It's a bookish life.
I found this late last night on Calapine's journal when I was too zombified to do anything productive, and thought "Hey! That's quite neat. I think I'll do that." The longer I worked on it the slower I got till I was almost gave myself qwerty face. You can tell because my answers get shorter as the night wore on...
( Book meme )
( Book meme )
I love Richard Scarry! He's so witty -- the more you look into the pictures the more you see. My brothers and I grew up with his books.
I have a copy of Buried Treasure on my 'to read list'.
To be fair to Tolkien, he wasn't really trying to write a novel. (I'd be surprised if he even knew what a novel was). The first time I read LOTR, as a student, I was looking for a way to talk about the history of ideas without 'trivialising' the ideas with too much exposition, so I was blown away by the way Tolkien does it -- he just tells you what you need to know and somehow convinces you that you already know the rest. I was so impressed, I forgave him everything else.
The next time I read it, it was as a fanfic writer who was basing her stories on the movies and needed a better acquaintance with the book, so my copy is now meticulously annotated!
I agree that his obssession with maps meant that he had no concept of fudging distances and cutting to the chase, which is why we tramp along with the hobbits in real time. And he never, ever came up with a plausible fictional reason for holding back information, it's always: "I could tell you, but I'm bigger than you, so I'm not going to." His 'big' characters are all excruciating (except Faramir, and even he blows it when he proposes to Eowyn), but his little characters -- the hobbits, Gimli, young Turin Turambar in The Children of Hurin -- are all pretty loveable, I think.
And Middle-earth gives you so much scope for adding things to your own stories -- mine have got mermen, werewolves, a Minas Tirith mafia, a were-bear, a djinn, an airship, an elixir of life...
:-)
ETA They do have plots as well, LOL
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so my copy is now meticulously annotated!
Hee. I know how that goes. I now have 2 copies of most of the HP books (sourced from charity stores) so that I can scribble notes in them.
Given how many of my IT friends are heavily impressed with Tolkein I'd hazzard a guess that the man himself might have been Aspergers?
"I could tell you, but I'm bigger than you, so I'm not going to." His 'big' characters are all excruciating
As I said I've never managed to finish the book but given when it was written it sounds to me very much the way adults were treating children in the early 20th century - Do as I tell you and stop asking questions!
I just couldn't see the plot for the trees! :-D
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