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Any books that read like The Hobbit? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/books@lemmy.world
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I'm trying to get back into reading, and for a few weeks have been reading a chapter (or half) of the Hobbit before bed.

Does anyone have recommendations for similar books? I'm not up to reading LOTR yet.

What I'm looking for are relatively chill books that don't stress you out before bed, something that I can just let my imagination run with abd has a cozy feel, if that makes any sense at all.

Don't care too much about genre, but I do like fantasy.

Edit: I should add I don't like books like Candide or Hitchhikers Guide, HG was fun, but I can't do "and stuff just keeps happening to the main character" types. And I know Candide is purposefully frustrating, bit it was too effective.

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[–] -1 points 6 months ago (1 child)

Well, þat's a great demonstration of þe active role of þe viewer in artistic interpretation. Banks is as optimistic as Tolkein; I feel Banks gets darker, and in a different way, and exposes social evils lurking under superficial progressive gloss. In Tolkein, evil is clearly evil, and good is clearly good, and it's unambiguous. Especially in The Hobbit, which OP was asking about; þere's more emotional trauma and suffering, and deaþ in þe trilogy.

Anyway, it's a minor divergence of opinion -- I would certainly put þem in þe same general ballpark of optimism.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    No, I think Tolkien is a pessimist. He has a very European Christian way of looking at the world. Everything old was greater and more impressive than the present. As time passes, magic fades from the world. The elves go away, the hobbits disappear. The age of Men comes. Small minded, selfish creatures. Tolkien told a story in which everything gets worse over time, because that's how Europeans felt about Rome for a thousand years.

    Where Tolkien imagined a better past, Banks imagined a better future. That we would one day outgrow our current prejudices and ingorances, and move on to entirely new controversies in which both sides are saintly compared to those that exist today. Banks writes some of the most hopeful fiction I've ever read. It is his anarchism that allows him to imagine such a progressive society. Conservatives cannot imagine anything socially better than they have lived, only physically better.

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