Tolkien's Two Towers

I finished Two Towers last night in a dead sprint to the end.  Not very many books drive me on to the end like this one did.  I loved the book, though I hadn't been sure beforehand that I would.  When I read Fellowship last year, it didn't have the same effect.  Two Towers seemed surer, somehow, in large part because of the way Tolkien develops Frodo, Sam, and Gollum.  They are distinct in subtle ways, but they are also very complex characters.  Gollum is not all bad; he's bad and good in ways that are at first difficult to recognize as such.  Sam has his own "Gollum" moments of behavior, and refuses to see any possible good in Gollum. You might have just read that and said to yourself, "by the end Sam seems to have been right about Gollum."  True in one way, but the beauty of the novel comes, in part, from the way Tolkien makes Gollum a character for whom we can feel moments of hope.  What he winds up doing matters in some ways less than the way that Frodo draws the Smeagol side of good out of Gollum, even if only temporarily.  I didn't expect to be moved at the end of the novel, but that's what I experienced.

Many, many people have said that Lord of the Rings is the highwater mark for fantasy writing.  I saw that clearly for the first time in Two Towers.  I've felt several times in reading fantasy novels as if I was standing on the edge of someone's imagined world, but never really able to enter it.  In TT, I fell into the world Tolkien describes many times.

I have not seen any of the Lord of the Rings movies, so the world I've imagined comes out of my head, not images someone else created.  I certainly don't plan to see any of them until at least after I finish Return.  I like this book enough, however, that I'm not sure I want to have the movie version compete with what I've experienced in my reading of the novel.  I don't think that often, so it's an indication of how much I enjoyed the novel, and likely will in later readings of it.

Re-reading The Hobbit out loud

I'm really struck by how different the experience of reading a book can seem depending on your life circumstances when you read and re-read it.  I'm reading The Hobbit right now to my youngest son, who is 10; this is my third time through it.  I read it when I was a teen, and then I read it to my oldest son when he was 7 or 8.  I loved the book when I first read it, but really struggled through it with my oldest son.  We finished it, but I remember thinking that the book was not nearly as interesting as I had remembered it from my first reading.  I was really disappointed and surprised by the experience.

This time around, I love the book again.  We have read half of it, and it feels exciting and interesting throughout.  Several times we have gotten to a logical stopping place, looked at each other, and decided kept reading.  That was not my experience when I read it to my oldest.  I couldn't wait to get to a stopping place.

So what's different?  One thing is the age of my children.  When I read it to my oldest, my other children were 4 and 1.  Not lots of sleep or time to read on my own.  I was, I think, a dulled reader at the time.  Another difference is that we have seen the first Hobbit movie, and this has helped me visualize some of the scenes that I couldn't before.  I'm not one to watch a movie before reading a book--and often I don't want to see the movie after I've read a book because I don't want to spoil my experience of it--but seeing the movie this time has increased our enjoyment of the book.

It's no great insight to say that we are different readers every time we read a book we've read before, and as a result the book seems (or is?) different.  But when I've thought of that idea before, I always understood it as variations on enjoying a book, or seeing things that weren't apparent in earlier readings.  With The Hobbit, I've gone from loving the novel as a teen, to disliking it in my thirties, to loving it again in my forties.  Perhaps the most fulfilling reading challenge for 2014 would be a re-reading challenge.