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What's the appeal in Lord of the Rings?
I've recently been press ganged by my friends into joining a Lord of the Rings book club and it's one of the more significant Ls I've taken in a long time. We've finished the Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Rings and I'm actually not sure I've ever read fiction this boring. Gargantuan amounts of the plot are just them wandering through the woods. The characterization is borderline nonexistent and the dialogue is so stilted that I have trouble keeping the characters apart - why are there even two characters for Mary and Pippin when as far as I can tell they're the same character? Every page feels like a slog, the only decent part is Tolkien has nice descriptions of scenery.
I'm not trying to be a dick though, I want to enjoy these books, everyone tells me they're great. What am I missing? What should I be looking for / trying to get out of them?
I saw you say in another comment that you expect to get crucified, but I don't think people are going to be mad or anything. Not everything is for everyone. That said, I disagree with you and I think that LOTR is excellent. Here are reasons why I think the book is great:
It's the OG high fantasy book. Basically every fantasy book you've ever read was influenced by it in some way, even if that was by way of the author disliking LOTR and consciously making something different. That alone qualifies it as one of the all time greats.
The book is genuinely good on its own merits. The plot is interesting and makes you want to know how it ends. The prose is enjoyable to read (I still get chills when I read some of the passages in that book because they're just so well written). The characters are fun to see go on an adventure. Basically, this book does the things that books are supposed to.
The book has a really well thought out world that it hints at but doesn't directly tell you about. When I first read LOTR, I was fascinated by these little glimpses of a larger world that the plot exists in (e.g. mentions of Fëanor), and it made me positively hungry to learn more. Which of course was by design - years later I read a bit where Tolkien talked about how he showed a bit of scenery on the horizon, so to speak, to make the reader curious what's over there and want to learn more. But this makes the book really interesting to me.
If you're not feeling it, I don't think there's something wrong with you or anything like that. But for my money, LOTR really is as good as they say, and stands head and shoulders above the movies (which were good movies in their own right but terrible adaptations).
It is really something that blew my mind as a 9 year old; there are all these references in the text to some greater shared culture that the reader is not a part of. It makes it really feel like an alien world, that their touchstones are something unknown and unknowable to us. It's very much a contrast to other mediocre sci-fi/fantasy which often does a poor job of creating that second world, such that their cultural memory and way of speaking is still very much that of a person living in modern-day North America or Europe. You know, like when a character in the year 48032 speaks of "the 20th century band The Beatles". And it's just cooler when the text doesn't trip over itself to keep its reader in the know. 9 year old me thought it was really cool that the battering ram Grond was named after the "Hammer of the Underworld", but it was even more awesome that Tolkien then made no attempt to explain what that meant.
(Of course this was all largely accidental: Tolkien meant for The Silmarillion to be published alongside The Lord of the Rings so that all these unexplained references would be filled in by the accompanying backstories. But I think it ended up working great as it turned out)
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