In reading The Hobbit aloud to a hobbit-sized critical audience, new facets of the story make themselves clear to me:
1. The Dwarves get thirteen diffeIn reading The Hobbit aloud to a hobbit-sized critical audience, new facets of the story make themselves clear to me:
1. The Dwarves get thirteen different voices and none of them can be told apart except for Thorin (the tough one), Fili/Kili (the young ones), and Bombur (the fat one). 2. Tolkien's writing style is easy to read past with a dash of mental sepia, but his unique subject/object organization caused me to stumble aloud. These sentences really need to be parsed out if you're reading them to an audience! 3. Poor old fat Bombur really gets roasted! In a modern retelling, he would be on semaglutides and recognized instead for his buoyant and forgiving good nature. 4. Andy Serkis deserved however many awards he won for those movies, plus the Arkenstone; doing the Gollum voice for a whole chapter blasted the skin off my larynx....more
Another wonderful collection of viscera, weirdly beautiful at the reveal. Ballingrud's love of Barker shines through in the pilgrimages to hell and inAnother wonderful collection of viscera, weirdly beautiful at the reveal. Ballingrud's love of Barker shines through in the pilgrimages to hell and in the sleazy, ill feeling of New Orleans at two AM....more
I recommend this book! It's not one story, as I misunderstood from the blurb. I'm guilty of buying it without knowing what was in it because I loved PI recommend this book! It's not one story, as I misunderstood from the blurb. I'm guilty of buying it without knowing what was in it because I loved Pilgrim so much.
Weirdly, the title story was the weakest to me, the least creepy. There's a long fight scene among some characters we don't really care about, with no stakes because we don't care about them, after a leadup of beautiful doom. The following novellas do a better job of investing hopes in their narrators.
The day/night cycles that wheeled Pilgrim are again strong: in nearly all of these tales, you can expect the narrator to be safe in light and hunted in insane ways when the moon rises. L眉thi is either well-read or well-researched on each of the historical settings his narrators struggle to overcome, which fleshes out the story immensely. He does a wonderful job setting the stage.
Overall this is a fun, spooky read, carried by L眉thi's ability to create scenes. I'd recommend his Pilgrim first (it's really phenomenal) but His Black Tongue has a share of unnerving moments....more
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