I’ve heard about it, sounds super interesting. I’ll need to pick it up. You know, when libraries open again.
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I still haven’t made it through That Hideous Strength, to my shame. It’s a lot different than the other books, and the first several chapters are quite mundane. I’m told it picks up in the second half, though.
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Okay, so y’all like C.S. Lewis, but who has read Till We Have Faces?
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At least three of us 
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Mmmm good
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Yep. Read it for school. It was alright.
Just started reading The Children of Hurin, which is a lesser known Middle Earth book by Tolkien, set after the events of the LotR trilogy. Has anyone else here read it before?
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Yep! It’s one of my favorite books of his. I read it when it came out when I was in middle school, which may have been a bit too early lol, but I think I turned out alright anyway. XD Fwiw, maybe you mistyped, but it’s actually set about 6500 years before LotR. The story appears in much-abridged from in The Silmarillion.
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I started reading The Hobbit. For whatever reason I have not read anything LOTR related, only watched the movies. Liking the books so far.
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You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.
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Oh boy, you’re in for a ride.
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four! I do love retellings of myths. It was one of those, as with most CSL, that I feel like I need to read again (and again and again) to really get the layers of allegory (analogy?). But, the masterful part, I think, is that I don’t need to necessarily be a deep or analytical reader to be impacted by it.
I had a friend (dude friend) read it, and he was thoroughly unimpressed and was annoyed by Orual’s whininess about being ‘ugly’. I’m not sure if he (friend) was coming from a more feministic point of view, like ‘women don’t need to be pretty to get things done or be valued’, but I actually thought it was well-written and her character progression followed from the insecurity really logically. I also appreciated it because, although it’s a bit of an older book, it wasn’t pushing a more modern feminist agenda, which wouldn’t have fit in the pre-modern society of the story anyways. /tangent
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Well-said. You don’t need analyze layers of symbolism to understand it, but it also doesn’t feel as “in your face” as some of the Narnia books (not that I’m complaining about those!)
I completely agree about Orual. In a pre-modern society, realistically, women would be largely judged on their looks, so of course it would be rather upsetting to be ugly. Orual is also not exactly someone who lets her ugliness get in her way: she’s a very active protagonist and rather hard-headed to boot, quite a far cry from the stereotypically passive female characters Lewis included in some of his earlier books. (And yet, as you say, it doesn’t feel agenda-pushing, as the terms I used could make it sound.) Apparently Lewis’s wife, who was considered something of a “liberated woman” in 1950s terms, helped him to write her personality. I think the result is that Orual is arguably Lewis’s best-written character.
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Urgh, now I want to re-read it.
Have you (or anyone) read A Grief Observed, the one about his wife? Personally haven’t, but always like to hear others’ takeaways. It sounds like a really heavy book, emotionally, and I’m not sure I’m up for it anytime soon.
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I actually just read it a few months ago, after putting it off for a long time for similar reasons. It was certainly heavy, but it didn’t leave me as shaken as I expected it to–while it does show the depths of his grief, it also shows how he learned to cope. I’d say I felt it was cathartic.
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Lord of the Rings is an amazing world, and the movies are a very good way of stepping inside of it for a while. This is one of the few series where I would recommend either the movies or the books depending on what you want to get from them.
The movies are good enough to just watch by themselves, and still get the glorious story, the epic characters, and the legendary battles, but the are kind of like abridged versions of the book. Nice to get all of that, but there is so much more to the world that the movies don’t go into in order to avoid being ten hours long.
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I just started Fellowship of the Ring. If it seems a bit boring, I highly recommend the audiobook narrated by Rob Inglis. He does a fantastic job of giving each character their own identity and immersing you into the world of Middle Earth. Plus, the book adds a lot more to the story that’s left out of the movies for time reasons. 
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There is no good excuse for removing Tom Bombadil.
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I thought this said Toa Bombardier at first
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