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It took the Machete Order to make the prequel of Star Wars finally fit into the rest of the episodes–well, except for the-episode-we-should-not-speak-of.

The Machete Order, for those unfamiliar, involves watching the movies in the following order: IV, V, II, III, VI. His argument is that you don’t lose anything from not watching Episode 1–and in fact, the series makes more sense that way.

Putting the prequels in the middle creates an interesting flash-back/foreshadowing effect.

It makes Episodes II & III a lot more interesting.

A series that I’ve struggled with sometimes is the Lord of the Rings. Don’t get me wrong, I love Lord of the Rings. But sometimes, as I embarrassingly put it, there’s an awful lot of walking and talking, and my patience is sometimes less… patient than usual.

Starlight Geek has come up with the “Starlight Fellowship”. This is a way to read the Fellowship of the Ring while skipping past the unimportant (or much less important) details.

As she puts it:

Here’s the thing: the books are not for everyone. They are long, the language is often archaic, and the story meanders heavily at the beginning. It is wholly difficult to read if you regularly read authors whose editors have a heavy hand (hint: pretty much all modern literature). I know so many people who have said they have tried multiple times to read LotR and get bogged down in Fellowship. Almost everyone seems to get lost in the Old Forest on the borders of Buckland.

The “Starlight Fellowship” is her way of making the book more accessible to those who tried and gave up, as well as those who want to re-read the series but not necessarily everything.

I first “read” The Lord of the Rings via book on tape during really long car rides. I have to admit, listening to the Fellowship got really tiring after a while, but I made it through.

It helped that the narrator used different voices for characters, which was especially interesting for Tom Bombadil.

So the CD did not receive the same fate as my Oscar Wilde book on tape–flung out the car window in frustration somewhere between Michigan and New York*.

*Note: I do not condone littering and I regretted doing this immediately–if just for the knowledge of how much I had paid for that book on tape.