Jan. 11th, 2011
First up is Stardust by Neil Gaiman. Okay, I know the villagers sharpening their pitch forks. I don’t mean this as an insult to Mr. Gamain. The book displays great craftsmanship, but his style just didn’t suit me. He is quite funny and I would bet every penny I’ve got that he’d have done a better job than Eoin Colfer at writing the follow up in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; I feel sure that his style would have been perfect to continue the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy. He stays surprisingly grounded for fantasy and while that’s not a bad thing, it isn’t my preference. In story that is a great adventure full of magic and action, his resolution was logical and it felt anti-climatic. Perhaps the biggest part of my preference for the movie is that I saw the movie before I knew it was based on a book and it set the plot and the expectations in my mind. I think that reading the book first would have given me a (possibly dramatically) different opinion.
Second is Lord of the Rings (thankfully none of my friends are wealthy enough to hire a "cleaner"). Tolkien was a genius - Hello, he created an entire language complete with ruin like symbols and an entire world for his epic series; no one is arguing that the man was brilliant. I read The Hobbit first as a school assignment and I liked it. Granted I liked it less at the end when my favorite dwarf was dying and I finally realized he WASN'T a girl after all and that there were in fact no female characters of any significance. That aside, I did enjoy reading The Hobbit and thought I should read the rest of them. I just didn’t like it. I can’t begin to describe to you how badly I wanted to like it. How disappointed I was that I didn’t love it. It bored me, half put me to sleep. Every once in a while I’d get to a point I was enjoying and he’d break off to spend four pages describing scenery. I ended up skimming and skipping large portions of the second and third book just to get through them. Sorry Tolkien fans, he just isn’t for me.
First up is Stardust by Neil Gaiman. Okay, I know the villagers sharpening their pitch forks. I don’t mean this as an insult to Mr. Gamain. The book displays great craftsmanship, but his style just didn’t suit me. He is quite funny and I would bet every penny I’ve got that he’d have done a better job than Eoin Colfer at writing the follow up in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; I feel sure that his style would have been perfect to continue the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy. He stays surprisingly grounded for fantasy and while that’s not a bad thing, it isn’t my preference. In story that is a great adventure full of magic and action, his resolution was logical and it felt anti-climatic. Perhaps the biggest part of my preference for the movie is that I saw the movie before I knew it was based on a book and it set the plot and the expectations in my mind. I think that reading the book first would have given me a (possibly dramatically) different opinion.
Second is Lord of the Rings (thankfully none of my friends are wealthy enough to hire a "cleaner"). Tolkien was a genius - Hello, he created an entire language complete with ruin like symbols and an entire world for his epic series; no one is arguing that the man was brilliant. I read The Hobbit first as a school assignment and I liked it. Granted I liked it less at the end when my favorite dwarf was dying and I finally realized he WASN'T a girl after all and that there were in fact no female characters of any significance. That aside, I did enjoy reading The Hobbit and thought I should read the rest of them. I just didn’t like it. I can’t begin to describe to you how badly I wanted to like it. How disappointed I was that I didn’t love it. It bored me, half put me to sleep. Every once in a while I’d get to a point I was enjoying and he’d break off to spend four pages describing scenery. I ended up skimming and skipping large portions of the second and third book just to get through them. Sorry Tolkien fans, he just isn’t for me.