Absquatulate

Blog Tag! Books...

Whitney tagged me, so here I go:

• Total Number of Books I've Owned:
  OY. Two degrees and a lifetime of Stephen King? How could one quanitfy? Well let's see.... If one presumes an average of 2 books per college course taken. and I've taken about 60 college courses (!!!), that's about 120 books right there. Add in pre-college purchases and gifts, and post college indulgences, and NOT including the countless articles and journals I've read, and I'd say well over 200? But who can really say? Some I've sold back, some I still have, some are lost, some on loan...
• The Last Book I Bought:
  There were four books bought at a local used book store (Amherst is a town of 30,000 and there are THREE used bookstores. Not including University bookstores. That's alot of used books!): Two from the Penguin Series of Good Ideas: Darwin's On Natural Selection, Orwell's Why I Write, Edward Gorey's Donald and The ... and a collection of papers on cognition.
• The Last Book I Read:
  I'm in the last 5th of LOTR: ROTK, at the end of Kitchen Confidential, and at the beginning of Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. I usually read one book at a time, but due to travel and illness schedules (The Godel etc. book, while good, doesn't lend itself to airline reading quite like Kitchen Confidential, and LOTR is a bi-annual comfort read) I'm in the middle of three!
• Five Books That Mean Something To Me:
  UGH, hm, okay, only five? LOTR, 1984, The Hay Day Country Market Cookbook, Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep, The Princess Bride, and while not a book per se, the 'book' of hand-drawn comic book characters my brother made for me when I went away to college, and this isn't counting graphic novels like the Watchmen and Ronin, . Yeah I know that's six. So sue me. :)

Verbosity

A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit. -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

Scary, Redux

A photoset on Flickr detailing changes made to Richard Scary's The Best Word Book Ever.

Shameless Begging

I happen to know there are a few people who read this site who might, on occasion, have the opportunity to buy me a present.  Should that opportunity arise sometime in the near future (only 295 days until Christmas!) will someone please, please, get me this book?

One of a few surefire ways to get me into your good graces.

LOTR: Just finish it already!

So I've been reading the LOTR trilogy again now having seen all three movies. Some purists (I'm looking at YOU TM) might lament that 'unfortunate' sequence of events. "OH, it's too bad you didn't read the books first, because the books are so much more vast than the movies!" &tc. Truth be told, the movies helped me get a grasp of the world as a whole. The books were so filled with directions I couldn't figure out where things were in relation to each other. The movie helped me get a sense of the world as Tolkien imagined it.

However I generally read books (for pleasure) the same way a starving man sits down to a prime rib dinner: quickly and without abandon. I swallow each page like a forkful of mashed potatoes and medium-rare steak, words dripping through my mind like gravy through the tines of a fork. I devour the words, page upon page turning and glossing over and pouring over the appendices when they appear in footnotes...

... and short on details sometimes. All those songs Mr. Tolkien undoubtedly spent lots of time crafting? Er, yeah, I kind of skipped over those. Tom Bombadill? Yeah, um, right. Geography of Middle Earth? Heavens. So I felt that I owed it to myself to reread the books and get all the juicy details, see how the movies deviated from the book, and delve further into the world.

From this second reading some of my original opinions on the story have changed. For example, I no longer though the sequence in the Barrowdowns and with Tom Bombadill to be irrelevant. However one opinion I held from the first reading has only been cemented with the second: Mr. Tolkien , while an amazingly gifted creator, was not a storyteller.

INFIDEL you cry. BLASPHEMER escapes your lips as you swoon. Well, I'm sorry, but I'm mired in the last 150 pages of the story, and it's so incredibly obvious that Tolkein just didn't know how to end the tale. I think the ending, specifically, the very last sentence in the book is fantastic, superb, perfect! But the whole winding down of the tale is excruciating. Excruciating suffering of the characters, excruciating detail of the landscape of Mordor, excruciating EVERYTHING. The bits I would have loved to have read more about were glossed over, like the romance of Eowyn and Faramir (don't get me started on Tolkein's handling of romance in this novel) or the coronation of Aragorn or Legolas and his yearning for the sea. Rather he seems to spend an inordinate amount of time describing the brackish water of the only stream in Mordor, the long thorns on the wretched bushes in the vales, the distance to Mt. Doom from where Sam and Frodo are and every single day spend it told in mind-numbing detail (wow, yet ANOTHER day where they crawl along the vale through thorns and bush and nothing happens.)

Much like a child who hedges and procrastinates washing up before going to bed, Mr. Tolkien holds tightly to the story by obsessing over trivial details and it drives me batty. Not so much the details themselves rather the sense that the story WILL NEVER END. I suppose that might be what he was going after, getting the reader to empathize with Frodo and his seemingly unending quest but I don't think that plopping the reader in such a predicament is the way to do it.

I'm not advocating for an editorial change to the books. I think they should stay exactly the way they are now. However, that doesn't mean that I can't look to the heavens every once in a while and wish for my own Star of Elendil to guide me out of the tale.