@Luke Maciak: LoTRO is quite a good MMO. I’ve tried it for a few months, but quit soon after. I just can’t seem to commit to MMOs. It’s very WoW-ish in a way, so it’s quite accessible. It’s one of the few MMOs launched after WoW that seem to have a good following after it.

I like the way the main storyline quests are handled, organized into “volumes” and “chapters”. If I remember correctly, most of these main quests are instanced. The best part is that it gets its source material from the book, not the movie, so you can expect ol’ Tom Bombadil to make an appearance in there.

@Luke: That is what I have heard. My best friend says it read more like a history book so I might try to read it concurrently with the trilogy so I stay intrested. I realize it is not about the fellowship but I think the combination would make both more interesting. We will see. Between graduation and college I might not have time anyway.

@Matt`: I haven’t heard about the Dune thing. So far there has been a movie and a miniseries.

The movie was pretty much just using names and themes from Dune as background material and re-wrote most of the story. Still, I never really hated it because I saw it before I read the books. So while it’s treatment of source material was atrocious, I remember enjoying the hell of it as I watched and re-watched it over years. Along with Star Wars this one one of these movies that I would watch again as I got older, only to see new interesting things in there that I was to young to get before.

Then I read the books (all of them) and now I’m torn whenever I watch it. On one hand, it fills me with a sense of nostalgia. On the other hand I scoff at all the things they changed.

The miniseries was decent – much closer to the book but suffered from some bad acting, and small budget. Somehow it felt much less epic than the movie.

I’d love to see another crack at adapting the books. It would be great to see something as faithful to the story as the miniseries realized with a Hollywood budget. They will likely fuck it up though.

@Adam: Definitely give it a try. Keep in mind that Hobbit is easier to read, and simpler but nowhere near as epic as the LOTR. It pretty much reads as a fairy tale, while LOTR is heroic fantasy proper. You actually don’t need to read the Hobbit to get LOTR but it is a good introduction to Tolkien’s literature as a whole.

@marianne: I know what you mean about Silmarilion. I made various valiant attempts to read it in the past but I always get stuck somewhere in the middle and get distracted.

@IceBrain: I was lucky enough to meet bunch of people passionate about books in HS. I sort of got a crash course on awesome when I got introduced to LOTR, Dune, Pratchet (well, not in the same league but funny), Role Playing Games and Wahammer Fantasy Battles in a single semester. :) Since then I’ve been avid reader and encouraged other people to read.

Also, my dad was a bookwork but he preferred action/spy novels and only occasionally dabbled in Science Fiction. So I sort of grew up reading Clive Cussler and David Morell novels. :P

@Ricardo: Yup, you are right – after you read a book you already imagined the world and the characters. Whatever you see on the screen will not be a perfect match. That said, I really don’t know if the LOTR movies could have been made better. Especially since I’m really not taking the offense with the various changes introduced by Peter Jackson but rather with the rather intangible “lack of magick”.

@Mart: Well, I actually don’t own a matching set. My Fellowship is a old edition paperback, in Polish. My Two Towers is some special edition paperback which is twice the size of Fellowship (widthxheight). The Return of the King is standard pre-movie paperback. Just by looking at these 3 books you would never be able to tell they were a single trilogy. Ive been itching to buy a nice matching set, but I’m waiting for a nice looking affordable one without Orlando Bloom’s mug on the cover.

Oh, and I haven’t tried LOTR online. Did you? How is it?

@Victoria: You are right. Tolkien pretty much invented Fantasy and no one else has really been able to do anything even remotely close in scope, literally eloquence and awesomeness.

It’s probably because most Fantasy writers are not accomplished linguists and philosophers. Thanks for the G.R.R.Martin recommendation.

@jambarama: Yup, Ive read a lot of fantasy and nothing even comes close.

@ExxonValdeez: Good luck with the Silmarilion. It is quite different from LOTR – just to let you know. :)

I actually learned about the books because of the movies but read them first. When the trilology was being filmed, my mom’s friend lent me really old copies of the Hobbit and the other three. I read through the Hobbit and ended up buying my own set of books because the old ones started to fall apart. That said, the covers were really neat. If I remember correctly they had Elven designs similar to those in the architecture of Rivendell. After reading the books I couldn’t wait to watch the movies and wasn’t too disappointed though I agree that the books are better. Over spring break I watched the Two Towers and the Return of the King again and I think I will read the books again this summer hopefully with the Simarillion and The Children of Hurin.

My mother read these books to me at night when I was growing up. I think I was 7 when we’d finished The Hobbit and the LOTR Trilogy. A few years later, I think I was 10 or 11, I read them myself. This was after I read all the other good fantasy series I could get my hands on – and my mother was an excellent book pusher. She loves to read, in fact, she can’t remember the names of her children, but still knows the stories she read in the Silmarillion as a teenager. Anyway, I read the Susan Cooper Dark is Rising series, the Lloyd Alexander High Kind series, CS Lewis & all 7 Narnia books, etc etc etc.

Having exhausted all the classics, then I got into the trashy fantasy novels – like Dragonlance & such. My mother read a few and frowned, but let me read the thousands of pages of that dreck before I got enough taste to discern quality – and it took years. Since then, I’ve reread Narnia once, and LOTR twice – and there’s really no comparison. No other series for me contained as much excitement, none had such richly textured universes – histories, ethnicities, culture, old myths & stories, and a full spate of languages. The Silmarillion is brilliant as well, if you read it like a history book.

I’ve read Hobbit when I was little, and in mid school I found the Two Towers. I’ve read it a thousand times (there were not so many Fantasy books around) and it’s still my favorite in the whole LOTR thing. It was much later that I was able to read Fellowship and Return of the King. The saddest thing ever was the list of death dates as an appendix to the 3rd book.

I even managed to read Silmarillion but it was seriously too much for me :) yet one of my friends thinks that S. is the only great work of Tolkien, not the trilogy.

Since then I’ve read a LOT of fantasy and near-fantasy books. LOTR is like the Old Testament of fantasy for me and I never found the New one :) I don’t even like LOTR. I respect and acknowledge it :) (the closest thing to New is Song of Ice and Fire by G.R.R.Martin).

I liked the first movie the most: during it I even forgot that Frodo was wearing chain mail and gasped at the moment.

I have to admit, I had to read the book a few times to finally “get it”. It was quite some heavy reading for me. The movie kinda helped a bit.

Oh and mine is a paperback without movie stills! ;)

Incidentally, have you tried playing LoTR Online?

I started reading the three books for the first time after my brother finished the first, some 4 years before the movies. At the time, I had no idea who Tolkien was and how big impact he created and still does.

Then I read The Hobbit and the LOTR one more time. Never had a chance to read Silmarillion or the letters.

I saw the movies some 3 times and I agree with you that they do not capture all the magic – although they are great movies. Then again, I don’t think that would ever be possible. When you read, you construct in your mind what the author is describing. It is very personal and no movie would ever match your imagination unless they both coincide.

I have too discovered Tolkien because of the movies. I never had many friends to talk about books (none of the guys read books, and the girls only read cheap, sappy novels), so Tolkien “passed” by me, although I had read The Neverening Story and some works by Ursula Le Guin.

But after seeing the movies (and thought they were great, especially the second – I saw the whole 3 hours without breaks and felt I could watch another 3 right after :P ), the books appeared everywhere and I read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion, and loved them all.

But you’re right: there much in the books that the movies don’t have, but I think it would be almost impossible to do it; Movies have a different way to tell a story, and “conversions” always have that drawback.

Read his letters too. There is stuff to discover there.