The amazing thing, I guess, is that the writing does, in fact, hold up. I can see myself coming back to this again. A fire has rekindled in my heart, as JRR himself might have it. The Two Towers, of course, is where the narrative splits, and splits again. On average, the point of view is more Hobbit than not, and the language remains true to their down-to-earth common-sense mode, while the more formal, old-fashioned epic style is used for the adventures of Aragorn and company, with, of course, the odd bit of mingling, and anyone who tried such a thing today would get laughed out of the bookshop. There are some advantages to been a distinguished professor of linguistics.

Furthermore a LOT happens in a relatively short space without feeling terrible rushed. Pippin and Merry captured! Aragorn's Gang race after! Battle! Forest! Saruman? No! Gandalf! Ents! Edoras! Helm's Flipping Deep! The first full-scale battle of the series! WE'RE BARELY HALFWAY THROUGH THE FIRST PART!

But through it all the one thing that never relents is Tolkien's endless detailing of the landscape. Moreso that language or history or customs, Tolkein builds his world from the ground up. The sreams, the fields, the trees, the hills: take out the action and you have a vivid, thoughtful, highly observant travelogue. You always know where you are, be it Rohan or Gondor or Mordor. The Fellowship never travels over a blank canvas.

One of the best part of Two Towers, though, is Merry and Pippin's aplomb at the gates of Isengard, greeting the King and his retinue. They've been through a lot, and they're soon to be parted and changed, but right then, they're the most hobbity of hobbits.

The ending, oh, the ending is hard to bear, and it's important to remember that in the films the ending is hard not to fast forward.

Merry and Pippin, who have been our viewpoint characters the whole time, really, come into their own here. They mature, they suffer, they endure loss and fear and gain the respect of their betters. Aragorn, if anything, becomes less interesting the more he grows in stature and nobility, and it's always nice when a hobbit calls him Strider. Gimli and Legolas, oh their blossoming friendship was treated poorly n the film wasn't it? And Frodo and Sam: the hardest test of all is to find the strength to keep plodding through ash and fire for days and days and days, and we feel almost every mile and every hunger pang.

But really, nearly half the book takes place when it' s all over. The long slow journey home. The Scouring. The trip to the Grey Havens. A happy, happy ending, and damn you if you don't blub up. Then, of course, you read the appendices and that time-line at the end that includes the fates of the Fellowship after the War and it's sob, sob, sob.

I loved this as a child. As an adult I'm almost shocked to discover that it was worthy of my love, and still is. I hope to return to Middle earth again some time. Maybe next year.

By its very nature, this is an unsatisfactory and even frustrating book, being a highly fragmented series of incomplete texts, really of interest only to those willing to wade through a lot of academic contextualisation to understand the nature of the pieces and the editorial process by which they were selected. Once past that, though, it's gold. The further one goes the more one appreciates the unique genius of Tolkien, the driven obsessive who recounts the stories he invents as though they were myth or history external to himself, discovered largely through the examination of language and linguistic properties, revealing peoples, landscapes, histories. There are terrific things in here, enriching the mythos, providing glimpses into the larger stories and of the limits of those stories and the potentially unlimited stories beyond. The least chapter is the horribly messy tale of Galadirel and Celeborn, the most complete is the Children of Hurin, but completists will be already well familiar with this. More obscure, and surprising, are the stories of Numenor - where was that one going, I wonder? And the history of the Druedain. The Quest of Erebor, the various battles and the friendship between Rohan and Gondor are crowd-pleasers. Lot of comments and footnotes that can be studied or skimmed depending on your bent. Not a good read, but a supplemental volume full of little good reads.

Savagely funny, utterly brutal, adrenaline soaked and fast enough to give you whiplash. A pure tonic.

I haven't read Lord Of The Rings since, oooh, College at least, long dim days lost in the mist of times, but once upon a time it was a veritable pillar of my life. I certainly wouldn't have survived my teenage years without it. When the films came out, of course, I thought about rereading them but somehow never got around to it. Here I am then, middle aged and pudgy as a hobbit with a family of my own, convinced that such adventures as I have had are all well behind me. My weary feet don't pursue the road very far and when my eyes turn to far-off hills, I wonder if I can get there by the motorway, and whether there's a cafe nearby.
So why would I crack open those old worn and torn and sellotaped paperbacks Mum got for me when I was in hospital that year having my appendix out? (I distinctly remember the soldier with the helmet full of water washing Wormtongue's spit from the steps while I sat in the waiting room. Pardon me, but could you put the book down while we perform abdominal surgery on you? Thanks.) Why would you revisit that and remind yourself of all the things you lost and left behind, all the things you did wrong?
Because in the end, that's what The Lord Of The Rings is about. Things lost and gone away and barely remembered. Suffused with the sadness of beautiful things passing; yet there is joy in the remembering, if you can bear it. Well, I can, and that's no bad thing.

I first encountered Infinite Jest way back whenever it came out in Ireland in paperback, at the back of Hodges Figgis in Dublin. I'd never heard of it or of David Foster Wallace, but I was fascinated by the sheer size of it. I was at the time not averse to vast tomes of science fiction or fantasy, anything so long as they were entertaining. This did not look entertaining. It had a tiny little blurb that seemed to sum up a plot that should have been very attractive to me, but I knew just looking at it that this book was not about plot. This book was dense, complex, and had footnotes that looked scary. I was more used to Terry Pratchett's footnotes, which were hilarious. Worse still, erudite-looking blurbs from elevated literary critics writing impossibly academic reviews for highly respected broadsheet newspapers with horribly serious review sections were calling it funny. A comedy. That was it. That was pretty much the kiss of This Isn't For Me.

But I was sad about it. I wanted to know what it was about. I wanted to know how a book with a plot about a search for a deadly film - a plot straight out of Ramsey Campbell and Jonathan Carroll, to name but two - could possibly fill a book this big, and how a book this big and serious could possibly be about THAT. This book was a mystery to me, and normally I liked books with Mystery. After all, it was the sense of magical Mystery that made me fall in love with lord Of The Rings. But I sensed that this was not that sort of Mystery. This was the Mystery of Life in the Real World, and I was pretty sure I wasn't ready for that.

Well, now I've read it. I was right! The book is Mystery. It is dense with stuff, thick with language and character and situations and institutions and interfacings and interactions. It plumbs the depths of stark naked honesty and the horror of hitting bottom and the repetitive banality of just non-stop talking about it via the world of AA and NA. It scales the privileged heights of irony and secrets and silence and entrapment in the highly regimented world of the Tennis Academy. And while those two things take up the bulk of the book, the sheer concentrated accumulation of details about lives and worlds and families and routines and rituals and addictions, there ticks over the satiric science-fiction world-building and the plot by the initially comic-seeming but ultimately revolting wheelchair assassins and their plot to free Quebec from union with America by finding and unleashing the lethal entertainment.

Yeah, wheelchair assassins. Guys with no legs. Then there's the woman in the veil, the brother with pronounced physical disabilities, the overmuscled arms and legs of the athletes, the tattoos and other disfigurements of the addicts. This is a book full of mutilation and woundings and disabilities and deformities. The psychic scarring of the characters should be beyond description, but Wallace goes ahead and describes them anyway.

And yet it is a brilliant book. Incredibly readable and often wonderful. Heartfelt, moving, but also sordid and horrifying. An epic of dependency and prepackaged entertainment. I kept waiting for the plot to kick in properly, and sometimes it did, but the end and the beginning - the first part of the book opens a year after the main events of the book unfold - do not join except in the most suggestive and ambiguous way. This should have been annoying and frustrating, but it wasn't. I felt he could have gone on for another thousand pages and gotten no closer to a conventionally satisfying resolution. Wallace gives us everything we need to know. No amount of light or detail or plot would reveal more of the Mystery. Whatever's left, we have to puzzle out for ourselves.

I bought this book with a Christmas present book-token back in 1989 along with, for the record, and not that anyone really cares, The Wasp Factory and A History Of The World In Ten And A Half Chapters. Those I read, but this resisted all efforts to get past the first few pages. I found myself intimidated and unprepared for the density, the language and the lives it portrayed. My ambitions to challenge myself with more literary fiction were always slow and intermittent and subject to my own desire for mysteries and thrills that generated excitement and suspense rather than the mysteries of time and death and the thrills of family life.

And so, finally, I pick it up more than twenty years later and barely manage to put it down until the final tragic transcendence. (I'm trying to write this while my three year old son is bombarding me with names of animals, repeating them until I make the appropriate noises. Occasionally he'll throw in the odd bridge or rug or cobweb to really stump me.) The novel launches into the story of the Buendias family and the remote town of Macondo in the jungles of South America (jelly fish? what sound does a flippin' jellyfish make?) and in a torrent of language and characters and incidents charts the course of the family and the town from the early years of wonders and magic when death could not find Macondo to the tawdry, lethargic squalor of its final days. Yet it is meticulously paced and expertly orchestrated so the larger than life characters (what the heck is a swombord?) that stride through these pages from their youthful vitality to their elderly senescence, if they make it that far, and the development of the town, which seems to encapsulate all of South American history, are woven together in a dense, dreamlike epic that never seems to pause for breath but never seems to rush, never seems breathless or clumsy.

Full of a sort of profound, energetic wisdom that knows all lives are circumscribed by death, and so too are families and towns and countries (dinosaur! Lion! Tiger! My throat hurts!) and that with old age comes decrepitude and the subtle traps of memory and nostalgia, Marquez is remorseless in his portrayal of human decline but does so with compassion and insight and humour. I think in 1989 I would not have been ready for this. I think even if I had finished it, I would not have had even a glimmer of understanding or appreciation for the achievement it is. But I'm glad I got it, and glad I carried it with me all these years.

(Motorbike!)