Pet peeve #1

[_ocelott_]

One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to novels is too much description. In my view, it's even worse than too little description, because while I'll whine about it if there's not enough, I'll at least finish the book. Nothing bogs me down and discourages me from reading faster than page after page of gratuitous description. I do not need to

Comments

[sylvanpixie]

If you despised reading the novels, you might want to try the short stories or the Silmarillion. I know most people say the last is a drag to read, but it's not a travelogue as the others are.

[_ocelott_]

It's not so much that I hated it as I got really frustrated with having to get through 100 pages of description just to get to a conversation that would move the plot along. I think I was also annoyed that their surroundings were much more vividly described than the characters. What can I say? I likes me a character driven story, and Lord of the Rings is not that.

I did read The Hobbit, and was ok with that one.

Re: too much description in Tolkien

[_ocelott_]

Yeah, there are a lot of seemingly random time jumps like that, too. Or the one that made me really angry was when they all go from Mordor to Lothlorien, and Tolkien spends all this time describing how Lothlorien looks, and how it works, and how everyone is so sad about Gandalf but Lothlorien makes them feel a little better... and then they go to leave, and suddenly Legolas and Gimli are best friends. WHAT?!? Did I miss something? They were still sniping at each other in Mordor! You could write an entire book (and, in fact, many have) on the two hating each other, prejudiced by race, and slowly overcoming it all to be pals, but Tolkien gives us one phrase. "...for by now, Legolas and Gimli had become fast friends."

GAH!

[aurillia]

I still haven't finished Lord of the Rings. Too much description, yes. It's very slow. There are hardly any women in it (yes, I know, product of its times blah blah), and sadly, I've read the story so many times already because of all those authors like Robert Jordan etc. who in the 80s and even 90s simply re-wrote the bloody thing.

I hope to read it and finish it one day, really I do. I didn't hate it or anything. I've just read so much better, it's hard to get into it.

[_ocelott_]

I can't say that I hated Lord of the Rings, I just found it really hard to pick up each time, because I knew I'd have to trudge through page after page of forest or meadow or something to get to the action. He had this whole wonderful world built up in his head, but over-saturated us with the scenery instead of letting the small details come out in the adventure.

[kat_nic]

I thought I was the only one who found LOTR to be merely mediocre! I read it and loved it when I was in high school, but it's lost its glamour in my eyes. Especially now the movies have been released. They were so much better, even with all the changes that had to be made. Jackson and Co. condensed the story very nicely, I thought, got it down to it's bare bones (or at least made it loose about a hundred pounds).

[_ocelott_]

I really enjoyed the movies for the same reasons you did. Instead of a hundred pages about trees, they did a ten-second camera sweep and it was covered, and we could move back to the plot, where the actors actually gave depth and emotion to the characters.

I think Tolkien had some really brilliant ideas, but the man needed an editor very badly.

[kat_nic]

I remember seeing on some documentary that all the editors at the publishing company were afraid to critique his manuscript, because he was a professor of language at Oxford, so obviously the man knew what he was doing...and that if he was alive and trying to publish it today, he would have a very difficult time, and would be definately asked to rewrite it before any agents or publishers would even touch it.