I’ve just discovered a cool thing at Tor.com, the website of the SF/fantasy publisher: blogs devoted to chapter-by-chapter re-readings of classic fantasy works. There’s one on The Lord of the Rings and one on Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. The idea tends to be a little better than the execution, which is sometimes rather mechanical — too much time devoted to plot summary of each chapter — but I think this is great all the same. In fact, I think I may do something of the kind myself in the not-too-distant future — perhaps working off one of my classes. It’s interesting — well, it’s interesting to me, anyway — to see how my responses to books I often teach have changed over the years after many re-readings and many classroom conversations. Maybe that would be worth recording.
I found that Lord of the Rings re-reading pretty interesting, and the discussion in the comments section is very high quality.
What a great way to get the gist of the Wheel of Time series without having to actually wade through every tombstone-sized–er–tome! I did read one. Once.