The Hobbit and The Corrections.

[ceelo]

This week I have decided to start The Hobbit and The Corrections.
I was just wondering what your thoughts on either one or both of these books are?
I've wanted to read The Hobbit for awhile, but found Lord of the Rings quite a tedious read (still haven't finished it) although i absolutely love the story.
Comments would be appreciated :)

[Caliban's Isle]

I'd just pick one or the other to read since they're basically the same story.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Are we talking Franzen's Corrections? I just got it, haha. Is it intentionally based off The Hobbit?

[Lokasenna]

I haven't read The Corrections, but...

...well, I'm sure pretty much everyone on LitNet knows my opinions on Tolkien. The Hobbit is a wonderful novel, though stylistically very different from LotR. Whereas LotR is written in imitation of Old Norse saga literature, The Hobbit is a curious mixture of Germanic folklore and Anglo-Saxon elegy. Quite aside from being a much shorter work, it's certainly an easier read.

[mal4mac]

I read the Hobbit when very young and, vaguely, remember enjoying it.

If you want more of this kind of "big concept" fantasy, try "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K Le Guin. The tramping through the snow gets a bit tedious, but it has some clever ideas & entertaining moments that make up for it.

But even that suffers from the main flaws of the genre - for instance, it takes a lot of time to set up the geographical & cultural specifics of these alternative worlds. This is often tedious, and because you have no relation to these cultures other than what the author give you they often end up seeming 2-dimensional, even with maps, invented languages, ... yawn ... etc... This puts authors in this genre at a great disadvantage to, say, Dickens. Everyone has some rich, mental vision of London. So the reader of Dickens brings a lot of useful, enriching material to the novel. And Dickens doesn't have to go into long drawn out explanations of geographical specifics or culture.

I read "The Corrections" last year and didn't like it much. The people aren't very interesting, and I found myself not caring about what happened to them. The scenes are typical of those encountered by middle class Westerners. It has nothing really surprising or "strange". One long bore really... Kind of the opposite problem to fantasy fiction, by basing it in typical burb-land it brings in all the boring connotations of burb-land... (this can work , but not here...)

[Caliban's Isle]

Are we talking Franzen's Corrections? I just got it, haha. Is it intentionally based off The Hobbit?

My comment was meant as a joke. ;)

I haven't read The Corrections, however, so I can't really say. I'd be quite surprised if it has anything in common with The Hobbit, though!