Why Cannot I Finish Reading Lord of the Rings
According to my good reads profile, last year I read about 21 books against my target of 10 books. This year though, the ever optimistic reader in me decided to up the stake, and take upon myself a new challenge. It is to read 100 books in 2017. As of today, I have read just one book, The Little Prince. It’s a weird surrealistic book that talks about everything from love to suffering to the little joys of life. It’s weird, even for me!
It’s already the last day of April. The good reads software tells me that to achieve that goal, I must have finished 35 books by now! Obviously, I was too ambitious — which happens a lot — and that means, some course correction is in order. For one thing, I have revised the target and made it 25 books. That appears more realistic. Second, I am going to not try and finish Lord of the Rings this year.
For some reason, I never could start and then finish the lord of the rings movies. However, I enjoyed the Hobbit films and then read the book that goes with it. I found the Hobbit, funny, simple, fast paced and action packed. Clearly, LOTR is more famous and more quotable and all that. I assumed that I will enjoy the books, and then may be, I will get around to watching the movies on Netflix or something. So, I bought all three books in a single book edition on Kindle and started reading.
Then I stopped reading. Then, I started reading. Then, I stopped. Eventually, after roughly 10 % of reading the entire trilogy, I realized something. I am almost 100 pages in and our protagonist has still not left his home town. It’s just endless discussion about abandoning your home and home town and thinking about turning back. Its walking to a park and then arguing about what to do next with each other and then just eating. Then sleeping. I know the book is supposed to be awesome. Perhaps, the story picks up after the 100 pages or the 150 pages or the 200 pages. However, so far, nothing is happening in the narrative and it is not triggering the usual emotional reactions that most books do in me.
I love long narrative novels and books. When I sneak peek into my kindle library, I see at least 20 books and all of them are door stoppers. I have read all the game of thrones novels, the huge book on world war 2 — The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and another door stopper, The Stand. Compared to these books, the Lord of the Rings is relatively a short book. So, length is not the problem. The genre is also not an issue, because I already read the Hobbit. Perhaps, contrary to popular opinion, LOTR does have a slow and non-exciting start and I simply am unable to subscribe to the slow start.
May be, I will pick it up in 2018. Maybe I won’t. Meanwhile, I have already picked up my next novel, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick. I will post my thoughts on it once I am done with it.
