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Summary: Amazing book, best fantasy book ever
Review: This book is truly the best piece of fantasy ever written. The plot is rich, heavy and vibrant, full of subtalities and esoteric undercurrents. The characters feel as if they were flesh and blood, and not just ink and paper. They experience internal and external anguish, fear, doubt and sorrow. In esence, they appear to be actually living, not just existing for the transient amusement of the reader, only to be extinguished as the pages are closed. Every thing is placed in a living, coharant, world, which Tolkien took great pains to construct and populate. Overall, this book is required reading for anyone even remotly intrested in literature, and fantasy.
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Summary: Brilliant, simply brilliant.
Review: The best book I have ever read
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Summary: Best Fantasy Books Ever (Besides Silmarillion)
Review: These are the best books I've ever read. Hands down. Salvatore's good, the others are good, but you just can't top Tolkien. I've read the other reviews, and this racist crap and "too hard to Read" is just stupid. Don't even give a care of these people, if they choose not to enjoy these wonderful books because of their squabbles with so called "racism" by Tolkien and such, that's their problem. Literary work at its finest!
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Summary: Kicks arse
Review: The Lord of the Rings is the bible of fantasy and is the very first fantasy book ever! It is the beginning. If you haven't heard of it then you don't read fiction or perhaps at all. It is the best book I have ever read and was voted book of the century in 1997.
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Summary: Excellent
Review: I found this book to be truly astounding. Two years ago I saw a book on the shelf of my local library. I decided to read it purely to amuse myselelf. What I found was a delightful world of enchanted realms in which Tolkien set his story. The characters were superbly described and brought about so as to compliment the true genius of J.R.R. Tolkien. Now I read the story every year purely to escape to the realm of Middle-Earth and enjoy its splendour. For lack of a better word, the story was perfect and a person of any age could enjoy it.
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Summary: The Lord of the Rings stands alone.
Review: Anyone who says .."this makes no sense" or "Where are the women",or "it`s too long" or the ognorant fool who said it was racist HAVENT BOTHERED TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY... this STORY doesnt begin and end with this series...If you read all Tolkiens other books you will understand what you read here. This book HAD to come out first even though it wasnt started first.If you don`t read all the other Tolkien books you won`t really understand what you`re reading in the LoR or you "...may mistake the meaning..."of what you read in it.These books are about Spirituality, about Pride, Family, GOD... Most Tolkien fans who have read the others have read them all dozens of times each. A new lesson / adventure / revelation each time.
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Summary: Turn off your computer and read this NOW!!!!!
Review: The colossal amount of reviews on this book is one thing, but the fact that most of them award The Lord of the Rings 5 stars speaks for itself. 5 stars is sadly not enough to reflect the sheer brilliance of Tolkien's epic, which is perfect in every way and readable to both fans of fantasy books and those who have never read a fantasy book in their life. I am one of those people, whose first fantasy novel was The Hobbit (forced on me by my brother) about a year ago, and I was surprised to enjoy it. I then set upon TLotR, which took me three months to read. By the end I felt: 1) "Why didn't I read this sooner," and 2) "I should not have read this so soon, because no book on earth (or middle-earth) could possibly surpass it."A previous reviewer talked about the underlying racism they took from TLotR when they read it. I noticed the white/black, good/evil stereotyping as well, but you have to remember that 1) this is a fantasy world we're talking about, and while parts of it are applicable to our lives as Tolkien states in his introduction, I doubt someone who created dozens of different species resembling everything from humans to trees and giant spiders, was too preoccupied with clear definitions of colour equalling good or evil... and 2) books must be judged in their context, and this was written in the 1940s/50s when JRR Tolkien would not have been concerned with racial stereotyping, which authors today go out of their way to avoid. This book has been voted Best of the Century for a reason: it IS the best. No novel before it or since has matched the level of imagination, plot complexity and background storytelling Tolkien manages here. It is as if it is not a fictional work at all, just a history book from another, much older, world. Above all, the book is an immensely enjoyable read. The characters are varied and nicely rounded, the action moves along steadily (slowly as well, but then it is a slow journey), the writing is stylish and vivid, and not only are we drawn into the land Tolkien has created but we start to believe it is real... This book is absolutely outstanding and if it takes you all your life to read it you will not be disappointed. Start immediately.
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Summary: By any measure, LOTR has earned its place as a classic
Review: Rather, this is a book that proves timeless in its themes, prose, and power. Indeed, the universally recognized construct of good vs. evil has been the crown jewel of all stories since Genesis. Humanity itself is reflected in this dynamic, and the drama unfolds in Tolkien's pages with a grace and fury uncommon to the genre. His tale of the diminutive, peaceful Hobbits placed against a frightening array of evil forces and corruption is one that reaches deep, clenching your heart. It is compelling because of its verisimilitude. We all wish for our heroes to be brave but to find valor in such an unexpected place is lyrically pure beyond means. Call it "Fairy Tale" or what you will-- LOTR is a literary masterpiece, easily qualified by its keen portrayal of endurance against adversity. But it has many other strengths. Consider that the civilizations, cultures, and history as devised by Tolkien are the product of decades of careful research into Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic myth. They seem real because they are drawn from a felicitous past. Painstaking effort provided the invention of real languages and alphabets for his Elves and Dwarfs. His erudition inspires awe. By great leaps of his imagination, he gave Middle-Earth an authentic backdrop of mythical deities, battles, natural wonders, and poetry. "I've always preferred history to fiction," Tolkien is quoted as saying. Indeed, he has provided such a rich explication of this past that the narrative takes on a substance unmatched in modern fantasy. This masterful portrait of high romance and adventure stands apart. The Lord of the Rings has been voted "Book of the Century" by Britain's largest reader survey (not once but TWICE). In the early 70's here in the United States it defined a generation. As C.S. Lewis once said of his friend's work: "Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron."
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Summary: Plagiarism, Racism & Freemasonic Subtexts
Review: For an Oxbridge Don, Tolkien sure stole a heck of a lot of his technique from Saturday morning matinee movies (Flash Gordon et al). Notice that there is a cliff-hanger at the end of each chapter and that each ensuing chapter jumps to another group of characters to create a sense of "drama". Try reading alternate chapters in the second book and see how interesting the plot development actually is (not). ...(Here, Tolkien is blatantly plagiarising from his amazed that Mathew, Mark Luke and Ringo have not sued!). Once the world of Middle Earth had been mapped out it could not have been too difficult to fill with an infinite succession of repetitive, different-but-the-same, baddies for our hairy heroes to face as they trudge from chapter to chapter. Why, when the programmers of shoot-em-up games like Quake do exactly the same basic thing (but make it much more fun), are they not lauded as great authors by the literary set? Surely they should be in for honorary degrees from Oxford University? Tolky squeezes this infinite potential for all that it is worth and we trudge through baddie after baddie, for thousands of pages. Bright ten year olds may be excused for mistaking a fat book for a great one - and let's face it this is an elbow-acher of a book. But only a feeble minded adolescent reader could ignore the other glaring problems of this piece. Not only of Tolk's limitations of style but also that the South African born author has laced his children's fantasy with his ugly, ugly views on race. If I were a responsible teacher, I would have this book removed from the school library and burned. If this "epic" isn't banned in order to save the rainforests (oh yeah, - isn't the internet supposed to reduce book production?), it certainly should be banned for Tolkien's racism. In the edition that I read (some years ago), the species that live in the middle of Middle Earth (Europe) are all elegant, cultured, decent and fair skinned (i.e. white). The "swarthy", (darkies to you and me), heathen hordes that live to the South and to the East are all featureless, baddies, worshipping evil and with characters never developed to any degree of interest. To deny a character human traits and complexities that we can relate to is the cheapest way of manipulating audience sympathies. There is even some suggestion that they ride strange beasts with big ears (African and Indian elephants). The surviving heroes (well, those who aren't so unfortunate as to have been born lower class), sail off across a great ocean to live in a Valhalla land in the West (America). Is this simple translation from existing facts and myths into thinly disguised fantasy the real source of Tolk's "vast imagination"? Whatever the answer to that question, exploit the lower class". Some lost souls rant about the great struggle between Good and Evil in this plot. "GOOD IS WHITE AND EVIL IS BLACK" is as sophisticated as it gets. This might have been OK for what is essentially a children's book, but to define Good and Evil by Race is not OK. Intelligent people are marked by their ability to out there, but it's wobbly". If you have an evening, read A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin and see how much more intelligently Good and Evil can be approached in fantasy. Whilst other racist works of the era have been deleted, The Tolkiad, it seems, generates too much money to be curbed by race laws. favour, spend six months reading a book on computer programming, or investment management instead and really improve your life. That way you might actually end up FUND RACISM - If you haven't read this book don't bother. Freemasonic content that the author loaded his book with?... guarantee of good character
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Summary: The Lord of the Rings defines fantasy.
Review: Tolkein is the epitomy of fantasy. Anybody who reads fantasy has to read this book. To say that you are a fan of fantasy is a hypocrisy if you haven't. I read it when I was 13 and then twice more later on in my teenage years and I keep finding things that I missed the first times. There are no fantasy books out there that could even be put in the same category as The Lord of the Rings!
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