SarahJanet's Books

Return of the King

Well, I ripped through Return of the King and finished it a couple of days ago. It was quite a satisfying read, actually - by far the quickest of the three to read, although that's probably because it's the shortest. (Nerd confession: I read most of the appendices, as well.)

So now I've read them all again since seeing all the movies, and I have to say, I agree with a lot of the decisions that Peter Jackson and co. made. In the books, Arwen is so practically non-existant that people would have been confused beyond all reason when they randomly got married at the end. And as much as I thought Arwen was completely lame and was annoyed that she stole a ton of screen time that could have been Eowyn's, I can see why they made that decision.

That said, I think Movie Eowyn is cooler than Book Eowyn. Book Eowyn is basically just a miserable suicidal ice queen, as far as I can tell, whereas Movie Eowyn was just frustrated by the role of women in her society. I might be biased by the hotness of Miranda Otto, but I like Movie Eowyn better.

The decision to leave out the Scouring of the Shire was understandable, I think, but I did like that it made a fairly powerful statement about how far reaching the effects of the war were. It's not too believeable that the Shire was completely unchanged by such an epic battle, when the rest of Middle Earth was under siege. Mind you, they sort of ignored the attacks on Mirkwood and Lothlorien and the Dwarves and everything in the movies as well, so at least they were consistent.

Anyway. The massive book of doom can now stop taking over my life and I can go back to reading the large pile of other material I've accumulated. I am now working on What Nobody Tells the Bride, which is a surprisingly good book about the parts of marriage people don't talk about so much. I read the Concious Bride a while back, which is in a similar vein, but it was all kind of earth-mothery hippy crap, which I'm not wild about. This one is much more amenable.

posted by SarahJanet @ 2:15 PM