I prefer The Hobbit to LOTR too for several reasons. It's easier to read, it's short, it's memorable and of course... lots of dwarves. That said, LOTR is epic, untouchable and one of the best written pieces of literature of our era.

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Yep, LOTR is the gold standard for fantasy books.

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I hate Tolkien's writing. I guess I liked it when I was young, but there's so much pastoral imagery about how the hobbit's house has windows that face northeast in a gentle sun, and this dwarf had a blue tunic, and this one had a red one...blargh!

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This was the world that I had created. I know what I have to do to fix it...to make things right. There's no problem that can't be solved.

I've always said that Tolkein is great at coming up with stories, but not so great at telling them. Sometimes I feel like his imagination is almost too vivid, and everything he pictures he wants to put down on the page. Some of the chapters in LOTR where there is very little going on are so full of trivial details it's almost excruciating, especially the early ones.

I remember when I tried to tackle LOTR as a child, after falling in love with The Hobbit, and it not being able to hold my interest enough to get past the first couple of chapters. I think I tried about three or four times over the course of a year before I finally managed to grind my way through it.

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What makes LOTR a great story told badly is that his interest in etymology and anthropology took over. He was so engrossed in making an all encompassing, rich history for his world that you get overwhelmed by it. He had worked out so much history and the changes that caused over time and how it effected language that it tended to slow down the plot when he tried to tell it to you. But the wealth of detail did leave to a very "full" feeling world.

You can see he was a lit. professor and not a writer in the modern sense.

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Yeah, I don't mean to overly denigrate JRR. Clearly he was a mad genius. And much is owed to him for establishing almost all the conventions of the fantasy genre. The man's influence is deep. I mean, aren't Vulcans just Tolkienesque space elves at the end of the day?

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This was the world that I had created. I know what I have to do to fix it...to make things right. There's no problem that can't be solved.

My favorite author would be Charles Bukowski. I've read also all the books from Crichton, but mostly because I loved his writing as a teenager and then I kept my collection up to date just for completion (which isn't too hard anymore, R.I.P.). I love the Ripley-books from Highsmith. I like Hemingway. Since a year or so I'm ordering english-language books because I want to improve my skills and also prefer to consume any kind of art in the original language (besides english I also speak a little french (actually that was my first second language)). And they are very cheap, at least the classics (check out 'Wordsworth Edition').
Some additional favorite books from various authors: 20.000 Miles Below the Sea, L.A. Confidential, Solaris...em...I spare you with german literature.

One thing I can't read is fantasy. When it comes to dragons and dwarfs I loose my patience. Few exceptions are The Hobbit (LoTR booooring) and I read the first book of A Song of Fire and Ice because of the great adaption by HBO...but got stuck in the second book. I think I'll just wait for season 2. And 3, 4, 5...6?
Surprisingly I enjoy fantasy for kids. Like Alice in Wonderland or Harry Potter (not the films!). But I guess that's just because they are easy written and as a german native speaker I like it when I can rush through a book although it's not my first language. As opposed to something like Wuthering Heights where I stuck on one single page for several minutes (Yorkshire dialect is a pain in the ass!).

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That had to be a translation....just struck me how close the title was to the book, but still pretty different..

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My bad. Just checked it: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In german it's '20.000 Meilen unter dem Meer' (20.000 Miles below the sea....although we don't use 'miles'...weird).

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yea...it was accurate enough, but it looked like one of those "translated out of a language and then back in" things. The words had the same meaning but were just different enough.

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