My Quest to Mount Doom

I have been reading The Lord of the Rings to my dad again these holidays, and we are finally onto the last stretch - the final stages of Frodo and Sam's journey to Mount Doom.  I have enjoyed reading it so much, today, and time and time again I have been surprised and delighted by his cunningly selected words and images.  Paragraphs and pages worth of writing have burst out in my face with so much thrill and fullness.  I have been completely absorbed, and partaking eagerly of every second of my asborbtion.  I hand-picked a pair of ripe sentences for you that pricked me as I read them. 

Under the lifting skirts of the dreary canopy, dim light leaked into Mordor like pale morning through the grimed window of a prison. 

and

The torch, that was already burning low when he arrived, spluttered and went out; and he felt the darness cover him like a tide. 

The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien (published 1955). 

I bolded the part that made me shiver with glee.  Aren't they beautifully written?  It's subtle by so strong. 

It's pretty funny, actuallly, how absorbed I was this morning.  It was all we don't have enough water, they could afford only a nibble of lembas and take my rations Mr. Frodo because etcetera etcetera.  And I was so freakishly hungry and thirsty when we finally breaked for lunch that I could barely walk!  I'm amazed by how clever writing is.  It's an incredible thing.  Very incredible. 

By the way, I have begun to revise my catalogue of 'Dates of Birth and Death of Major Authors and Publication Dates of Major Literary Works Between 1500 and 2001'.  It is a spectacularly nerdy enterprise, but it is hugely interesting, because there are a lot of connections between things.  I also intend to start including the years in which film adaptions have been made.  And while doing all this, I've found that I really need to start compiling a catalogue of all the intertwining connections between books and authors - like I never knew that Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens wrote books together (short story The Haunted Mansion).  I mean, I knew Wilkie Collins published in Charles Dickens' magazine, but this fresh gossip is too juicy to forget in the future.  I've just so into it!

Oh, and lastly, I found out that 25th of May is 'Towel Day', celebrated by all Douglas Adams fans.  I know what I'm doing next year!