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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).
I'll give a qualified admission that I've never been super gripped by fantasy in general, so it might just be a personal taste thing. That is another element to this though, I've already encountered all the tropes that Tolkien created done in a dozen different contexts; I'm trying to imagine experiencing them freshly the way new readers would but it's a challenge.
There was a section that did it for me at the end of the first book, where Frodo goes to the top of the hill with the ring and has the vision. I'm not sure why that scene wasn't in the movie, it seemed pretty cinema-ready.
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