Books & Authors

Posts about books I love, authors I admire, and so on

J.R.R. Tolkien, Hobbits, and BEER

Originally published on Celebrating the Suds, September 23, 2011 So, J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Yeah yeah yeah, I know what you’re thinking. “This is a beer blog. Why the hell are you posting about the dude who wrote about elves and hobbits and all that?” I’m doing it because Tolkien and beer go together like me and Kate Beckinsale. (Just go with me on this, please.) Tolkien loved his beer, something reflected in his fiction by way of the Hobbits’ passion for a pint and the way in which a good pub is shown to be central to finding true contentment. Throughout The Lord of the Rings, for example, Merry, Pippin and Sam are forever looking for…
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Love Books? Build Your Own Little Library

Contributed Post Libraries are a staple of life. We used them during elementary school days, having lessons inside them with interactive elements. We used them during high school, to try and get our heads down for studying away from distracting things like having a social life. We used them for the same reasons during the college days, and we might have even felt like we lived in one. And as adults, we go back to them for a sense of nostalgia, and to borrow a book we don’t feel like buying every now and then. But it still feels like the need for a library is in decline, and more and more of them around the globe are being shut up because of people’s immediate…
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That time I wasted my life editing together a ‘new’ J.R.R. Tolkien book, then lost it

The recent announcement of a ‘new’ book by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Gondolin, which will compile previously published material about one of the great tragic epics of Middle Earth’s early days, brought to mind a few weeks of wasted life circa 2002 or so. It’s a waste that still frustrates me to this day. Years ago, I got this idiotic idea in my head to edit together a load of Tolkien stuff into a standalone book. There was a wealth of material about a character called Turin, a cursed man who goes through some truly awful stuff, up to and including accidental incest and the death of just about everyone and everything he comes in contact with. Yes, it’s a real joy! Turin’s story…
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How Ursula K. Le Guin helped inspire me to see people in a different way

As I write this, the news is breaking that Ursula Le Guin, one of the 20th Century’s great novelists, has passed away at 88. She was a giant, known for her work in science fiction yet crafting works that transcended the genre. Whenever I’ve thought of the authors who have inspired me, awed me, impressed me, humbled me, shaped my tastes, molded my views, and made me see the power of the genre, she was always on the short list. It wasn’t the awards that made Le Guin great, though she got gobs of them. It wasn’t even that her stories were entertaining, though they were. It’s that she reinterpreted the world, showing us both how it truly is (even when we didn’t acknowledge it)…
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