I’d seen the movies first, same as most people my age, and went into the actual books a little braced for them to feel like homework by comparison. They don’t, not exactly, but they are a genuinely different animal, slower, more digressive, willing to stop the plot cold for a chapter of songs about baths and walking-songs and history nobody strictly needs. I know the popular move is to skim those. I didn’t skim them. I’m not sorry.

Tom Bombadil is the fight everyone wants to have about this book and I’ll just say my piece: he shouldn’t work, a jolly immortal man who sings constantly and is completely unaffected by the Ring, and by any normal plot logic he should be cut, but there’s something about the way his section functions as this little pocket of untouched, pre-war world that I ended up finding weirdly moving on a second read, even while agreeing it’s the section most people would cut first. My favorite single word in the whole trilogy, for what it’s worth, is “eleventy-first,” which is doing an enormous amount of characterization for hobbit culture in one compound number.

The thing that actually surprised me, reading it as an adult rather than skimming toward the next battle the way I did at twelve, was how long the book keeps going after Sauron falls. There’s a whole Scouring of the Shire sequence, the hobbits coming home to find their own homeland occupied, that a lot of readers find unnecessary, a hundred pages after the “real” ending, and it’s genuinely one of my favorite stretches in the entire trilogy, the war following the characters home instead of staying safely elsewhere. I get why the films cut it. I think cutting it loses something real.

Five stars, no real hesitation, even with the descriptive passages that go on a paragraph or two longer than they need to and the near-total absence of women outside Galadriel and Eowyn, which is a real and fair complaint, not a minor one. It’s still the book every other fantasy trilogy is quietly in conversation with, whether it admits it or not.