some poor person with a fantasyland immersion problem dissuade you from buying this book. If you're a Tolkien fan and have a shred of a sense of humor, you'll love this. Read the trilogy for the fortieth time (if you're like me), then breeze through this book. It's worth it.
Rating:
Summary: Not for the Hobbit-Lovers
Review: This book is a must-read for those of us who find Tolkien's epic tedious as well as smarmy and twee. This parody is, as a parody, excellent, with even the characters' names laugh-out-loud funny, and it follows the plot of the original closely enough to demonstrate just how padded and over-written Tolkien's books were.
Rating:
Summary: Bad! Just plain bad!
Review: Some people have no respect. No stars would be more appropriate. An unfunny, sexually explicit parody that does justice to neither its authors, nor to the book it attempts to parody. This hobbit wishes there was a "0" star option.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious Reading
Review: This book took me a long time to find, but when I did I but cast with more hilarity than any other book. Read it.
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