(no subject)

[contrarianarchon]

brin_bellway 's thing about childhood books has reminded me of Childhood WTF #35:"I'm 8 and I've heard this Tolkien guy is good so I go to my primary-school library and pick the first book I find with his name on it and totally fail to read more than ten pages of the Silmarillion, and basically never touch a Tolkien book again"

(I did read The Hobbit in my mid-teens. It was pretty good. Still not touching anything else.)

Comments

[brin_bellway]

I was about that age, but fortunately did not get the Silmarillion first (or at all, in fact). I liked The Hobbit, found The Fellowship of the Ring a slog, gave up partway through The Two Towers, have never gotten around to trying it again.

(It might very well be better now: I found A Wizard of Earthsea significantly better during my mid-teens attempt than when I first gave up on it at the age of high-single-digits. In my teens I made it as far as ~3/4 of the way through The Tombs of Atuan, which is the point at which--much to my disappointment--it developed a plot.)

[contrarianarchon]

Ewww plot. Who wants that to spoil their perfectly nice worldbuilding.