I came back to this as an adult, having stalled out on it at eleven or twelve like a lot of people apparently do, and it hit completely differently the second time. One review put words to something I’d been feeling but hadn’t articulated, called this an RPG without the interactive element, and that’s exactly the texture of it, a party with a fixed roster, a quest with real stakes, side characters with actual backstory the narrative doesn’t need but gives you anyway. It reads like a campaign log written by someone who was actually there.
The single-volume edition is the way to go if you can find it, one reviewer described it as some twelve hundred pages of small print that we erroneously call a trilogy because it was really always one novel, and once you read it that way the pacing makes more sense, the slow parts aren’t detours, they’re world texture the story needs before it can ask anything of you emotionally later. I missed a subway stop reading the Moria chapters. Not proud of it, but it happened.
What surprised me was how many small details survive from book to film and how many don’t. Sam, apparently, takes even less mess in the prose than he does on screen, which tracks, this is a story that trusts its quiet characters to just be quiet and steady without needing a moment. I also went down a small rabbit hole listening to a Rob Inglis audiobook chapter, and hearing Tom Bombadil actually sung rather than read changed how I felt about a section I’d always found skippable.
Not everyone finishes it, and the ones who bounce off usually bounce off the same spot, the opening stretch before the story earns its scope, overly descriptive is the phrase that keeps coming up. I get it. But stick past the Shire and this becomes something close to unbeatable, one of maybe three books I’d actually call a world rather than a story.