TOTAL TOLKIEN IMMERSION
When I was a teenager, I tried to read Tolkien's The Silmarillion, the epic tale of the creation of the universe, Middle-Earth, and all the creatures, high and low, who dwell therein. I couldn't get past the first few pages. The density of the arch prose, the bible-style retelling of events that happened eons ago, and the absence of a here-and-now narrative with fully realized regular joes were simply too much for me.

Around Christmas, rekindled by the magnificence of Peter Jackson's The Two Towers, I decided to re-read The Return of the King, the LOTR installment with which I was least familiar (having read it only once years ago). The Return of the King is arguably the most entertaining and powerful of the three installments, a fact I had forgotten. Its sadness and triumph, the verisimilitude of its players' struggles reminded me of why Lord of the Rings is such an important piece of entertainment. Tolkien wrapped up his sprawling saga with the sort of virtuosity one expects from a musician who shapes all the elements of a disparate melody into a cogent and breathtaking whole.

Could I now digest The Silmarillion? Yes. I'm not sure if I was able to read it (nigh on devour it) because I'm a grown up and much smarter than my teenage self, or because Peter Jackson's two film adaptations have inspired in me a more visual sense of what is going on, what people looked like, how they spoke, creating a physical logic I could then apply to The Silmarillion. In any case, it's a terrific book, full of huge ambition, little moments, and a mythic completeness that, frankly, was more gratifying than good sex or the finest of meals. Kudos to Christopher Tolkien for compiling a lifetime of his father's notes and writings into something much more compelling and readable than the bible, at its Old Testament best, could ever hope to be.