The only real problem I have with it is the ending. The major stakes are resolved halfway into the book and much of the rest is overlong. The additional happenings afterward are extremely mixed and made it far more laborious than the previous books. If could have been greatly abbreviated; some of it could have been placed in the very large appendix to facilitate a much more natural ending, too, I feel.

I continue to enjoy the narration of the series. It’s well done and puts a much more pleasant spin on the meandering lore dumps. I also like the camaraderie, which is a far different characterization than the movie. It’s far more clear that they treat each other like boyhood friends that they hope will last all their lives. There’s a lot less toxic masculinity bs than in modern fantasy stuff, and I like that a lot. The dialogue makes for an altogether different feeling to middle earth you’d never get from the films.

The only thing that dropped off this book for me was the ending. Tolkien loves his nice endings, as he foreshadows in both books so far. But I think the much more natural ending would have been when Sam takes up the ring. The somewhat long winded ending afterward killed the tension and emotional engagement for me. Otherwise, I’d probably have given it 5 stars instead of 4.

Interestingly (to me), the changes the movie made, as well as the very large difference in tone at certain points in the story, make this book more compelling than I expected. When I was a teen I could not stand to get past the farmers fields; something that took 3 hours in the audiobook. However, being read to made this tale much more interesting to me despite the fact that after 3 hours I would have far outpaced the audiobook and got to the journey proper.

What I liked a lot is the embedding of wanderlust. This is what appeals to me about fantasy but is rarely characterized in simple wonder. Usually it’s danger this or danger that, even when navigating the lands or discovering new artifacts. The boyhood discovery/ wonderlust angle stemming from the hobbits coming from the shire made it incredibly endearing and propelled me until the journey proper. The differences from the story I know and this book itself are enough that I find myself wondering what will happen next still.

Audiobook seems to be the format that I needed to get into these books. The narrator is very good and, mercifully, a good singer (there are a LOT). He’s a slow reader so I kept much of it at 1.5x, which is usually too fast for others but rarely noticeable with this fellow. It also cut the 19 hours to 12. :)

I finished Lost Boy, the story that literalizes Peter Pan, making Peter a particularly cruel af villain rather than Hook.

I find that literature that relies heavily on metaphor and meant to be a parable or proverb which gets this treatment from writers always end up churning out something less interesting than the original story because in literalizing it, they’re erasing the _point_ of the entire story. You still need to replace it with something better or more interesting, right? Instead they always rely solely on the subversion. Being critical of a story never meant to be taken literally is fine, if it also communicates something!

A story written by a grieving son and brother for a grieving mother in which their dead family member never grows up, which is in part, about accepting how someone chooses to grieve a child—becomes about that same dead child being fucking terrible and probably evil and cruel, if real. He’s _dead_! He’s not real, that’s why the damn story worked!

Nearly everything in the damn story is metaphorical, right. The notion that it’s interesting if he’s a dick because we’re ignoring the idea that he’s a dead kid and he’s real now and not a vector for grief is like, a weird flex... ???

I mean, It was an OK story. But when I thought about it after I had finished it, the more I had to ask but... why?

Not bad but not as good as the show. It’s a bit sterile but a fun popcorn-like story. Kind of like a Dan Brown level of a novel for me. The novella format zooms past any significant moment so it’s hard to care about the characters. But it was still enjoyable.

I liked this book overall but I found that it took a really long time for the stakes to become interesting and for the 60% of it to become pertinent to the somewhat opaque plot. The later 40% was fantastic but it did feel laborious getting there, even with the fantastic narration on the audiobook.