I’m sure she read it. I just didn’t want her to feel obligated to put pen to paper to reply.

I thought Gob possessed The Sword of Destiny?

His work is written like a medievalist's. Which he was. All his works are highly inspired by medieval literature.

That's kind of like criticizing Shakespeare for his weird English.

I'm not going to tell you to like it, but calling it badly written is not really sensible.

thank you ... yeah...

Most of the discussion about it I'm getting links for now on Google is in academic papers I can't read for free. Just searching "the white hotel plagiarism" will give you some idea of what the issues were.

Yeah, it's just much harder to come up with an attractive story without hacking into people's biological needs. Also, much of the blame falls on readers, since often authors are just trying to survive by leaning more on the commercial side rather than artistic.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is seriously underrated. I wish it was assigned to reading lists for schoolwork.

About to go on a trip. Maybe I will download House of Mirth to read.

oh!

I never heard of that? Got a link? or I'll try wikipedia...

Strongly disagree about the dialogue. I reread the novels for the first time in 20 years just last year and I was struck by how naturalistic and often hilarious the dialogue is, especially between hobbits.

Authors love to hear positive feedback. It makes them realize their work actually means something. That their work is worth it. So, reach out.

That's a great viewpoint, thank you. It's the exact reason I'm asking - to get an objective feel for it. I was blessed with having a linguistic educator for a parent and have been reading as early as I can remember. Environment is definitely an important factor, but now I'm wondering whether thirst for knowledge is inborn or passed on to intentionally.

Jesus, you couldn't be more wrong 😅 His son helped him organise the fragments of his later works and put them together coherently. Tolkien was not thinking in terms of children's books either, he was meant to write a sequel to The Hobbit and ended up writing The Lord of the Rings, he even said to his publisher that it was not a children's book.

Honestly I think there probably are decent odds that it got read by the author at some point. I imagine writing back is much more of a time sink at that scale.

If you're looking for information then skipping and skimming is good. If you're actually reading something for pleasure then it doesn't make sense. Sometimes in literature it's not about what the words say, it's about what they don't say, or it's about the information left out or the way something is said. A turn of phrase can impart a nuance of meaning that you might miss by skipping and skimming bits. Tolkien writes for the love of words, linguistics and myth. Part of the joy in reading his work is the immersion and the vibrant picture he paints with words. I know I'm in control of what I'm reading and if I was bored enough to skip bits that didn't resonate then I would just not read it. It's not some revelation.

The main reason anybody remembers The White Hotel was because of the plagiarism scandal around it. He never lived that down.

We are usually the product of the environment we grew up in.

My parents were divorced and I was raised by my father who highly valued education and was a lifelong learner. My sisters were raised by my mother, who valued homemaking and birthing children. I was teased about reading so much, I was told the only reason to go to school was to find a husband. When we were raising our kids my sisters would complain that the schools gave too much homework and allowed their children to not do it and blame the school when they would fail classes. My kids went to college and both still love to read and take classes.

I'm retired and I'm the only one of 5 siblings that read and continues to actively learn new things. My siblings continue to mock me about it.

While I think that's true of a lot of books, with Tolkien, one of the main reasons he is so beloved is the quality of the prose. The downside of this is that a lot of the writing is spent in description, or in retelling old legends, and other pieces of fluff that do not advance the narrative or tell us much about the characters we're following. I do believe that if you were to skip over this because you find it boring, you would be missing out on a large part of why Tolkien is special.

I was into the first half of Return of the King before I finally started skimming through pages looking for anything interesting to happen and skipping songs and poems. Wished I had started sooner.

Like OP said, all respect in the world to Tolkien for pioneering the genre and a truly astonishing amount of world-building. But as a storyteller he left me unimpressed.

When I first read Tolkien (1990s) I had been working at a research facility using networked Sun workstations. Our sysadm had given each computer a network node name from LOTR. This provided me with helpful visual images of the characters as I read: Arwen was the Sparcstation-10 on Rick's desk, Bilbo was a Sparcstation-5 on Zheng's desk, etc.

If you're skipping pages in Fellowship, you're not making it through the Frodo and Sam chapters in The Two Towers. I love Tolkien but I completely understand that he is a very difficult read. But if you want to actually enjoy and get through the trilogy you are going to have to read it slowly and take in all the prose, which is where Tolkien shines. My advice to you, if you feel you have to skip through sections, is to put the book down and don't waste your time on something you won't enjoy. Or alternatively read The Hobbit first (if you haven't already; it's not clear in the post if you have) which is far more accessible and a much tighter narrative. Then return to Lord of the Rings.

I'm not saying that not having a degree is a bad thing, or has any indication of person's intelligence. Honestly, I did not learn even a fraction in college of what I learned after it, by my own choices of educational direction and pure interest in various fields. But from experience, the people I know who haven't studied, often are bit touchy about the subject. For one, I thought I was worse than someone with a degree, before I got one. I guess it comes from having no experience with higher education first hand.

I'd say hang on if you can. It's a slow starter, but around halfway (of the first book) it becomes incredible.

Also, there is no need to read it all in one go. Don't feel guilty for dropping it, reading something else and picking it up again. Years later maybe. That's fine.

I found that I enjoyed the first books more than the last when I was younger. I am nearing 60 now, have read them again, and the last book hit me so hard I could not breathe or think straight.

Written language - conveying meaning through abstract symbols - seems to be unique to humanity. If you're not reading, you're just a beast that wears pants. Why even bother?

Of course it's okay, just don't be creepy