Book Fail Helpline

[Griffin NoName]

Love Lord of the Rings. But could never get into his other saga The Silmarillion. Couldn't understand a word of it.

[Swatopluk]

That one is highly condensed anyway. To 'get' it, you'll have to read the full 12 volume (iirc) History of Middle Earth compiled by JRR's son Christopher. It's worth the effort (imo).
It's also fascinating to learn how different LOTR turned out from the original plans. E.g. Aragorn was a hobbit up to the Falls of Rauros and in one draft Frodo and Sam escape from Minas Morgul because Sam is mistaken for the Lord of the Nazgul(!).

[Roland Deschain]

The Silmarillion was a little heavy going when I first read it at 14, but subsequent reading has made it far easier to understand. Not touched The History of Middle Earth yet. It will be time to finally get around to it soon. Swato, there was a lot that he ended up changing, which is why there are a few inconsistencies thereabouts.

[pieces o nine]

As an Englishman, I must concur that The Great Gatsby was very enjoyable to read. I have no idea why more of the English than the US residents here seem to enjoy it. It must be a cultural thing.

. . .

There have been few books that i've had to put down partway through. These have been Weaveworld by Clive Barker, ... Weaveworld I absolutely adored once i'd read it fully, but couldn't get on with it at first. I don't know why, as I love Clive Barker's books, usually. To anyone who's read Gravity's Rainbow, i'm sure you understand why I felt I had to stop. Most bizarre book i've ever read, I think (I believe headf*** is the correct term here).

I have a 4-volume F. Scott set; his writing is not difficult but perhaps Gatsby describes a lifestyle too far removed from the US norm at this point to appeal to a wider audience.

I went through a Clive Barker stage; I liked Weaveworld, but don't remember finishing Imajica. For some reason it just irritated the hell out of me and I had to give up on it. Maybe enough time has gone by to give it another shot...

There were a few others-- Tolkin's Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring had be bogged down in it's endless pages of nonsensical poetry.  Years and years, I would put it down, to pick it up and try again.  I finally did slog past the endless boring parts, and then eventually managed to read the rest, and the next two books as well (this time, skipping/skimming the poetry--whole chapters simply ignored as unreadable).  

OMG! I have to agree with you here, Bob! I love language and poetry and I should   have enjoyed both in his massive tomes...but, sadly, no. I remember describing it with a somewhat crazed expression, [facial and vocal] ranting about how he slogged you every effing step of the way to Mordor -- IN REAL TIME -- replete with 12-verse epic songs dropped randomly throughout the text, for no apparent reason, [or perhaps due to daily immersion in interminable hymns in Chapel from his CoE-sponsored schooling?]  followed by their translation into Elvish, then into Dwarvish, then into the other Elvish, into oh god make it stooooooop...

Otherwise I quite enjoyed the story and kept the books. (I've noted elsewhere that it is a federal law in the US for college students to read all of Tolkein and all of Herbert, among others. But when I saw The Silmarillion...

Love Lord of the Rings. But could never get into his other saga The Silmarillion. Couldn't understand a word of it.

...my eyes glazed over and I experienced something akin to PTSD.
I refused to touch it.

I love Frank Herbert's Dune series, but I have similarly refused to have anything to do with the series beyond Chapterhouse Dune. One really needs to know when to say when, sometimes, even where one loves...  

And in that vein, I will probably never finish Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before despite being quite fond of his other works. Like Imajica, it just irritates the hell out of me, even though it goes against the grain to let a first edition languish, for years, that way. Likewise, I had really enjoyed every foray into history by Sharon Kay Penman until about 100 pages into When Christ and His Saints Slept . That period interests me, but I just cannot progress.

Have any of the rest of you read Sharon Shinn? I really enjoyed her Samaria series; such an entertaining scifi rework of the myths we've inherited from the 'Holy Land'.

[Swatopluk]

It will be time to finally get around to it soon. Swato, there was a lot that he ended up changing, which is why there are a few inconsistencies thereabouts.

He even gets self-referential about that. In LOTR Bilbo admits that the published version of The Hobbit differs from the reality of LOTR. Originally Gollum simply kept his promise and led Bilbo to the exit because the ring that was his original bet in the riddle contest was lost. He did not suspect Bilbo of being a thief. Tolkien changed it to the LOTR version in later editions of The Hobbit and made the original a lie Bilbo told to make his possession of the ring look less legally/morally dubious.
I personally think it was a major improvement storywise independent of LOTR.

I had mixed feelings about Tolkiens insertion of full length poems. A lot of them I liked very much, others I did not 'get' at the time. The Eärendil poem Bilbo recites at Rivendell was one of those. What the standard reader of LOTR does not know is that this one is another in-joke. In-story it is Bilbo reworking a (nonsense) Hobbit poem, in reality it was a nonsense poem Tolkien wrote many years earlier and that may be connected to the famous Major-General song by Gilbert&Sullivan (link unproven). Btw, Tom Bombadil also originated from poems independent of Middle Earth. Tolkien made them for his children who owned a toy puppet of that name and appearance.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

I guess I was "ruined" by reading acutal, really-good story tellers-- strip out the unneeded, flowery language, and get right at the actual tale-to-be told.

In my childhood, I grew up reading Bradbury, McCaffery, Norton, Heinlein, White, Wells and a myriad of other stories written for the "juvenile" market, and peddled to Jr High libraries.   Later on, I discovered the "adult" books written by many of these childhood authors.  These I devoured at a greater-than-a-book-a-week rate.  I soon exhausted all the supply in my Jr High library, and turned to the city's resources-- which was even more scant in the Juvie section-- but I went through it anyway.   Couple this with spending allowance on paperbacks too-- especially those el-cheapo subsidized reading programs, where you could get 10 books for a dollar sometimes.  I always got the max allowed--- which always amazed my friends, who had to be coerced to buy even one, at a quarter.  One they probably would not read anyway-- I was mystified, but not devious enough to offer to use their subsidized allotment and purchase more for myself.... oh the missed opportunities.

I remember one year, 4th or 5th grade it was, and I had easily finished all the books I'd received by the 2nd week, and was complaining I had nothing to read.  My mother said, "why don't you read some of those books you just got?"  My reply, "I already finished all of them" always astonished her, "what?  Already?"   She read, but not like I did back then.

Reading took me away from myself, away from being a painfully shy, skinny little kid who was often the joke of the sports activities-- in books? I could be anyone.  *sigh*

These days, I don't read nearly as much as I did back then.  I suppose I'm more comfortable in my own skin now, than I was then.   And there are other things to do, these days, like.... write on obscure forums about how I used to read as a little kid....



Anyway, I find I simply cannot be bothered to slog through a book that is written in a ponderous style-- if the writing style keeps getting in the way of the actual story?  I find all too often, the story is weak anyway, and not worth the bother.   So I just skip'em-- life's too short to slog through someone's pompous efforts, to get at a story that wasn't worth the bother anyhow.

My pet peeve is that "Great Literature" seldom is--- except to self-styled "literature experts" who say it's great, just because they were taught that it was....  really great literature needs no spokes-weenie to promote it-- it promotes itself, just by being itself, and no explanation is needed.

But that's just me, in my own brand of self-styled pomposity, I've no doubt.   

[Griffin NoName]

........  really great literature needs no spokes-weenie to promote it-- it promotes itself, just by being itself, .....

and winning the Man Booker Prize

sorry, UK and Ireland only

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

The Silmarillion is very hard at the beginning but it gets easier to read once you past the first chapters.

The Island of the Day Before is perhaps one of the slower ones, more considering that the translators try to replicate the Italian of the XVI-XVII centuries, still Baudolino and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana are on the slow side compared with The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum and lately The Cemetery in Prague (highly recommended BTW).
--
I confess that I started The Magic Mountain a couple of times but I haven't had the patience to finish it...

[Swatopluk]

I confess that I started The Magic Mountain a couple of times but I haven't had the patience to finish it...

If you have to read Mann then go for Heinrich not Thomas!

[Roland Deschain]

But I love the almost realtime element of LotR, and the poems as well. Maybe i'm one of the odd ones out here, but I loved it all. PoN, we need words on your views on Tolkein and Herbert!

Bradbury, Heinlein, and Wells are great authors, but i've never taken the plunge with McCaffrey, Norton, and White. One of my most treasured books is a first edition of The Time Machine (UK edition), which has been read many times.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

I cut my WW2 stories on Robb White's several novels of heroism during that conflict.

Likely his most famous was Torpedo Run or perhaps Up Periscope.  I've read most of his WW2 stuff, but quit reading his books when I moved to a different school, and the library didn't have any of his books.

I first read Torpedo Run, as a $0.20 Weekly Reader novel, way, way back in grade school.   I'd re-read it again, if it was on a legitimate Ebook.   Alas, long out of print.

There's another Jr High author, but I cannot remember how to spell his odd name, Kikkigard? Junior-something.  He mostly wrote fictional stories about human-animal interaction, typically in a frontier/western setting (only without all the shooting of Hollywood westerns).   His best was a fictional telling of the discovery of fire, and other primitive tools by a hypothetical fictional hunter-gatherer.   It was re-written and re-released about 20 years ago under a modified title, but I have forgotten that, too.

*sigh*

[pieces o nine]

But I love the almost realtime element of LotR, and the poems as well. Maybe i'm one of the odd ones out here, but I loved it all. PoN, we need words on your views on Tolkein and Herbert!

How 'bout these words?     
[youtube=425,350]l1YmS_VDvMY[/youtube]

As for Herbert, I loved the Dune series.  I just reached the point of, "If you love something, set it fremen. If it comes back to be read again, that's great. If someone else goes all new testament with endless additional epistles, it's not yours to worry about." 

Of course, I did make it through the *entire* Anne Rice vampire and witch canons, so I know a little about about pursuing lost literary causes just on principle...

[Roland Deschain]

As for Herbert, I loved the Dune series.  I just reached the point of, "If you love something, set it fremen. If it comes back to be read again, that's great. If someone else goes all new testament with endless additional epistles, it's not yours to worry about." 

Of course, I did make it through the *entire* Anne Rice vampire and witch canons, so I know a little about about pursuing lost literary causes just on principle...

Fair enough. At least you tried. I like the prequels written by his son, Brian, and Kevin J Anderson (a good author in his own right!).

You really are a glutton for punishment, persevering through her "god" stage.

[pieces o nine]

Actually, I stopped when she returned to the bosom of Mother Church.

Although, as one wag put it: What's the big deal? She used to write about a guy who wants to drink your blood. Now she writes about a guy who wants *you* to drink *his* blood. It's still kinda the same theme for her.




Childhood favorites:  Lloyd Alexander and John Christopher.

[Swatopluk]

While we are on the topic of church and magic, I am looking for easily available literature/info on the Norwegian witch trials in the late 16th and esp. 17th century. Unfortunately most texts that I find infos about on the net seem to be only available in print and not in any library I have access to. And to get special books from Norway without going there is not easy either.

Stuff like this: Female Witches and Sami Sorcerers in the Witch Trials of Arctic Norway (1593-1695) by Rune Blix Hagen

which would have the advantage of being in a language I am fluent in. I can deal with Norwegian if need be.