The Fellowship of the Ring

I've seen all the movies and I thought “It's about time to read the books, maybe the Hobbit as well.”

So.

When they say this book is slow-paced. Believe them. It might just be that I don't like slow-paced books but it got downright excruciating to read this book at times. Most of the time with a book this size I can finish it in 2, maybe 3 days depending on time and motivation. It took me two weeks to finish this because I would read one, maybe two chapters before I got bored or my attention was taken by something else because practically NOTHING happens in this book. I can count the number of interesting/action scenes on one hand. The other 80% of the book is long, slightly confusing descriptions of scenery or paragraphs on paragraphs of traveling drudgery, which is another pet peeve of mine in books. I can't stand long descriptions of traveling that serve no real purpose.

The interesting/action scenes were fine, but I honestly don't know how much I would have liked them if I hadn't already seen them happen in the movies. They definitely didn't make up for the rest of the book, which I had to start treating like required reading just to finish. I'll admit that in the last ~60 pages I started skimming because I just wanted to be done.

I was pretty disappointed in this book. If it was just a random fantasy book I probably would've DNFed about 25% through, but I pushed on so I could at least say I read the first book in this series, because it's looking highly unlikely that I'll finish the trilogy itself, let alone read The Hobbit or The Silmarillion like my best friend wants me to.

There were some parts that I liked. Sam and Frodo got a lot more personality in the books, but it also felt like as a result, the rest of the Fellowship got drained of their personalities? Except for Gandalf, Frodo, and Sam, the rest of the Company just blurred together for me. I couldn't individually pick out who was saying what before a dialogue tag because they all had the same voice, so to speak. The movies fleshed them out much more, I feel.

Overall, disappointing. I rated it a little higher than I wanted for nostalgia but I still did not enjoy this book.