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...