Book Note: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

This is book 3 of the "Lord of the Rings" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Slow reading, due to major system reconfiguration work (I creatively fixed something and had to spend days recovering, as is typical).

Such a satisfying conclusion. There's maybe a little too much of good things coming from doing the right thing (like not killing Gollum). But it's sometimes ambiguous, at least. If Treebeard hadn't let Saruman go, and Frodo hadn't stopped Sam from killing him, what would have happened? Would the Shire have been less devastated? Probably it would have. But would actually killing Saruman have been disastrous? It wasn't that bad for Wormtounge, but he may be under different rules as a servant of Saruman.

I very much like the concern for the trees in the Shire, and Sam's use of Galadriel's gift.

And I like the bittersweet of those who saved the world being unable to really benefit from it. It's nice that they get to go into pleasant and honorable retirement with the Elves.

Anyway, it's an old favorite of mine, and I'm glad I reread it. Still, in the end, I have to say this is the least enjoyable reread of these books I've made in a very long time. Maybe I wasn't ready to, and pushed myself into it (to beat the movie release), or something.