A review by dllh
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

4.0

I never read this (or The Hobbit) as a kid, but when all the movies started coming out a few years ago, I read in preparation for them. I've since read The Lord of the Rings at least twice more, aloud to my family. So this was probably my third time through the books. I really enjoyed it this time through. There's a lot of lyricism in the book, and I especially enjoyed finding sort of hidden rhythms or other poetry even in the prose. I also liked the songs and poems that followed sort of the old Anglo Saxon poetic mode (alliterative verse with caesuras). The variety of landscape words and descriptions can seem tedious but also makes the books pretty richly described. There's heroism here, and courtliness, and admiration of beauty (Gimli's description of the caverns in Rohan is dazzling, for example). It's long, and at times a little slow, and Frodo is a pill, but this to me really is a delight to revisit. I started rereading The Hobbit right afterward, and the quality of the books is markedly different (The Hobbit being the lesser book).