Get Lost . . .
. . . and save yourself
For reasons obvious to those of us who wake up shaking our heads to yesterday’s news and brace ourselves for what’s to come, I wanted to leap into the pages of a good book this summer and lose myself. Not just silly summer reading—but an expedition deep into the forests of fantasy and fiction.
I didn’t have to look far.
Among the various titles in our bookshelves of knowledge and whimsy stood the full (and I mean full) version of J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I bought it 20 years or so ago as a special combo with the extended edition of Peter Jackson’s masterpiece movies, which I voraciously consumed after I finished the book. This edition came with folded maps on both ends that you can refer to as you follow Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gangee and their Middle Earth adventure from The Shire to Mordor.
I fully intended to read the book back then when Lord of the Rings was a hot ticket at the theater but never got around to it. Oh, I tried—twice--but didn’t get far enough to warrant commitment. It’s not a light read. Focus is essential in the journey through Tolkien’s Middle Earth. And it’s beautifully written.
But then came 2025 with all of its “beautiful” and surreal wrappings. It was time to temporarily protect my mental health.
The version of the book I read, without its voluminous appendices, is 1,031 pages (longer than Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” but a bit shorter than The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich). A heavy lift, both literally and figuratively. I actually wished someone had invented a device to hold the book in front of me without straining to hold on to it. It weighs as much as a sack of supermarket Idaho potatoes—about 5 pounds or so. With its appendices, it’s 1,138 pages long.
Though reams have been written about the book’s meaning, Tolkien, who actually served in the British army during WW I, repeatedly denied parallels to his real world (it was written between 1937 and 1949 and published in three parts in 1954 and 1955). It’s said that Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, the prequel to the Lord of the Rings as a bedtime story for his daughters and then the 3 books of Lord of the Rings at the urging of his publisher.
Tolkien, despite his several illnesses, was a master linguist and prolific storyteller. Though there are only about 30 main characters in Lord of the Rings, Tolkien invented close to 1,000 of them across all his writings, called the Legendarium. In all, he wrote a dozen books related to the Rings fantasy. He also illustrated many of them.
Many overthinkers have tried to interpret the meaning, hidden or otherwise, to Lord of the Rings but I skipped trying to draw any similarities to real Earth.
With the exception perhaps to the obvious “good vs. evil” storyline, I was blissfully romping through Middle Earth, orcs and all, knowing that the “real” world was still waiting for me as soon as someone snapped their fingers to bring me to.
