Summer Book Club Week 6 - Halfway Mark!

I might have missed last week's update (sorry! 🙈), but rest assured, the book club is still going strong! We are currently in the middle of The Two Towers, the second book in the Lord of the Rings series. I am personally about halfway through at this point, which is good since we are technically at the halfway mark in the timeline. However, I'm hoping to put a big dent in it in the next week or so.

I'm somewhere around chapter nine or ten at the moment, so in case you don't want spoilers, use caution if you continue reading!

Of course, I'm always going to mentally compare the books to the movies, since I watched the movies first (I know, I know...). That being said, I've found it pretty interesting so far how the book progresses in comparison to the film. Currently, there have been exactly zero scenes including Frodo and Sam. That's pretty different from the big screen adaptation, which uses a more modern "parallel" approach in which we see the perspectives of multiple characters happening simultaneously. After a brief stint with Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, we got a glimpse of Merry and Pippin's adventures with the Orcs and Ents before switching back to the threesome's adventures in Rohan. Finally, I reached their reunification in Isengard.

In some ways, I liked this style of storytelling that is often missing from modern literature. It's a bit of an adventure following the characters through their own journeys before having to piece together what was happening at the same time with the other characters. For instance, while we see Merry and Pippin heading off to Isengard, we don't get a clear picture of what happened there until Aragorn and the others arrive at the ruined fortress of Saruman. It creates suspense in a unique way. 

Speaking of the destruction of Isengard, I have to say that my mental picture of the Ents has been challenged a bit while reading this book. The movie portrays them as "walking trees." Reading Tolkien's description, I can see where the filmmakers kind of got this idea--Treebeard describes some of the Ents as becoming more "tree-like," their skin is described as bark-like, and their beards are mossy. But Tolkien often compares them to trolls, which threw me off a bit. Now, I feel a bit lost as to how to imagine them! Are they trees? Are they trolls? I feel like the movie rendering of them is probably not 100% faithful to Tolkien's idea, but I'm having a hard time expelling the tree-people image from my head.

I'm looking forward to catching up with Frodo and Sam, but I'm guessing that probably won't come till Book 4 within The Two Towers. What about you? Are you ahead of me or behind me? What are your thoughts on the Ents? Let me know in the comments here or on social media!