If you had told me when I was a teenager struggling to get through The Lord of the Rings and bouncing off the Entmoot that I would one day not only gleefully smash through the whole trilogy but then follow it up by reading The Silmarillion in just one week, I’d have laughed in your face. But inexplicably, here we are. And as personal reading achievements go, this one is something of which I am...

Here we are at last. It’s been a long time coming—years in the trying—but I have finally finished a full read-through of The Lord of the Rings. After the surprising ease of reading The Two Towers, The Return of the King was a step into totally uncharted waters. And what a remarkable ending this was for the trilogy. I’ve stopped my read at the end of the narrative chapters, short of the...

I mentioned in my review of The Fellowship of the Ring that when I tried to read The Lord of the Rings as a teenager, I only ever managed to get about halfway through before dropping it. In truth I don’t recall how many times I tried, but it was certainly more than once, and certainly at least once at university. The sticking point was always The Two Towers. Specifically the Entmoot, which is...

It’s been a very long time since I last attempted to read The Lord of the Rings. I was a young teenager when I first picked up a ratty old combined edition paperback that was the size of a brick, and this was naturally off the back of the Peter Jackson movie trilogy. Back then I got as far as about halfway through The Two Towers when I crashed out, finding the Entmoot mind-numbingly boring...

This isn’t a first for me. I have fond memories of my dad reading The Hobbit to me as a bedtime story when I was a child, and it’s remarkable how much the book stuck with me over the years. Now I’m older and I have children of my own, it has given me a wonderful opportunity to read the book to them as well. Unfortunately, I didn’t own a copy of the book!