confusionbeggs on books.
The second installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy picks up where the first left off, and follows the broken fellowship as they take separate paths to their goal of saving the world from the darkness of Mordor. This book is filled with more classic sword and sorcery fantasy, but continues the vivid creation of Middle Earth. New lands and new histories open up as the trilogy continues.
A readers pole a few years ago voted the Lord of the Rings trilogy the best books published in the past 100 years (meanwhile the editors picked James Joyce’s Ulysses, which having read I just don’t understand, but that’s another story.) This is the first installment of the Lord of the Rings, and my personal favorite of the series. The Fellowship is filled with the history of Middle Earth: it’s hero’s, it’s legends, it’s lands. It is all the stuff that is not important to the plot of the book that makes Middle Earth so memorable. Every little detail that Tolkien writes brings the land alive. You can read this one over and over again and find something new every time.
Only Homer and the Bible have had a comparable effect on western culture. Who cares if William Shakespeare or the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays, it’s the plays themselves that count. Timeless archetypes of humanity in universal situations. No education is complete without some Shakespeare, and I consider myself lucky to have been born into the English speaking world so I might enjoy the Bard’s plays and sonnets to their fullest in the original language. Though, of course, “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”
Shakespeare is my favorite author, I’ve read all the plays, all the sonnets and both long poems. I own three copies of his complete works. I like the Arden Shakespeare because they are as close to “the official Shakespeare” as you can get. They are the ones what poor over all the copies of the folios to come up with a copy of each play that is as close to the original as possible. They also include a massive amount of footnotes explaining word usage, allusions and historical notes to each play. Their individual books are also excellent.