Now That’s What I Call Self-Control
December 29th, 2003
Reading a New York Times article about the pre-Christmas screenings of Peter Jackson’s trilogy, I came across this comment from one of the fans in the queue:
Mike Schneider, a 17-year-old who, along with a friend, had taken the bus in from Westchester, recalled being 11 when he first read Tolkien. “I’ve read the trilogy five times,” he said, “but never the last 50 pages so I still have something to look forward to.”
I don’t know whether to admire his self-control at having held back from finding out how the story ends until he could see it on the big screen, or to be aghast that he’s made his way through three longish novels five times but never quite finished the job.
[Via rec.arts.sf.written]
December 30th, 2003 at 2:14 pm
The bulk of the story, including the fate of the Ring, is over well before 50 pages before the end.
December 30th, 2003 at 5:17 pm
True, but there’s still some resolution of the fates of the various characters to come at that point. It’s not so much the specifics of what exactly he’d missed that’s the issue, more the idea that someone could slog through a thousand or so pages and then, knowing that the author still had umpteen pages of the story to tell, stop dead.
I’d love to know what he thought of the end of the story as seen on-screen.