The Narnia books have always been some of my favourites. There's always been a magic in it for me, even now I'm twenty -- I never got to the age where I was too old for fairytales. That, or I passed through it so quickly I'm already out the other side.

I know that for a lot of people, the magic is spoiled when they find out that Aslan is really Jesus, that this first book is an allegory for Genesis, that the whole thing is full of Christian themes. I nearly always knew, though, and figured it out when I was about seven years old, and it didn't spoil it at all -- just added to the levels of possible meaning, for me. I was a Christian then, though, and I've always found Christian ideals interesting and relevant and close to my heart. So it's not very surprising.

I don't think the allegory detracts from the magic at all. It's wrapped around by wonderful fantasy, and the voice of the narrator is fun -- a storyteller's voice, really: I think I can almost hear the book being read to me, in every line. There are some parts that I think are just beautiful, because they're perfect. The writing is always clear and easy to read (and tastes quite nice, if you're that kind of synaesthete -- in my experience, anyway). The characters feel quite real, imperfect but trying hard -- they're not completely likeable, sometimes, especially Diggory, but in a quite human way.

I'm not very good at criticising this book because it's so full of warmth and nostalgia for me. My children's lit course does make me think about how much this book is really for children, given the references to very adult concerns -- mostly surrounding Uncle Andrew -- but I think it works on that level, and if I have children, I'll give them these books.

Fandom: Supernatural
For: kink_bigbang
Quality: Barely checked
Characters: Dean, Sam

( Another mark )

I've really liked Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch trilogy, but this third book also really irritated me in a couple of ways. I like the way this has all developed -- that the reader's understanding has developed with that of Anton, and that each of the parts are relevant while still being stories unto themselves. I enjoyed that characters who were mentioned earlier, like Edgar and Kostya, become more important as you learn more about the world.

But the "plot twists" are really starting to annoy me. Just once, can it not be Gesar's plot (the Mirror story doesn't count, because it wasn't anyone's plot)? Actually, that's one of the things that really bothers me. For all that we get in the last couple of stories, as we learn more, about the Others all basically being the same and equilibrium being important and so on, and there always being two halves to the truth and blahblahblah, Lukyanenko always basically has the Light Ones coming out on top. I mean, they get Svetlana, they get a second chance at Egor, Anton powers up, they get Anton and Svetlana's daughter, their Messiah figure, they end the trilogy with four Great Magicians, Igor wins the duel with Alisa... The only thing the Dark Ones get is the Mirror, and that's just to equalise the two -- it doesn't let the Dark Others get ahead in any way.

That encapsulates another of the things that annoyed me: Anton's rise in power. At the beginning he's sort of mediocre -- not insignificant, but not the greatest. Yet throughout the story he gets levelled up and levelled up... against the actual rules of the world as we know them originally... for no real reason. It's not plot necessary. He could do everything he needs to do with amulets or by channeling the other Others' power, but no... I'm glad, in one sense, that it means no barrier between him and Svetlana, because Svetlana's a nice character. And the whole problem with them not being equal is kind of understandable, but the problem with Anton is that he's quite a self-centered dick. I didn't mind his initial small rises, so that he remained one of the best characters to see things from and didn't become insignificant, but the fact that he became a magician beyond classification seemed needless.

Which leads me to the way I hated the treatment of Kostya. Apart from the poetic muses in the end about him flying, well, the message is "don't try to prove you're better than people think you are, they'll ignore you and it leads to trouble". Awesome, just awesome. I also found the ending a little confusing, and wasn't sure exactly what Kostya got wrong... In any case, again, Anton being an asshole -- he should have destroyed Kostya rather than let him go to a prolonged, painful death. What a jerk.

Another thing that I found irritating was the disappearance of Olga from the text. In the first book she's an important character, a strong woman, etc. Yet as soon as she becomes Gesar's lover again, she's mentioned a couple of times and the only time I remember hear appearing is to serve Czech beer to Anton! Besides that, she makes a stupid rookie mistake out of essentially female sentimentality and everyone else has to clean up after her! That doesn't sound like the original Olga. And it's weird, because there are strong women in the story -- Olga, Svetlana, Tiger Cub, Arina, even Alisa... But by the end, for various plot reasons, we basically only see Svetlana and know that Olga is supposed to be around there somewhere...

I'm looking forward to reading The Last Watch and seeing what it does with what's there, but the ending of the third book feels quite satisfying -- in the sense that it's conclusive enough -- and I'm not sure what to expect from The Last Watch. It'd have to be pretty damn apocalyptic to build on what's already happened.

The translator of The Day Watch is the same as the one for The Night Watch, and I believe the same applies. The language barrier isn't as bad as it could be. I do wonder if I'd find the twists and turns of the book more... predictable in its original language -- I keep wondering if I'm missing hints, or something. You can predict right off the bat that Sergei Lukyanenko won't do what you expect him to, but how exactly he's going to twist it, I'm still not up to following.

There's something very compulsive about reading these books. I did take a while over The Day Watch, admittedly -- I could've finished reading it weeks ago. But once I'd picked it up, it was hard to put down. I've meant to do a lot of other things today, but I kept telling myself 'just ten more pages'. It's not hard to read and get absorbed in, and not hard to get caught up in trying to figure out the twist (because you know there is one).

I almost hope that one day he'll do the expected plotline, but it won't be expected because we're all expecting his twists and turns.

I didn't find that The Day Watch hung together as a book as well as The Night Watch did. It's the changing points of view. The Night Watch was held together quite well by the continuing presence (and point of view) of Anton, but Alisa and Vitaly are both out of the game by the end of their sections. They're also difficult to sympathise with -- Anton isn't exactly a saint, either, and sometimes I wanted to kick him, but at least he's on the side of the Light... The book did a better job of making me sympathise with Alisa, Vitaly and Edgar than I expected, but they didn't win me over entirely, by any stretch of the imagination. It spent rather more time in third person than with an individual character, unlike The Night Watch, and I suspect that was because of the storytelling difficulties with the chosen side.

This book certainly didn't keep me as well-entertained and as pleased as The Night Watch did, so it drops another star, to three stars. Which is still pretty good -- in fact, if I weren't comparing it to The Night Watch, it might still qualify for four stars.

The Plan:
Read my own height (~5'4"/1.5m) again.
The Rules:
1. This must include only books owned before 01/11/2009.
2. There are only two sections: "rereads" and "new".

This is in an effort to clear my shelves a bit faster! Hence the relative lack of rules. I don't even have to review anything, though I probably will, just read it.

Long time no post! I've been holding off on posting 'cause I was so very, very close to the end. Now I've made it. I've read my own height (and a tiny bit more). I already have my next challenge in mind -- and indeed, some books read for it, if I decide they count -- but first I need to formally finish this one.

iltaru is still working on hers, of course. If you want to keep following her progress, catch her on the comms.

If you didn't see the rules post, it is here. The comms are readheightetc and readheightetc.

Progress:
(* indicates a reread.)

Current picture.

wilderthan:
Floor to knee:
-Rosemary Sutcliff, The Capricorn Bracelet.
-Nicholas Stuart Gray, The Seventh Swan.
-Surgei Lukyanenko, The Night Watch.
Knee to hip:
-J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers.*
-J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King.*
-Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.
Hip to shoulder:
-Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy.
-Nina Bawden, Carrie's War.
-Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.
Shoulder to top of head:
-Rosemary Rowe, Murder in the Forum.
-Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club.
-Jeannette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry.

iltaru:
Knee to hip:
-Neil Gaiman, Stardust.*
-Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.*
-Jingo, Terry Pratchett.*
-Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber.
-Garth Nix, Sabriel.*
-Garth Nix, Lirael.*
-Kazuya Minekura, Saiyuki vol. 1.*
-Kazuya Minekura, Saiyuki vol. 2.*

This is another bleak one -- does that characterise all of the books Stephen King wrote as Richard Bachman? It's kind of similar to The Long Walk, in that it's a future America and a brutal form of entertainment involving death. It's easier to read than The Long Walk -- a bit more dynamic, I guess.

The trouble I had with it was predictability, in the main. You know that he's going to escape this time, 'cause there's however many pages left. It's also difficult to sympathise with the main character, despite the wife-and-child excuse, because he's not that likeable. We don't learn that much about him other than that he's slightly antisocial (by the standards of his society), that he doesn't quite fit. Well, no shit, Sherlock. He's the main character of the novel. There's got to be something special about him or he wouldn't be the main character.

Characterisation is light throughout, really. Some of the little glimpses we get of characters -- Amelia, Bradley, Killian -- are good, they sound like interesting people, but you don't get inside their skins, not very deep.

I did enjoy the ending -- it isn't a happy ending, at all, but it's a satisfying one, I think, because there's revenge and perhaps the possibility of change. The book as a whole is easy to read, both because the writing is functional and goes down easy, and because it all has a kind of energy to it. There's very little 'dead writing' where nothing is going on. It's an angry novel, though: dark and angry.

I didn't like Stephen King back when he was pretending he wasn't Richard Bachman, so I don't know if I'd have recognised his writing if I'd read this then, but I think I probably would've. There's something about it. The main difference is the theme -- it's horribly human, much less supernatural. He always has something of the human in his books, I've found, something true, something that'll make sense to your ordinary sceptical reader, no matter who they are -- something about family bonds, or just the familiarity of the creeping horror, or a fear that sort of floats around, like a flu pandemic or the death of a child...

This book is much closer, because it's all about humans. It's a cruel book. You know from the beginning that the end isn't going to be a release, because you start off with one hundred characters and it's going to narrow down to one. That's cruel. I felt bad, rooting for Garraty, 'cause weren't the others deserving, too? There isn't a real winner, in The Long Walk, I think. The ending is interesting -- I can see why people call it weak, but it fits with the rest, I think, and if you find it an anticlimax, well, consider: maybe you were supposed to.

For something in which so little happens -- one hundred boys walk through Maine, and if they go slower than four miles per hour they get shot, and the winner is the one left standing at the end -- this is oddly compelling.

And my feet feel just a little sympathetically sore right now.

I remembered I had the ebook when my Creative Writing teacher gave us this. He was trying to illustrate some seriously bad writing for us. He succeeded. I needn't tell you Dan Brown's writing is terrible -- go to that link and you'll find plenty of evidence -- but he certainly isn't improving. It's not just his adjective-laden writing, or the adverbs (they're like Tribbles, I think), but also the clichés, the info-dumps, the lack of subtlety, ...

Do I need to go on? I've rated previous books of his with three and four stars, and I'm not sure why, but I'll let it stand since that was my initial impression. This book does fall short of even those, anyway, with the pacing shot to hell and a general lack of urgency about the whole thing. Somehow the disaster everyone's racing to prevent doesn't seem so bad.

At least the formula is broken a little. The mentor figure doesn't betray them.

I'm not sure what he was trying to do at the end, either. Add a bit of philosophy to make people take his work more seriously? If you're trying to write thrillers, dude, skip that, or at least make us more emotionally invested in it. It didn't work.

I don't really recommend it. If you're curious about the hype surrounding Dan Brown, read Angels and Demons instead.

I liked this more than I liked Sexing The Cherry. It just seemed to flow easier, to come together better. There were fewer moments where I sat up and said, 'that's beautiful', but it worked better for me as a whole -- the weird Arthurian/fairy tale interludes notwithstanding, even. I'm wary of labelling it autobiography or memoir, based on what I read, though goodreads reviews tell me that's what it is -- at least semi-autobiography.

Jeannette Winterson's writing is lovely. At parts I didn't really 'get' the imagery -- like the orange devil or whatever it was -- and didn't see the point, but the writing kept me interested anyway. The relationships between her and various other girls interested me -- and reminded me of my first fumbling forays into sexuality, too.

Strangely enough, though it worked better for me, I don't have the same urge to own it as I did Sexing The Cherry. I can't picture myself going back to it, not even for particular special passages (which is why I own Sexing The Cherry).

Easier to read, easier to relate to, yet less enchanting, I suppose.

Murder in the Forum (by Rosemary Rowe) isn't great, nor is it terrible. Since it's the third book of a series, I might've been more interested if I'd read the other books, since I'd have known the characters and cared about them a bit more -- and I might've missed some subtleties of character-relationship. I don't think so, though. It was quite easy to get into without feeling that I was missing something, and it had a horrible tendency to overlabour a point -- like, "look! look at me! I'm a clever detective novel and I'm set in Roman Britain!". The historical accuracy wasn't too bad -- I didn't notice any glaring errors, though I only ever got up to A Level in Classical Studies.

The plot was also terribly elaborate. Possibly over-elaborate. I'm not that quick at keeping up with crime/detective novels -- I like them, but I'm not that great at working things out generally -- but this one felt particularly circuitous and I didn't have a moment of realisation where I figured it out ahead of the book telling me (and even I normally have that).

I don't know what to say about Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Given how much attention it seems to get, I'd hoped I'd fall head over heels in love with it, but it's not really that kind of book. It's very bleak, almost hopeless -- though not quite completely hopeless. The choice to disregard various conventions of novels -- punctuation, chaptering, naming characters -- was interesting. I wasn't convinced by it -- it made the book different in that sense, but I'm not sure the rest of it was that different. It's three hundred pages long, but a lot of that is the same thing over again -- walking, walking, walking, starving, meeting someone on the road, surviving, starving, invesigating a potential source of food, eating for a few days, starving, walking, walking...

You get the drift.

I did like it, in the sense that it felt gritty and real and you could almost taste the ash and the lack of hope. I found it interesting to see how it dealt with the way it discarded conventions. The reasons for that were obvious, but I'm not sure it got round all the disadvantages -- for example, not knowing who's saying what, and dialogue not being immediately obvious. Mind you, all the possible confusion might have been intended. It was easier to read than I'd anticipated.

It's a new, bleak kind of roadtrip novel, I guess. It's easy enough to read, and I think it could be accessible whether you're used to post-apocalyptic fiction or not. It won't make you feel great about the world, though.

There are two extracts I really liked:

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.
(p. 4)

They lay listening. Can you do it? When the times comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesnt fire? It has to fire. What if it doesnt fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.
(p. 120)

And the quiet image, throughout the book but not foregrounded particularly, the image of them 'carrying the fire'.

I finished reading Surgei Lukyanenko's The Night Watch last night, but I didn't write my review then to give me time to digest it, so to speak. It was originally written in Russian, so obviously I read it in translation -- it's quite odd to see a translated fantasy novel be relatively popular here. I think the only other translated fantasy novels I've read were by Cornelia Funke. In any case, the translation isn't bad. I'm sure it loses some of the original, but I didn't get a horrible sense of distance from the text as I do from most translated works, and I didn't feel as if I was missing anything huge.

The book is split into three parts, and is largely from the point of view of a single character, Anton. I didn't find him incredibly easy to sympathise with -- when he was in action and doing things, it wasn't bad, but when he's sat around waiting or contemplating, he's awfully whiny. I found that particularly in the third part. I felt like that could have been shorter, or more to the point, and I also felt it ended a little confusingly. The same twist is used in each of the three parts, too -- so while the first part was hard to predict and interesting, the second part you felt an inkling of what was going to happen, and you knew nothing was as it seemed in the third part.

I like the world-building, though. I like the fact that it's set in Moscow and that's it -- it doesn't spend a long time introducing people from London or New York to what Moscow is like. That part is quite matter-of-fact -- so much urban fantasy seems to be set somewhere that's sort of generally familiar in a way, like London, and then when it isn't, they make a big song and dance about the fact. It's nice to read something that's just simply set in Russia. It allowed that part to be familiar -- even though it isn't, to me -- so the world of the Others is what we're really being introduced to. The explanations about Dark and Light in this book are interesting, and the way the Dark isn't completely horrible -- that Dark Ones can love, have families and affection... in fact, they seemed warmer than the Light Ones. For all the main character, Anton, is a Light One, and he talks about loving Svetlana, there isn't really much warmth and humanity. There are only a few references to his parents, for example.

It was very interesting to read something like this that wasn't written by a Brit and set in London. And refreshing. It was also refreshing to read about vampires who weren't necessarily evil -- I would have liked to see more of Anton and Kostya's friendship -- and to read a book that just casually contained vampires and werewolves without romanticising them...

I can't quite give this book five stars. The first two parts kept me quite interested, but the third part felt self-indulgent and not as substantial. Four stars, it is!

Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth is fully as good as I remember. That's a lot to say for a book that I adored from the age of eight until about fourteen, reread at seventeen-ish, and then haven't read for a few years... In my head, it was always one of the most amazing books of my childhood, and my memory didn't overstate it. It is written for children, so it's very easy to read and perhaps a little less than subtle, in places -- particularly with foreshadowing. "Little did he know how important this piece of information was going to become" sort of thing.

But Marcus and Esca are still the bright, real characters I remember. I always loved the parts that show the bond between them, the friendship, that transcends the initial fact of Esca's slavery. In fact, reading it again, it kind of amazed me how strong their friendship was -- realistic, yes, and with boundaries, but strong. I can picture both of them as characters, down to the way they move, can almost hear their voices. Part of that is years of imagination as a child, but I wouldn't have bothered if I didn't have good material to work on.

It's been a while since I did Classics, and longer since I learnt anything about the Roman occupation of Britain, but I think the historical details are reasonably accurate, too. I like the development of the two mysteries -- the entombed Roman Eagle, and the disappearance of the Hispana.

One thing I did notice was similarities in description and ideas to The Capricorn Bracelet, which I read for the first time last week. That was a little disappointing.

This book had an interesting idea. The story of the seven swans, and one at the end who still has a swan's arm... I can't remember any origin or location for this story, originally, but it's interesting that this version seems to be set in Scotland. It's odd, though, because there's a very feudal system, with clan wars and sieges and so on, but as well as swords there are guns... It seems a little anachronistic, although, heh -- I never got on well with history, certainly not with the little details like this.

Alasdair is intriguing at first, since you don't really understand what's wrong with him, but he gets wearing a little later on, with his whining and his constant complaints about his wing. It's understandable characterisation, but it doesn't make good reading.

Also, Fenella's little plot -- and the way everyone treat him -- as if he's supposed to think that people won't mind the fact that he has a wing. Come on, be realistic. People mind. You don't have to have something as strange as that to be made into a pariah. His own behaviour doesn't help, of course, but...

The idea was more enchanting that the execution. The characters could have been interesting -- like Ewen, in particular -- but he was so mercurial and strange at first that I had no idea how he felt, whether he really cared about Alasdair or not. The idea kept my attention rather better than any of the other components of the book.

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler... not utterly terrible, but not very good, either, in my opinion. The main thing that stuck out to me, throughout, was that the narrator was weird and the narrative jumped about in the most irritating way. It wasn't just that there were flashbacks -- I don't mind those, deployed correctly -- but there were flashbacks and then there were chapters in the present. And the narrator seemed to be a member of the book club, but an unnamed, invisible one. And for all that she closes it at the end with a neat little Austen quote, I didn't feel much closure. Not much happened with Prudie. Allegra and Corinne don't seem exactly suited. Bernadette has another husband, another happily ever after. Daniel and Sylvia are apparently back together with virtually no fuss. Jocelyn and Grigg, the same.

I also didn't really buy into the magic of Jane Austen. Or the theme of Jane Austen's books binding everything together. The members of the club didn't all really know each other, or meet up outside of the group, it seemed.

I did like the way Ursula Le Guin sneaked in there. I'd believe in the magic of her books, any day.

It wasn't really terribly interesting, really. Women being married, or in the process of divorce, or getting boyfriends. Yawn.

It took me a long time to read David Copperfield -- because I stalled in the middle for... well, about three months. It's hard for me to review it as a whole, in that light. I remember reading it when I was younger quite vividly, but I'm not sure I ever got past the first few chapters, back then. It's contrived to get tangled up in my mind with Great Expectations, somehow.

It's interesting to know that this book is thought to be based largely on Dickens' own life. I don't know if he ever said that himself, or whether it was deduced by other people. If he did look on David as himself, it's a wonder he wrote about him so frankly. It certainly seems like a lifetime's worth of Dickens' experience went into creating it, anyway.

I liked it a lot, despite the length and Dickens' tendency to go on a bit. I felt sorry for David a lot, and sometimes wanted to slap him -- which is the way I feel about some of my favourite characters, and shouldn't make you think I didn't like him.

There: I've finally finished my reread of The Lord of the Rings. I'm trying to remember when I last reread it. Probably three years ago, maybe four, because I went through a long period where I was sure it would have lost its magic, and I mostly just remembered the accusations of how slow it was, how boring, how long it took to get anything done. That was true, as far as it matters: Tolkien is wordy, but I like the way he writes. I wasn't wrong in remembering that it tasted nice to me, with the help of my synaesthesia. This wasn't a book I wanted to gallop through at amazing speed. It doesn't have to move fast -- part of it is the awful menace, the seemingly interminable waiting. I feel some of the despair of the characters -- but at least I know that in five pages, or fifty, or five hundred, good news is on the way.

I seemed to have swallowed whole all the other accusations too: racism, moral absolutism, sexism, etc, etc. I think most of that comes from a reading that isn't terribly deep, though. It's true that there are the evil men of the East -- I think it's the East -- and so on. I don't think we see a single redeemable character among those, or among the Orcs, for example. But it isn't quite wholesale 'men are good, elves are good, dwarves are good; only orcs and such are evil'. There are evil men, too, like Bill Ferny and Wormtongue, and arguably Saruman, since he's a man-shaped thing at least. And there are men who bring in some -- gasp -- moral ambiguity. Boromir, for a most obvious example. He ends as a noble man, but for a while it's in the balance. Denethor? He gives in to despair and by inaction threatens the cause.

Gollum's another. For all the evil he does, he serves Frodo faithfully for a time, and there's a spark of light in him. And he does at the end what Frodo cannot -- however unwittingly and unwillingly. There's darkness in Frodo, and light in Gollum.

Aragorn himself leads an army whose weapons are mostly fear and darkness -- the ghost army.

As for sexism, it's true that women don't have a great part in the story. No woman rides in the Fellowship, and there's no sign of a woman for great swathes of the book, especially when it comes to Frodo and Sam. Women do have a place in the story, but it's to be come home to. Eowyn is given tasks that keep her safe and home, preparing for the return of the men; Arwen stays well out of the action; Galadriel remains hidden in Lothlorien; at the very end, Sam rides off with Frodo and leaves Rosie there alone, and comes back to her at the last...

But at the same time, the role of women is explored a little through Eowyn. She leaves the safe haven of her home and goes out to war -- strikes one of the most important blows. We're told that the Lord of the Nazgul cannot be killed by a man, but Eowyn can kill him. She is eventually calmed, by being settled down with Faramir, but the way she's written, I doubt Faramir could or would rule her, and it's still acknowledged that she has won great reknown for what she did. Galadriel, although she stays hidden, seems to be important among the Wise like Elrond and Gandalf, and wields an elven-ring.

Lord of the Rings would probably be quite different if written now, with what we have of reform and feminism and equality, but that's obvious. There's still some place for women in the narrative, and more than might be expected.

This last book was shorter than I remembered. It was hard to stop reading it, and in the end I gave in and just sat down to finish it. In a way, I think the end lingers a little too long -- it could end in Minas Tirith, it could end as they enter the Shire, etc, etc. It's a little strange the way the action starts up again a little at the very end, for the Scouring of the Shire. But it is still good to read, and it ties up a lot of loose ends.

And the real end, with Frodo and Bilbo and Gandalf and the elves all sailing away to peace and healing, it's beautiful. It's a little too good to be true, because people don't just sail off into the sunset and live apart from any strife; if there's anyone else around, there's usually something to disagree about. But that's what beautiful fictions are for.

I loved Rosemary Sutcliff's historical fiction, when I was younger. I read two copies of The Eagle of the Ninth to pieces. This book is also about Roman Britain, although it's more focused on the area around the wall, and is also less about big epic deeds, and more about ordinary people -- focusing on a single family through a period of a couple of hundred years. There's less excitement, I suppose, but there are fascinating little details about how Sutcliff imagines life to have been then -- realistic, so far as I can tell.

I liked it. It wasn't the kind of story to blow someone away, I think, but one to sit with quietly and absorb. There are lovely details in it, lovely moments, and small quick glimpses of lives...

My only argument with it is that the narrators, the six different narrators, don't sound very different. It's hard, I suppose, to differentiate, but it felt like one voice. Could be partly choice, keeping the family link clear, but it bugged me.

It took me so long to read this, this time! After always saying it was the one I read fastest. But it's true, once I settled down and gave myself time to read it, I read it practically all in one day. The first half of this book, technically 'book III', picks up a lot of pace, to my mind. We chase orcs with Aragorn, meet up with Gandalf again, meet Treebeard, attack and overthrow Isengard, defend Helm's Deep... Quite a lot happens, just in book III. Book IV follows Frodo and Sam closer and closer to Mordor, which is a little slower, a sort of ghastly crawl -- I don't mean the writing or pace is that terrible, but you can feel the sense of dread the whole time, the revulsion.

It's also the book in which we see rather a lot of Gollum, and in which many people learn to feel pity for him. We learn a little more about him -- though not much, really: that mostly happens when Gandalf tells his story at the Council of Elrond. He's treacherous, but we see the potential good buried underneath the bad... I find him quite a tragic character, and wish that he could really truly be saved.

We also meet Faramir, who I had a total literary crush on way back when I first read this. He's nobler than his brother Boromir, easier to love and admire, I think -- at least for a certain type of person, because I suppose Boromir's confidence and fighting skill and drive to find a solution to the problems of Minas Tirith is also appealing to some people.

I'm still leaving my overview of the trilogy for last. I hope I'll remember everything I mean to say for then.