this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
88 points (95.8% liked)
Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (LotR), etc.
1673 readers
2 users here now
For all things Tolkien, Lord of The Rings (LotR), and The Hobbit across all media. Speak friend and enter.
Rules:
- No abusive language
- No buying, selling or advertising
- Be civil
- No politics
- No discussions about race
- No bots
- No memes or AI-generated content
- Don't criticize others for their opinions
- If you found the image on the web, it is encouraged to put the direct link to the image in the ‘Link’ field when creating a post, instead of uploading the image to Lemmy. Direct links usually end in .jpg, .png, etc.
- No unrelated posts
- No spoilers in title, mark spoilers
- Let people like what they like
- Follow all Lemmy.world rules
Please report any rule violations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have both, and I like both (in a library of 10k books in different languages). Umberto Eco still makes sense, I crass contrast to a lot of literature price recipients.
Hard reading is not the issue. I actually liked how "The Name of the Rose" dropped my reading speed down to a hundred page per hour.
What I regularly notice in books rated high in literature circles is lack of internal integrity. Those people have not a single molecule of world building in them - they don't really think about what they write.
Hmm. Lot to unpack here.
I mean it's generally accepted that most of Ecos books are hard to read, even you had to slow down, right? Many people do not like that or have the mental energy to read one page phrases. Some don't amuse themselves reading those kinds of books, and read books that are simpler. Most good books are not simple even if there are counter examples (L'etranger for example is dead easy to read).
Maybe you're checking out bad litterature prices? Kundera got the nobel price, and I understand why (not because of the book itself, which is one of his worst IMO, but for his life œvre).
Also maybe you just don't appreciate some types of books? Do you have an example of a known book that's particularly bad in your opinion ?
If you like world building, and Eco, go read Baudolino if you haven't yet (it's fabulous in French if you do read that).