By coincidence I also finished The Fellowship of the Ring about two weeks ago.
I have always had the intuition about reading speed that it is very easy to be a speed reader if you skim over things. I've always questioned how much of speed reading is just skipping stuff and filtering for the most important word tokens.
You could skip all of Tolkien's scenery descriptions, you could skip Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien and still know basically what happened to Frodo and where he's going. But that's not really the point. When I read a book of that much importance, I've always read every word and understood every sentence. I get easily distracted and often have to reread passages. I am not a fast reader. Tolkien's descriptions are not always that easy. But this is what I find so rewarding about reading in the first place.
However, when I'm reading an article online, the difference is stark. When I read articles, I usually start from the bottom and read backwards. That's my way of finding out the results, and then piecing together how much context I actually need to understand it. Maybe I should slow that down sometimes.
Although people think LoTR as a novel meant for younger people, it certainly is not an Tolkien never meant it that way and it certainly is not an easy text. It is far more complex than any fantasy I have ever come across. Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring. One would be mad to simply skim it through.
> Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring.
If you want to see it then way Tolkien saw it, probably the best way is to get through all that unimportant stuff involving rings and battles as quickly as possible to get to the appendices where Tolkein spent his time thinking about the history and etymology and even neat little details like how the calendar worked in the Shire...
Reminds me of an ah-ha! moment I had as a kid playing a text adventure game on my C64. I was stuck for a while and tried to find alternative ways forwards. I typed in "cheat" and it replied "OK, you win!" and ended the game.
This is also possible in the first and second Monkey Island games, using hotkeys ctrl+W or maybe alt+W.
The cheat code will immediately end your game while informing you that you scored 800 of 800 points (presumably a Sierra reference; this is the only way to score any number - including zero - of points).
There's no particular reason you'd discover this while playing either game, but if you play the third one, a mandatory plot point will show the message "You lose. You scored 0 of 800 points," referring back to the obscure joke in the earlier games.
One might also argue that The Little Prince is "far more complex" and deeper than anything written at a typical adult reading level. That lower linguistic surface complexity allows more space for the reader to explore ideas and themes.
I'm skeptical. Is there no more value to series like Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse, beyond mere literary masochism, compared to LotR? Like them or not, LotR, as elaborate as its mythology is (if you include Silmarillion and some or all of the History of Middle Earth), is not at the same level.
One would like to point out that the set {Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse} is not a subset of {fantasy books I have come across}. I would not dare to claim that LoTR is the end all of all fantasy writing. Perhaps the word ”complex” was a bad choice here, since I’m sure there is books with more complex structure (which is not necessarily a good thing…)
I think what I tried to say is that the language Tolkien uses is as much or more part of the middle earth as are the characters, maps and whatnot. The obvious point is that he created whole new languages and writing systems for the book, basing the two Elvish languages on Finnish and Welsh etc. Other is that he changes his vocabulary depending on what he is describing. I am not a linguistic scholar, but I’m fairly vertain that at least in Two Towers the parts describing nature, forrests and whatnot use solely words that are celtic in origin, ie. no Latin influence and very old. There’s also structural techniques of interwoven plots that I can’t even start to unwind.
Point being, you can very much read the book on surface level as Frodo and the Ring and Swords and lah-di-daa and that is all fine. That’s how I read it when I was 12-13. But there is so much more, mastery of English language comparable only to Cormac McCarthy and Joyce… Here Tolkien is very much a singular writer, escaping the limits of genre he very much was essential in creating.
So no wonder it is perhaps the most influential book of the 20th century.
I've read that Tolkien wrote There and Back Again / The Hobbit as a book for his children. Then he started writing what would become The Fellowship of The Ring for his kids, but he quickly realized that the story was taking many dark turns and that he was best served by moving away from writing it as a book for his kids.
I think both ways of reading are fine. Sometimes you just want to get on with the plot, other times you want to immerse yourself. Or maybe you always just want to get on with the plot, which is fine, just don't complain about the book being boring, it just wasn't for you. Which is how I feel about Lotr. But at the same time, rushing over the songs, boring parts with Tom etc is also how I managed to make it work for me.
I've been reading "Terminal Alliance", a light, humorous s.f. novel. After reading tfa I've slowed down and after all it's Christmas holidays, what's the rush? Even reading this inconsequential novel more slowly has allowed me to enjoy the details more. The metric in online discussions is always how many books you read, but this is a reminder that that's not the point.
The title, about "default settings" being "too high" makes me want an example from a technical domain, though.
Imagine if Tolkien was writing Fellowship last decade, and the book landed on your hands today. No decades of cult growing, no adaptations or explosive marketing, some word of mouth. Would you think it "much important" before reading it? What makes the importance?
In my opinion it's the prose. It's always the prose. Always gotta be on the lookout for good writers, new and old.
I thought I was crazy for reading articles backwards, but it really does help to build a better picture of what's being shared or reported.
I find that a lot of journalists like to pack their writing with fluff before they even reach the subject of the headline, a lot like recipe blogs sharing their life stories before finally reaching the instructions, as if the recipe is only secondary or tertiary to the background given.
This is why I appreciate articles that include bullet points or a TL;DR right at the beginning to summarize. For anything really long that I'm just not interested in reading fully and only want the main points, I use an LLM with the URL to summarize briefly.
While there's so much value in slowing down as the OP wrote, I feel as if journalists want you to lend the same pace to them for all the time of ours they waste. It's like they forget how much information is available to us and how unimportant it all is.
I have always had the intuition about reading speed that it is very easy to be a speed reader if you skim over things. I've always questioned how much of speed reading is just skipping stuff and filtering for the most important word tokens.
You could skip all of Tolkien's scenery descriptions, you could skip Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien and still know basically what happened to Frodo and where he's going. But that's not really the point. When I read a book of that much importance, I've always read every word and understood every sentence. I get easily distracted and often have to reread passages. I am not a fast reader. Tolkien's descriptions are not always that easy. But this is what I find so rewarding about reading in the first place.
However, when I'm reading an article online, the difference is stark. When I read articles, I usually start from the bottom and read backwards. That's my way of finding out the results, and then piecing together how much context I actually need to understand it. Maybe I should slow that down sometimes.