Lord of the Rings

I admit that most people consider my education to be somewhat, um, incomplete. On the lists of top 100 movies, I’ve probably seen fewer than ten. I never read Jane Eyre, didn’t like Gone With the Wind, don’t have a clue who most of today’s celebrities are.

Though I’ve never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, I decided I would read the book, since the books are usually better than the movies, anyway. Emphasis on usually.

The edition I bought on Kindle is the 50th anniversary version. There’s about a thousand pages at the beginning that cover corrections and changes in various editions that no casual reader could possibly care about. So Tolkien preferred to use “further” when “farther” was correct. Does it matter?

So I skipped pages of boring comparisons and started with what I thought was the beginning of the book. If it wasn’t, why in the world didn’t the editor cut it? It was more pages of boring, this time about Hobbits. Assuming such a well-loved book couldn’t possibly start with such tedious pages, I skipped ahead to what was presumably the real beginning. I’m sorry to say,  so far it hasn’t been much more interesting than the history of corrections. I got to the point where Bilbo disappears at his birthday dinner and gave it up.

Maybe it gets better? Or maybe it’s the exception to the book-is-always-better rule. I’ll have to wait until I’m totally bored, out of reading material and miles from a wifi connection, then give it another try.