How did your homework from Writing Roundup #5 go? Have you learned anything interesting? I've had a killer writing month (in a good way), but we can get into that later.

Today’s post is going to be two separate but related reviews of Ella Enchanted and Fairest by Gail Carson Levine, but first I want to tell you all about a recent-ish trip to the doctor. It’s totally connected—pinky swear. If you want to skip this, head down to the Ella Enchanted header.

I started reading and reviewing The Chronicles of Narnia books individually, but later I realized how silly that is for a series with this many short books.  So instead of continuing to review one book at a time, I’m going to tackle the series overall today. Wish me luck.

I hope you guys are ready for some homework. After a break of nearly two months, I certainly am. There’s been a shakeup in the categories with “grammar” changing into “technical stuff” and we’re starting all new resources for that category. Exciting! But now I’m getting ahead of myself.

Seven of the fourteen boxes of books we've packed thus far. We still need to pack a couple more.

My review post buffer is also completely depleted from Camp NaNoWriMo and some medical issues I had last month. I have still been reading, however, so when I come back in September I should have some series reviews/wrap-ups and other fun stuff ready to go.

Our next Eclectic Writing Class post will be on September 11th. I've decided that our new grammar/technical stuff resource will be William Strunk's The Elements of Style. I have a third edition with revisions and additions by E.B. White. You shouldn't need my exact edition to follow along with most of it, especially at first, but that is the one I'm going to reference so it might be worth picking up a third or fourth edition rather than downloading the original public domain book for free.

Three Month Goals Update

Family/Romantic:

I’m still going on dates with my husband on Sunday afternoons and/or Saturdays. Our five-year wedding anniversary was in June. In lieu of going on vacation, we have decided to go hiking several times this summer. We’ve been on a couple already, but we need to hike in national forests at least seven different days to make our annual Northwest Forest Pass worth it. The goal is to do that before it expires next year, and state parks don’t count because they have a separate fee system. I felt kind of stupid when I figured that out after I bought the pass.

I hope you finished your homework from Writing Roundup #2 because today we get a whole new set of assignments. If you're new to the class, I recommend checking out the Eclectic Writing Class post hub for explanations on the categories and links to the earlier lessons.

The complete BBC Radio Broadcast of The Lord of the Rings, written by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell, aired on BBC Radio 4 from March to August 1981. There were 26 half-hour episodes.

Today’s post will focus on the portion of the story considered equivalent to The Fellowship of the Ring.

Description

It’s been a month. How did you do on your homework from Writing Roundup #1?

Several months ago I decided to reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It had been a few years since I last read The Hobbit, and maybe 8-10 since I read LOTR. My memory of the details was getting rusty, and since so many writing websites take their examples from books I haven’t read or movies I haven’t seen, regrounding myself in one of the few popular stories I have read seemed like a good idea.

Now, I don’t have much time to sit down and read, so even though I have all of the books in paperback, my first thought was “I’ll borrow the audiobooks from the library.”

This is where I made a mistake. Instead of looking them up on my library’s website, I looked them up in Overdrive. My library service had access to two versions of each title, a BBC dramatization, and an American dramatization. I placed holds the BBC versions, because Tolkien was English, and English accents are awesome.

So I waited. And waited. And waited. In the meantime, I came up with the idea to write book reviews for this blog. I read The Three Musketeers and The Silmarillion. I wrote their reviews.

When I finally got The Hobbit, it was awesome. It also wasn’t an audiobook. Instead, I had checked out a radio broadcast adaptation, which simply would not do. These are supposed to be book reviews, damn it! But in the end, I thought the broadcast was worth writing about too. So I finished the broadcast, took some notes, and then read my paperback.

Any time I start The Lord of the Rings, I feel obligated to read the whole trilogy—which is why I’ve only read it once in its entirety. Not so with The Hobbit. I can read one book and then move on to something else. It isn’t as big of a commitment, and I appreciate that. This is at least my third time reading it, maybe my fourth or fifth—I don’t remember.

I used to tell people interested in The Lord of the Rings to check out The Hobbit first, but as I’ve been rereading the books this time, I realize that LOTR and The Hobbit have some important differences that could make them appeal to different people. Today I’m going to get into some of the features of The Hobbit, who might like it, and who would do better to go straight to LOTR.

Why I Read The Silmarillion:

A little over a year ago, I nagged a friend into giving me a book recommendation. He chose Dies the Fire, the first in S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse series.

So what does that have to do with The Silmarillion?

The series has tons of winks for Tolkien nerds, but my favorite is an eccentric girl named Astrid Larson. At age thirteen, she was already an archer and spoke fluent Sindarin. Traumatic events in the story drive her mind deeper into Middle-earth as a coping mechanism. Basically, everything goes to hell, and she goes bonkers. When they're rebuilding society after the Change, Astrid creates her own mercenary mini-country, the Dúnedain Rangers, where new recruits must learn both Sindarin and sign language. Throughout most of the books I read, Astrid is an entertaining major side character with a religious fanaticism for all things Middle-Earth. To a certain extent, I read The Silmarillion because I wanted to hang out with her just a little longer.

Also, my brother has read The Silmarillion—and he doesn’t read! That’s kind of embarrassing for me as a person who writes high fantasy novels.