I watched the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers at the theater and I am not
going to present a review since my analytic abilities when it comes to movie or
book reviews would be no more profound then “Thumbs way up.” Normally I go to
movies even less than Victor Lams does but I was not about to wait eight months for
the rental. The movie was almost three hours long which is only slightly less
than the time taken by all of the movie previews and other video game
advertisements shown. I now know all the movies that are going to come out
within the next ten years. Maybe I will start a new subscription service called
MOVIETIME where you will be given both the time the previews start and the time
the movie actually starts.
But seeing LOTR got me to thinking about the reasons why I had never read the
Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy until just about two years ago. In my adolescence I
was a computer geek without a computer to geek on. It wasn’t till my senior year
in High School that I even played with the Altair 8080 which used
switches to enter programs in octal and communicated via a teletype. I have
always greatly enjoyed the field of science, this was a special time of awe with
the space program and moon landing occurring. I had tried experimenting on the
small amplifier in a portable record player and I mixed household cleaner
ingredients in a lightbulb with the base removed. That I survived my inquisitive
childhood is a surprise. My father bought me electronic kits to put together to
try to aim my propensities into safer directions and he also introduced me to
science fiction which was the bulk of his library.
When I finally took to
reading I really took to it and read constantly, and yes what a surprise that I
am another shy introverted blogger who reads a lot. My Sci-fi of choice was
“hard science” fiction such as Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Hal Clement, H.G.
Wells and Arthur C. Clark. The only thing I really read outside of Sci-fi was
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle “Sherlock Holmes” series and Dorothy L. Sayers “Lord
Peter Wimsey” stories (introduced to my by PBS’s Masterpiece Theater). I was
also interested in the Roman and Greek myth and enjoyed the Odyssey and the
Iliad. When I joined the Navy I found I had many opportunities to read,
especially while standing in the chow line and I also picked up the bad habit of
reading while eating. It was very easy to exhaust the ship’s library and the
books of those around me and one time I picked up what I suspect to be one of
Piers Anthony’s Xanth series books. All of the bad puns obviously didn’t bother
me but a walking skeleton was just too much for my scientific preferences and I
wasn’t able to overcome this prejudice at this time. Which is rather odd since
my favorite genre of movies was of the “Jason and the Argonauts” and the
“Sinbad” movies type
The first fantasy series that I came to read was Stephen R. Donaldson “Thomas
Covenant” series, which I enjoyed greatly and so I added dwarves, orcs, and
elves to my repertoire of reading. Looking back I now realized that I enjoyed
these fantasy books because of the usual tight camaraderie of the characters and
also that they had strong moral convictions on what they would do and in
rescuing their friends. I at the same time was growing in moral convictions (not
necessarily moral actions) and as I had mentioned in a previous post I found the
the very characters I loved were much more moral than I was and I paled by
comparison. One series of books that I read before my conversion was R.A.
Salvatore’s “The Icewind Dale Trilogy” a story about a Drow Elf Drizzt Do’Urden
who overcame growing up in a dark elf community to leave it and to live in the
human world as a ranger in the face of massive prejudice and distrust. I reread
this series and the beginning “Dark Elf” trilogy and I found them to me to be
very Catholic. Nowhere else had I read someone pondering about the morality of
killing orcs and whether they could be redeemed. The struggles Drizzt had with
the temptation to wear a mask that would hide his Dark Elf features and all of
the moral problems he worked to overcome. There is a very strong redemptive
streak in these books and the struggle against evil. But as I mentioned at the
top of the post I am no reviewer and might have read into these books more then
was there. I have no critical abilities when it comes to prose, especially since
my own writing is like grammatical speed bumps so I can’t say for sure that
these books are well written.
Getting back to why I had never read Tolkien’s works till recently, for
whatever reason I just hadn’t come across them yet. Towards the end my my kids
high school I had homeschooled them using the courses from Seton and they had a reading
list for which books they could do book reports on. I found this a very good
guide for myself since it included the LOTR. It also led me to read Graham
Greene, Louis de Wohl, and Evelyn Waugh. So my literary universe has been
greatly increased and I look forward to all of the other great literary works
that I have yet to read. My love of science has not decreased since my
conversion but has deepened. Before I was like a camera stuck in zoom mode,
admiring all of the details. I lived in a universe where paintings could have
randomly painted themselves. Now I can zoom out and pan around a little and not
only to see the beauty of creation but also it’s author.
