If you’re a true geek, it won’t matter which you read/watch first since you’ll re-watch and re-read them both several times!
I’d say read the books first, if you are pretty sure you are going to read them eventually. I loved the experience of seeing PJ bring the books to life. He did a fantastic job, and you might miss that if you watch the films first. After being so often disappointed with film adaptations of books, it was so nice to be pleasantly surprised for once. Purists will tell PJ altered the books to much, but none of his pertains bothered me at all. Even
At my daughter’s wedding last month, she had a poem read from the Fellowship (I sit beside the fire and think…). It was a lovely sentiment – except that all I could think of was the Bored of the Rings version (I sit on the floor and pick my nose…)
The books are told almost entirely from the perspective of hobbits, little people who haven’t been out of their corner of the world and don’t know much about what’s going on until they learn it or experience it along with the reader, so I think they’re pretty easy to follow. The movies start by showing some back story that the books only explain later, which works pretty well; but I’m not a fan of starting a work of fiction with a Prologue. On the other hand, the books start out slowly; it takes a while before the action really gets going.
In fact, if you want constant action and forward movement, the books may frustrate you: they alternate periods of exciting action with periods of rest and recuperation or preparation or discussion or relatively uneventful travelling through scenery. Which is like life; it’s all a realistic part of what the book describes and its characters experience. Tolkien has the difficult task of letting you, the reader, feel the passage of time and the length of the journey without boring you, and IMHO he succeeds much better than many authors could, but still, there are plenty of places where you could get bogged down.
I pretty much agree with this. Read the books, then see them brought to life.
Oh, and as for Jackson’s Hobbit movies: take the advice to avoid them with a grain of salt. They’re not essential viewing; they’re not a faithful rendering of the book; and they certainly shouldn’t be your introduction to Middle Earth. But they (especially the first one) have a lot of good things in them—as well as a lot of faults and justified criticisms and complaints. And many of these (the good things and the flaws) come from how much effort and ambition got put into making them.
If you get to the point where you’ve read and re-read Lord of the Rings about five or ten times, then read Bored of the Rings. For anyone other than hardcore fans, though, it won’t be very funny.
And one of the things that made the movies so good was that Jackson included a lot of tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them details that only the hardcore fans would even notice. So you’ll get a lot more out of the movies if you’re already at that stage. Though realistically, it’s probably not fair to expect a newcomer to read enough to reach that stage (at least The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales) before watching the movies.
I was dragged tot he first Hobbit movie, and was actually pleasantly surprised: It was OK. I expected it to be a disaster, but it was OK. The other two were almost unwatchable. Read The Hobbit if you must, but forget about the movies. Just keep in mind that *The Hobbit *is really, really, really written as a Children’s book. If you have any appreciation for linguistics, you’ll really enjoy LorR. The author was, at his core, a linguist.
I read the book out loud as bedtime reading when my son was seven. He loved listening to it. He came away with his own mental images of the scenes and characters, which Hollywood could never match. He could even draw vivid pictures from the story.
I would say watch the movies first, in almost every case; movies often disappoint readers by what they leave out, while books offer new insights and elaborations to the tale.
And for goodness’ sake, watch the Extended Editions!!
P.S. Just noticed that in that thread, I mentioned I’m not a fantasy fan. A year later I wrote my first fantasy novel. My new career is thanks to these films!
P.P.S. Re-reading the responses I received, almost everyone was enthusiastic and encouraging about my watching the films without having yet read the books. Interesting the difference in advice between these two threads!
ACK. Damn it, sorry for triple posting, but I want to say, if you do read the thread I linked to:
DON’T READ PAST POST #48!
Because once I see it, I start asking a fuckton of questions about things I wasn’t clear about (I’m rather embarrassed how poorly I understood the first film) and it’s spoilers ahoy. Sorry about that!
As a shallow note, it’s amusing though that at the beginning I thought I wouldn’t find any of the guys attractive. Because once the second film introduced a certain character, I was well and truly infatuated (still am) by the actor and the character.
They posed different questions for different circumstances. Yours asked, “I’ve never read LOTR. Will I like the movie(s)?” and stipulated, “I’m not motivated enough to read the books.” This one asks, “Assuming I read the books eventually … would people who have enjoyed both the books and the movies recommend that I read the books first, or watch the movies first?”
True, the threads came at it from different angles, but my thread drifted soon after my OP. (I don’t think I said I never planned on reading the books, did I come across that way? At the time I was just itchy to see the films so I could join the 21st century zeitgeist already.)
Still, the majority of responses were basically saying they’d recommend I see the movies first, it’d be easier to enjoy them as their own entity and then read the books for the full impact. Many said reading the books first led to their being irked by what Jackson left out.
(One person said that s/he’d started to read the books, got confused and stopped. Then s/he saw the films and was able to return to the books able to distinguish the characters and other names much more clearly. So the films actually helped clarify stuff for a reader who’d given up.)
That’s what I took from those recommendations, anyway. If you’re going to do both, see the films, then read the book.
Years ago I practically had Bored of the Rings memorized. After a while, I started reading the Hobbit and intended to continue reading the entire trilogy. But I couldn’t take the originals seriously after BotR, so I lost interest in the series. I sort of got dragged into seeing the 2nd movie once, but I wasn’t interested in it. And I think I caught the beginning of the 1st movie on TV once. I didn’t stick around to see the whole movie.
So, I can’t speak for LotR specifically, but I will say that whenever I’ve read the book BEFORE I see the movie, I end up pretty disappointed in the movie. Because there’s no way you can put a 400 page paperback novel in a 90-120 minute film without omitting a LOT. On the other hand, if I see the movie first and then read the book, since I know how it ends, I tend to take my time and enjoy the stuff the movie left out.
Trust me, if you’ve read Dune, you will regret watching the movie.
You said: “I’m not motivated enough to read the books”, as Peremensoe said. It was direct quote.
The way you posed the question is likely to bias the number or responses towards those who did not read the books, since they are more likely to know if you can enjoy the movie without reading the books. So, I’m with Peremensoe– it was a different question and elicited different responses.
