kind of meh, still good though

This is a varied and sometimes fascinating collection of essays by writers about their encounters with J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle Earth. Numerous writers credit Tolkien with opening the market for modern fantasy novels. Many, including Robin Hobb and Lisa Goldstein, report that their first reacton upon completing LOTR was to look around for more of the same. Others say that they immediately sat down to write something like LOTR. Many remembered the circumstances of their first encounter with Tolk...

An interesting compilation of essays that explore J. R. R. Tolkien's impact on the literary world, such as: the scale of his world-building, the rhythm of his prose, and his influence on modern writers and readers. Some are quite repetitive––it seems as though every author writing here has a similar story about discovering (and being transformed by) The Lord of the Rings in the 1960s. And the essays are quite dated by this point, as they were written around 2000/2001, before the first Peter Jack...

Originally written on 8.30.06 on www.sffworld.com.blog/779.html I did sometyhing illogical for me a few hours ago. I read an essay while engrossed in a novel. I don’t do things like that. It requires too much concentration for me, especially just reading any essay. But maybe, just maybe, I’m evolving. I put down ‘Clan of the Cave Bear’ by Jean M. Auel to read ’How Tolkein means’ by Orson Scott Card. Maybe I had a hair up my butt, but I just felt it had to be read. No time like the present. And I...

A series of essays on Tolkien.The commonest one was "the impact The Lord of the Rings had on my life and writing". A lot of them picked it up in the 60s or 70s when, really, there wasn't that much fantasy about. Terry Pratchett actually got pointed at Beowulf when he asked for more books like it -- fortunately he noticed books that had guys with helmets on theri covers and dived in. (That shelf was marked History, BTW.) One discussed Bored of the Rings and how it taught her the comic effect. One...

Some of the authors' insights were completely new and scarily clever, but it was mostly what I've already know - Tolkien was a genius.

An eclectic mix of essays on Tolkien by a gaggle of authors. Some are dry and technical, some are critical or ambivalent, but the majority are early converts, people who, like myself, found Tolkien at a key time of their late childhood or young adulthood, as did I. We were fortunate enough to be exposed to The Hobbit in English class, and, for a small group of us at least, it changed our lives, and dominated our teens.It's over 25 years since I read LOTR, so I have a certain nostalgia about Tolk...

An anthology of essays by authors – mostly well-known – who recall their introduction to Middle Earth and/or give their own view on the subject, or an aspect of the subject.As in all anthologies some of the efforts are more successful, and/or more in my taste. I found that the writers I like were generally better and more interesting, and the obverse. Raymond Feist, for example, says: "[Frodo], along with Sam, Meriadoc, and Pippin, were willing to brave tribulations that the larger, more 'classi...

This book is a mixed bag of other author's thoughts about Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Some of them credit Tolkien with turning them into authors and recount their first meeting with his books. I enjoyed what one reviewer called the "tree house/school bus/fishing hole" essays the most. I didn't experience anything like they did so this was new to me. Other authors wrote critical essays. I wish they hadn't, or at least that I hadn't tried to read them through. Although I have read and enjoyed...

Interesting for the Rings fans among us....

Some of the essays are close to five-star, others are one-star, so my three star rating is an average of the seventeen essays compiled in this anthology.I would recommend this book if you are are one of those people who loved Lord of the Rings and then tried to find other books like it (the essays will all tell you that you will never find another book like it, but there are quite a lot of credible recommendations for older fantasy works written pre-Tolkien, and warnings to approach with caution...

I am always interested in essays authors write about their influences. I also liked the small section "About The Authors" in the back of the book that put together a small list of some of the works they are known for.

An outstanding and wide-ranging anthology of essays concerning Tolkien's work and how it impacted the lives of several top fantasy writers. It did strike me as a bit dated (being published in 2001), with several authors describing their first encounters with Tolkien's work, most of them in the 1950s or 1960s, when life was quite different than the way it is now. (Disclosure: I myself am a child of the 1970s, not much had changed then, so the essays really echoed my own first encounters with Tolk...

Not very interesting observations on the Middle Earth cycle.

Thought I had already read this - had it for a long time, but looking it over discovered I hadn't.These are essays written by authors/illustrators for whom the discovery and reading of Lord of the Rings changed their lives and opened up new worlds to them. Edith Friesner's essay was a wonderful read - I laughed most of the way through it. Raymond Feist's was also quite good. I enjoyed the interview with the Hildebrandt brothers on their experience and their calendars. Ursula Le Guin's was an int...

It was interesting to read this book not only because of the anecdotes and points of view of each author but because it's like we are from different times. This book was published on 2001 (when I was 3 years old) and that same year Peter Jackson's movies were released. For these authors, their youth as the youth of their sons were marked with the book written by Tolkien, while in my childhood I grew up no reading The Hobbit, or There and Back Again or The Lord of the Rings : I grew up watching t...

Some of the essays are quite fun. The one by Ursula le Guin in particular which examined the rhythm of Tolkien's writing.... almost like Hebrew poetry which rhymes in "thought and idea" and not in sound.

"Frodo travels through Middle-earth like some kind of God-sent integrity test. The wise, if they were truly so, upon seeing that he had come to visit, would shriek, 'Oh, no! It's that fucking hobbit! I'm not in!' and slam the door in his face. Here is the true purpose . . . not to destroy the source of power but to test all of creation and decide whether it is worthy of continuance."Some of the essays were really good, and some were kind of dull, but if you're a fan, the collection is definitely...

I really enjoyed this one! There were a couple essays I did not fully read as I couldn't stand the authors' writing styles, but there were a couple other ones that spoke deeply to my soul and I thoroughly enjoyed. This book was also very insightful to the impact Lord of the Rings had when it first came out. A lot of authors also mentioned Tolkien's essay 'On Fairy-stories', which I now desperately want to read.

This was a fantastic collection of essays by some amazing authors in the speculative fields writing about their experiences with Tolkien’s works. As is always the case with these sorts of books, some essays were stronger than others, but I felt those that were strong were very strong. It’s always fun reading about how others discovered Tolkien, and even more so how that might have influenced their lives as they went on to become best-selling authors in their own right. And scattered through the