Lord of the Ring-a-thon-along

YES, still.  Except now over several weeks instead of in one glorious day.

(Everyone in these books is always either feasting or on short rations, but either way I'm like YES, FOOD WOULD BE GOOD.)

Anymoot.  The Ents get warmed up and flood the shit out of Isengard and God I love Treebeard.  Hrrrm hoom, let us not be hasty, and then he stands there 'pull[ing] down a bit more of the walls, in a leisurely sort of way, just to amuse himself.'  That line slays me, every time.


Mordor already?  Damn.  I thought that wasn't until Return.  This is where I start to question my commitment to the cause, because this whole section is so ghastly. So Frodo and Sam in Mordor, and then also Gollum, and Sam and Gollum are aggressively antagonistic and it's sort of amusing but maybe because everything else is relentlessly oppressive, and I can only stand it for so long.  I always laugh at the part where Gollum is talking himself into stealing the Ring and refers to his future powerful self as The Gollum, even though the whole scene and the way his twisted mind talks itself out of keeping his word is insanely tragic.


And then Faramir shows up and proves that he is a Better Man than Boromir and that second sons are sometimes worth keeping around and I start to get all weepy in advance about how Denethor loses his mind later and tries to set them both on fire.  I AM GETTING AHEAD OF MYSELF.


I'm starting to see how deliberate these moments of sunlight are, like when Sam stews the brace of coneys, because without them this trudge would be almost unbearable.  But then ugh, Cirith Ungol and Shelob's Lair and Frodo is attacked and Sam has to go on alone and HERE is your Patrick-Nessian cliffhanger: 'Sam hurled himself against the bolted brazen plates and fell senseless to the ground.  He was out in the darkness.  Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy.'  HERE ENDS THE SECOND PART!