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Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

I need to re-read it. I probably finished the last book 20 years ago. Then I saw the films. And in the intervening years my opinion and attitude towards it, and the genre as a whole, has shifted toward the negative. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just from getting older.

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I get it. I was really into fantasy as a teenager, but now I'm on the wrong side of 35 and nonfiction is all I'm interested in. I feel like there is so much stuff that has happened in real life that fantasy seems hollow.

I’m old and tried re-reading it recently and the low number of female characters and voices is really jarring now. YMMV. There’s so much I haven’t yet read I just moved on.

As for the genre as a whole, here's Pratchett on considering fantasy "genre": https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/lvoi3t/the_late_si...

(I didn't quickly find a more readable form than the image uploaded to Reddit)

Maybe it helps you to reconsider.

It can certainly be an acquired (or reacquired) taste.

If you want a different type of Tolkien story - the children of Hurin is tragic as anything the Greeks wrote.

Have you read The Silmarillion, by chance? It gives a great deal of the background mythology of LOTR.

I got about 1/3 through it.

The last 2/3 of the book are the best part!

To give a sense of scale, the entire plot of the Hobbit and LOTR is given in at most 2 paragraphs of the entire Silmarillion.

I have to say it's massively unlikely that someone who read LOTR and disliked it would enjoy the Silmarillion.

I usually dump to the Children of Hurin first, because that's more "readable" - the Silmarillion is very Old Testament and takes some heavy archeology to get the stories out.

The audio book helps with this a lot imo. I prefer the original to the recent Andy Serkis recording, but both are great.

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