This is my third review of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy. You can find my review of Fellowship of the Ring here and The Two Towers here. The Hobbit is here. This review is semi-spoilery in terms of tone of the conclusion of the series, but vague. As previously mentioned in the Two Towers review, one of my favorite things about Tolkien’s series is that stakes are high for everyone involved. The bad guys are bad and a lot of them die, but the […]
“The burned hand teaches best.”
This is is my second review of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series. You can find my review of The Fellowship of the Ring here. But so our path is laid.’ ‘Yes, that’s so,’ said Sam. ‘And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things […]
1001 nights of hidden meanings.
I don’t know a whole lot about The Arabian Nights (or 1001 Nights), but I do know the general premise, thanks to popular culture—Scheherazade spins a web for 1001 nights to save her life from the whims of a capricious ruler and so captivates him with her storytelling that he allows her to live at the very end. The stories are populated with thieves, the poor, the rich, rulers, and djinn. It is this fabric against which Salman Rushdie sets his Two Years Eight Months […]
A delightful fantasy princess tale. You know, typical Gaiman.
I’m alive! I’m also very behind on my reviews! Now that I’m *finally* caught up with all my grading, I can begin to buckle down and blog. I remember one of the veteran Cannonballers (maybe it was Malin?) saying that after completing a triple Cannonball, reading and reviewing books was a bit of a slog. I don’t feel that way about reading (because that’s one of my relaxers, and I seriously could never give up reading), but reviewing has been *really* difficult to keep up […]