"A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War" by Joseph Laconte

Oh. My. Goodness.

You know how sometimes, lots of people tell you to read a book because they're sure you would love it, and so you find the book, and then you put off reading it for like a year because you're afraid you might not like it as much as they expect you to like it?

Or is that just me?

Anyway, that happened for me with this book, and it just goes to show you how foolish I can be sometimes.  Because this is a great book.

I've been gravitating toward books about WWI lately, I think.  Not intentionally, they just... keep cropping up.  I'm happy about this because I feel like I don't know enough about WWI, and this is all filling in a gap in my knowledge of world history.

ANYWAY!  I'm rambling today.  Sorry.  THIS book is fantastic.  It focuses chiefly on J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, as you may have guessed, especially their experiences as soldiers on the front lines during WWI and how those affected the rest of their lives.  Especially their literary lives, of course, since that's what most of us know Tolkien and Lewis for.  

But it doesn't stop with those two.  It shows, gently and persuasively, how the catastrophic destruction of that war caused millions of people to turn away from God and look to science and technology for their salvation here on earth.  And how that change in the world around them informed the things Tolkien and Lewis wrote about.

I learned so much from this book!  In fact, I told my husband he needs to read it too.  I'm confident he'll also find it fascinating.

(From my Instagram account.)

Particularly Good Bits:

Tolkien and Lewis were attracted to the genres of myth and romance not because they sought to escape the world, but because for them, the real world had a mythic and heroic quality (p. xvi).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for discussions of war-related violence, suicide, and so on.  No cursing or anything like that, just a lot about the realities and horrors of war.

This is my 13th book read and reviewed for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2018.

And this review is also part of my Tolkien Blog Party.  Tomorrow is the last day to enter the giveaway and the games, so if you haven't done so already, have at it!  I'll choose giveaway winners on Saturday, and post the game answers and scores too.

Finally, this is part of my continuing quest to read a goodly number of the books I've collected that have to do with Middle-earth and J.R.R. Tolkien, which I've dubbed My Years in Middle-earth.

"Smith of Wootton Major" and "Farmer Giles of Ham" by J.R.R. Tolkien

Awwwww, these two stories were so cute and fun!  I really wasn't entirely sure what to expect from these two short stories, but they definitely reminded me in some ways of Tolkien's Letters from Father Christmas, just whimsical and funny and with some nice bits of wisdom gently bestowed here and there.

"Smith of Wootton Major" is all about baking cakes and giving secret gifts, and since I love both those activities, I probably liked it the best of the two.  "Farmer Giles of Ham" is about a reluctant, accidental hero who ends up outsmarting a tricksy dragon and becoming very important indeed.

This is totally going to be the next book I read out loud to my kids.  It's sweet and clean and will make them giggle.  It made ME giggle!  Especially those knights in "Farmer Giles" who didn't want to go dragon-hunting at all.

(From my Instagram)

Particularly Good Bits:

In the small hours of the night giants seem less unlikely. (from "Farmer Giles of Ham")

The knights were talking among themselves about the new fashion in hats. (from "Farmer Giles of Ham")

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  G.  Suitable for all audiences; nothing objectionable here at all.

This is my 15th book read and reviewed for the Classics Club, my 6th for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2018, and my 3rd for the Old School Kidlit Reading Challenge.

"An Atlas of Tolkien" by David Day

This is an extremely cool little book if you're into the world of Middle-earth like I am.  It's a total overview of the entire history of Tolkien's fantasy world, and I wish I'd had it when I read The Silmarillion a couple years ago, because I think it would've been really helpful for keeping people and events straight.  

I've had this on my shelf for a while, but when I sent my niece her own copy to celebrate the end of our studying The Lord of the Rings together, I decided I should read it myself instead of just looking at the pretty pictures once in a while.  So happy I did!  

(From my Instagram)

This doesn't go into great depth about any of the happenings in Tolkien's books, nor does it cover every event and mention every character.  It's just an overview, like I said. But it's a really good overview, and I enjoyed it a lot.  I also feel like I have a better grasp of Middle-earth history now than I did before, so yay!  It fit in nicely with my personal "My Years in Middle-earth" reading challenge, too.

This is my fifth book read and reviewed for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2018.

In Which I Join Instagram and #MiddleEarthMarch

I keep hearing good things about #bookstagram, and this post from Musings of Jamie prompted me to just take a flying leap into the world of Instagram.  (Well, that plus I just got a new phone with a decent camera on it, which will make posting to Instagram a lot easier.)  I joined, I started posting pictures, the whole shebang.  And I promptly joined an Instagram challenge called #MiddleEarthMarch, which basically is just posting Tolkien-related pictures all through March based on various themes.  What themes?  These themes:

I promise my feed won't be continually Tolkien-related -- there will be plenty of bookish pictures, photos of flowers (I'm addicted to flower photography), probably pictures of things I bake or places I go or whatever.  But for this month, yeah, gonna be a lot of Tolkien stuff.  I thought it fit nicely with my current My Years in Middle Earth reading challenge and the LOTR read-along I'm hosting here, etc.

I joined under my real name, so you'll find me @RachelKovaciny there.  I've loved photography for years, but I'm obviously entirely new to the whole Instagram thing, so this is a new adventure!  Looking forward to finding new friends there and also those of you I already know via the blogosphere :-)

My YearS in Middle Earth

You may recall that I decided that 2017 would be My Year in Middle-earth.  I planned to re-read LOTR and whatever other Middle-earth-related things that came my way.  And I think I did fairly well, though my re-read of LOTR got suspended for a while because I decided to use it for my niece's high school lit class this year.  She and I are almost finished with The Two Towers, and our class together has been such a joy.

Besides re-reading half of the trilogy, in 2017 I read:

J. R. R. Tolkien: Mind of a Genius

Wizards, Hobbits, and Harry Potter edited by Mark Whitlock

Finding God in the Lord of the Rings by Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware

The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power by Jane Chance


And besides teaching LOTR to my niece, I went ahead and started a new read-along of the trilogy here on my blog.  It slowed down a lot over the holidays, but we'll be picking it up again tomorrow at a much brisker pace, I promise.

But it comes to this:  I have a lot of Middle-earth-related books that I haven't even touched yet.  We have almost a full shelf of books by and about Tolkien:

Some of those are extra copies of certain books, but many of them are cool commentaries, history books from Middle-earth, and so on -- and I've barely scratched the surface of most of them.  

So I am extending my time in Middle-earth!  Instead of a one-year personal challenge, I'm going to make it last for two years.  And I hope to share reviews of at least four more of the books on this shelf with you over the course of 2018.

"The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power" by Jane Chance

There are several different places in this book where I wrote "mind = blown" because the nuances Jane Chance teased out of Tolkien's storytelling were so amazing.

I'm serious.  She brought up things I never, ever thought of, and I'm on my seventh reading of The Lord of the Rings.

I'm trying to find words to explain all the wonderful things I learned from this book, and I'm falling so short.  I'm going to have to re-read it again and again to really internalize and remember a lot of what I learned, but I'll share a couple of the things I found most interesting.

How about the fact that Denethor and Theoden's names are basically mirror images of each other?  Den-e-thor.  The-o-den.  And that their "leadership styles" are also mirrors -- one is a kind and loving leader who "commands through respect and love," and the other is a "tyrant [who] commands his followers by edict, rule, law" (p. 90).  HOW did I never notice this?

Or how about the fact that, while Gollum calls the Ring his "birthday present," it literally is Frodo's birthday present because Bilbo left it to him (along with Bag-End) on their shared birthday?  I mean, dude.  So amazing.  And again, now that I see it, that's so totally obvious, but it's not anything I ever thought of.

My favorite chapter was probably the one at the end, "Heroic Narrative and the Power of Structure."  I love studying the structure of myths and epics, also called the "hero's quest," and how they get used over and over in new and interesting ways.  I'd previously identified a lot of things in LOTR that draw from the classic myth structure, but I had never before noticed that "[i]n each of the three volumes, Tolkien matches the heroic structure of the initial book to that of the second book" (P. 19).  Which means for instance, that in book 1, everyone's at a great gathering at the beginning, Bilbo's party.  At the beginning of book 2, they're at the Council of Elrond.  In book 1, Frodo and friends go down into the valleys and encounter an ancient being who consumes some of them, Old Man Willow.  In book 2, they go down into Moria and encounter an ancient being who drags Gandalf away, the Balrog.  And on and on it goes.

Just fascinating stuff that I not only never noticed myself, but that I, as a writer, would never have come up with!  My appreciation for Tolkien as a writer and storyteller have grown so much while reading this book.

But this book is probably not for everyone.  If you don't enjoy analyzing texts, looking for deeper meanings, and somewhat scholarly pursuits like that, you probably wouldn't enjoy this book.  Certainly you can understand The Lord of the Rings without it.  But if you're like me and have read the trilogy quite a few times and enjoy peeling away layers to see the wordcraft and deeper meanings below a book's surface, I definitely recommend you try this book.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for some discussions of things like violence.  No bad language or anything like that.

I wrote this review as part of this year's Tolkien Blog Party.  If you haven't yet, check out the blog tag and giveaway and other posts for the party!

This is my eighth book read and reviewed for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2017.

"Finding God in the Lord of the Rings" by Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware

This is a fantastic little book.  It goes through the whole trilogy in chronological order, pulling out events and examining them in the light of Christianity to see what they contain.  Faith, hope, love, sacrifice, redemption, grace, desire, fear, death, weakness, danger -- there are so many wonderful topics packed into this book!

While it's set up so you could use it as a devotional, reading one section a day, I didn't read it that way -- I gobbled it up as fast as I could, underlining and scribbling madly in the margins.  I'm teaching my niece high school lit again this year, and we're reading The Lord of the Rings together as our first project.  Delightful!  I'm drawing on this book for a lot of the themes we're discussing.

Particularly Good Bits:

Tolkien understood that our lives are part of a grand drama that both transcends and explains our experiences.  The drama's narrative infuses meaning into scenes and events that would otherwise seem arbitrary and meaningless.  Tolkien saw the adventure of our lives, like the adventure of his hobbits, as part of a story that began "once upon a time" and is moving toward its eventual "ever after" (p. xi).

C. S. Lewis believed that our desire for something better is a gift, a way of reminding us of what it is we lost and what it is we hope to regain (p. 2).

Tolkien saw our world as neither completely right nor completely wrong, but rather as a good that has been violated, a beauty marred.  He realized that the only way we can understand that which occurs within time is to view it within the context of that which occurred before and beyond time (p. 4).

The true forces of evil in our world are rarely haphazard or indiscriminate.  The occasional mad gunman notwithstanding, the history of mankind shows that the most destructive wickedness is devious and determined.  Violent insanity is far less trouble than diabolical brilliance (p. 18).

It is only when we humble ourselves by acknowledging that we don't know everything that we are able to learn from others (p. 22).

Middle-earth, in other words, is a hauntingly luminous mirror image of our world.  For we know that the world in which we live is a perilous place, a place where good and bad, light and dark, innocence and horror, glory and depravity march side by side and sleep back-to-back.  We forget this at times, of course.  In the course of our dull daily routines we often grow numbly accustomed to it all.  But there are those moments when we wake suddenly in the middle of the night and remember that we are, after all, surrounded by terrors (p. 33).

It is our human destiny to participate with God in the ongoing work of creation (p. 112).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  G.  Absolutely clean and God-pleasing.

I wrote this review specifically for this year's Tolkien Blog Party.  If you haven't yet, check out the blog tag and enter the giveaway.  There will be more posts coming this week, including games and another Tolkien-related book review.

This is also my 7th book read and reviewed for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2017.

"Wizards, Hobbits, and Harry Potter" edited by Mark Whitlock

This book was not exactly what I was expecting.  I thought it was going to be all about the bad and evil things contained in fantasy fiction, and why we should stay away from them.  The subtitle of "What Your Family Needs to Know" certainly made it sound that way.  But actually, it was a thoughtful discussion of what the Bible says about magic, the power of storytelling, and also how to read fiction in a discerning manner.  My copy also includes a CD of an audio discussion of these same topics, but I haven't listened to it yet.  

This book also discusses the first four Harry Potter books, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Narnia series.  It gives a summary of each book, questions to think about or discuss as a family, and Bible verses that relate to various issues faced by characters in each book.  

I thought I was going to read through this quickly, then put it in the box of books I'll be selling at my yard sale.  Instead, I want to share the discussions of Narnia with my son, as he loves those books, and I know I'll be using some of the questions about LOTR next fall when I read through those books with my niece for her high school lit class.

This is my fourth book read and reviewed for the Mount TBR Challenge 2017.

Top Ten Tuesday: Fandom-onium

Today's topic from The Broke and the Bookish is a "fandom freebie."  I'm choosing to focus on ten literary worlds that can count me as a devoted fan.

I'm thirty-six, so I tend not to use the term "fangirl" to describe myself.  But I absolutely use the verb "fangirling" to describe my behavior at times -- I can act all fangirly even if I'm not exactly a fangirl.  Just drop a character name or quote a line, and *boom!* I'm ready to discuss, dissect, drool, or daydream.  Also bounce and make happy noises.  Pretty much this:

I belong to a multitude of fandoms, both literary and filmed, but today I'm going to limit myself to talking about my top ten book fandoms because, after all, this is my book blog.  And I have to draw the line somewhere, or we'd be here all summer.

1.  Sherlock Holmes

I'm a Sherlockian.  Or a Holmesian -- I'll answer to either :-)  I first started reading his stories in my early teens and have grown to love the canon dearly.  I also love Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes novels by Laurie R. King, the Granada Television show starring Jeremy Brett, and much of Sherlock.  But the canon is the best.

2.  Lord of the Rings

I came to LOTR backwards.  My college friends dragged me to the theater to see The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, and I bought a copy of the books that same week.  I've read the trilogy six times, and am calling 2017 My Year in Middle Earth because I'm reading it again, and digging into several other books about Tolkien or Middle Earth as well.

3.  Anne of Green Gables

I've been an Anne fan since one of my mom's friends introduced us to the books when I was probably seven or eight.  We watched the movies over and over as I was growing up, but I like the books best, especially Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of Windy Poplars, and Anne's House of Dreams.  I dream of visiting PEI one day.

4.  Raymond Chandler

My absolute favorite author.  I've read all his novels and short stories numerous times, and re-read one now and then just for the pure delight of soaking in his amazing descriptive power.  People ask me what my favorite Chandler novel is, and the truth is, I don't truly have one.  My favorite tends to be whichever one I read the most recently.

5.  William Shakespeare

This one's pretty obvious, given that I've taken my blogging name from one of his plays.  I love Hamlet the most, and also Much Ado About Nothing and Taming of the Shrew, but I get a lot of joy from many of his works.

6.  Jane Austen

Ahh, the divine Jane.  I prefer being called an Austenite rather than a Janeite, but either way, I'm a fan.  She makes me laugh, she makes me think -- it's all good.  I love Persuasion the most <3

7.  Nero Wolfe

I came to Rex Stout's mystery series backwards too -- first, I started watching the A&E series starring Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin and Maury Chaykin as Nero Wolfe, then I found some of the books at the library and tried them.  How I love those books!  They're my bookish version of comfort food.

8.  Robin Hood

I've been a fan of Robin Hood in books and on film since I was very tiny.  It started with the Disney read-along book that came with a record, which I totally still have -- my kids listen to it now.  I've had to tape the cover of the book back on like three times.  Then I progressed to the Great Illustrated Classics version, which I wore out.  Except the last chapter.  I never read the last chapter in any Robin Hood retelling that is going to involve Robin Hood d-y-i-n-g.  If I don't read it, it doesn't happen.  Just the fact that the chapter is titled "The Death of Robin Hood" or something equally dismal doesn't make it so, as long as I don't read it.  My favorite book version so far is definitely Howard Pyle's, which delights me to no end.

9.  Harry Potter

Yup, I'm a Potterhead.  (Is that still what HP fans get called?)  My favorite characters are Sirius Black, Severus Snape, and Ron Weasley.  My favorite book is Prisoner of Azkaban.  I like some of the movies too.

10.  Jack Aubrey & Stephen Maturin

I read all 20 of Patrick O'Brian's naval novels more than a decade ago, before there was a movie, and I have been itching to re-read them.  Maybe I'll dedicate the next two years to them or something.  I love hanging out with those characters!

Mini March Reading Tag -- Summary

You may recall me posting briefly about this event.  I decided just to do one summary post at the end of the month about what I read for each author, since I didn't read anything new or big.

For Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I read "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," both of which are in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.  I'm teaching ninth-grade literature and creative writing to our oldest niece, and those were both things I assigned to her.

For William Shakespeare, I read the first two acts of Hamlet.  I meant to read the whole thing, but children and life intervened.  

For J.R.R. Tolkien, I finished a chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring today.  I'm considering suspending my LOTR read for right now because I might be teaching it to my niece next fall, and I don't know that I have time to read it twice in one year.  Which isn't me giving up on My Year in Middle Earth, just sort of splitting it up.  I won't decide until I've discussed the idea with my in-laws and niece.  She loves fantasy and hasn't read it, and I think it would be an excellent way to teach things like theme and world-building and foreshadowing and... we shall see!

Anyway, my thanks to Joseph at The Once Lost Wanderer for setting up this mini reading challenge!  Without it, I wouldn't have dipped into Hamlet this month, I'm sure.

"J.R.R. Tolkien: The Mind of a Genius"

I picked up this magazine at Toys 'R Us last week.  It's pretty nifty -- lots of lovely pictures and interesting text.  it's divided into three sections:  Creating Middle-Earth, Exploring Middle-Earth, and Celebrating Middle-Earth.

Creating Middle-Earth tells all about how Tolkien came up with the idea for his fantasy world, drawing on his love of myths and languages, his wartime experiences, and his dissatisfaction with modern fantasy stories at the time.

Exploring Middle-Earth had lots of maps and some timelines.  I especially liked the timelines, as sometimes I get a bit lost as to what events happened in which age and so on.  I suspect that I will be referring to those from time to time.

Celebrating Middle-Earth is about how popular Tolkien's fiction still is, the adaptations people have made, and so on.  
I have only one quibble with this magazine/compilation/thing, and that's about this sentence from page 41:  "In Middle-earth's version of the Big Bang, the 'Music of the Ainur' created the physical universe."  Um, no... pretty sure that's the Middle-earth version of the creation story from the Bible.  In the Bible, God speaks the world into existence, and in The Silmarillion, Illuvatar sings it into existence, and the Ainur embellish on his work.  The magazine/compilation/thing earlier talked about Tolkien's Catholicism and how it informed his fiction, so I was pretty disappointed in the obvious mistake here.  But it's one sentence out of 90+ pages, not enough to make me recommend avoiding this if you're a Tolkien fan.  Don't avoid it!  It's a fun and pretty collection, and like I said, I'm sure I will be referring back to it.

2017 Reading Plans

You know I usually have some kind of reading goal for the year.  For 2016, it was My Year with Anne, where I wanted to read all the Anne of Green Gables books.  Went pretty fabulously.  In 2015, it was My Year with Robin Hood.  Kinda crashed and burned.  It happens.  

I've been tossing around a few ideas for 2017, and nothing really felt right until I found that one of my newer blogging acquaintances, Risa, is planning a very relaxed re-read of The Lord of the Rings.  I haven't reread that since I led my very first read-along, which was three years ago.  Gack!  I need to read it again!  So I'm doing that with her.  Calling it My Year in Middle Earth, as I hope to read a couple other things set there as well, like those short stories I've never read yet (such as "Farmer Giles of Ham").  Never know, I might even try some of the History of Middle Earth books or reread The Hobbit as well.

And also, my TBR shelves are scary right now.  So I'm going to do the Mount TBR Challenge (hosted by My Reader's Block) again in 2017.  I did it back in 2014 and really liked how it helped me get through some of the books I already owned, so I'm signing up again!  I'm aiming for Pike's Peak, which means reading 12 books already on my TBR shelves before January 1, 2017.  Not making a list for this, just reading as the book vibes move me, as usual.  Who knows -- I might get ambitious and aim for Mount Blanc and 24 books instead!  We shall see.

I think that's enough reading challenges and plans for me for 2017.  Besides my Classics Club list, of course.  Do you have any goals in mind already?  Or are you not a fan of challenges and so on?

This might be my last post before Christmas, so just in case it is... Merry Christmas!