Name: The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings [collection/set]
ISBN: 9780544445789

What Hacker News says

ikeserbestianSep 2022

J. R. R. Tolkien's Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings,

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe,

Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island,

Most of the Jules Verne's books,

The Iliad and The Odyssey from Homer,

The Godfather from Mario Puzo,

Hermit in Paris, Under the Jaguar Sun, The Complete Cosmicomics from Italo Calvino,

The Name of the Rose from Umberto Eco,

In the World from Maxim Gorky,

...

First works coming to mind but there should be more... Also I probably re-read many times basic printed materials related Abrahamic religions like Torah, Quran and Bible.

Re-reading is inevitable if you love books.

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whicksJul 2022

Not sure which one the OP had in mind but if you're into more theatrical audiobooks / podcasts check out "An Unexpected Journey" by "Samwise Gamgee" on Spotify. Absolutely top-tier audiobook of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

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WillAdamsOct 2026

It kills me that education is not a solved problem --- we have many of the same hurdles which the Greeks faced, and apparently, one of the best schools which I ever attended is no longer run as it once was (classes were divided between academic and social, the latter were attended at one's age level (homeroom, phys. ed, social studies, &c.) and academic classes were attended at one's grade level with teachers at the combined elementary/high school also being accredited as faculty at a nearby college and students being able to continue on to university level study until such time as they had attended their 12th year of education, with the possibility of being awarded not only a high school diploma, but also a college degree, or at least being afforded a transcript of college-level studies to apply at the school of their choice.

One thing which I started with my own children which seemed promising was to read biographies of notable individuals in chronological order as bedtime reading --- since it was a difficult list to compile, I started on a smaller subset of U.S. Presidents which worked well (though I was surprised that there was no child-friendly biography for a couple of them in the local library system necessitating ordering) --- I also tried to read a more formal, adult-oriented biography in advance to anticipate questions. Unfortunately, my wife's schedule changed when we got to Truman and the effort was abandoned due to a changing evening schedule. Note that this was in addition to having read all the C.S. Lewis Narnia books, _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_, Susan Cooper's _The Dark is Rising_ pentalogy and many, many other more traditional book choices.

The big thing in child-rearing is to offer the child chances and experiences and age-appropriate choices --- the line in _The Simpsons_ where Homer tells Bart that it's okay that he failed at learning while wrongly phrased does have a kernel of truth in it.

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frasermarlowApr 2026

An interactive map of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, with events from across the legendarium plotted as markers.

I have been commuting a fair bit between the East and West coast, and thanks to American Airlines' free onboard WiFi, I was able to vibe-code a full interactive map of Middle-earth right from my economy seat at the back of the bus.

It's rather amazing how much an LLM knows about Tolkien's work, and it was fun to delve into many of the nooks and crannies of Tolkien's lore.

Some features: - Plot on the map the journey of the main characters in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. - Follow a list of events in the chronological Timeline - Zoom in on the high-def map and explore many of the off-the-main-plotline places - Use the 'measure distances' feature to see how far apart things are.

I also had a lot of fun learning about tiling to allow for efficient zooming.

If you are anything like me, this should provide a fun companion to reading the books or watching the movies (note that on this site, I followed the book narrative, and did not include Peter Jackson's many departures)

If you get the chance to check it out, I would love more feedback, and if there is demand, I might do the same for Game of Thrones.

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jfengelJun 2023

Between the letters and the History of Middle-earth, we have an incredible insight into the creative process. I don't know of any other author whose work is so profoundly documented -- and it happens to be an author whose process is so radical.

Not just in the languages, though those are the most obvious, but the lifetime obsession. It can be hard to recall that in his lifetime he only ever published The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He never published The Silmarillion, because he kept revising and revising. It was never fully compatible with either The Hobbit (it wasn't intended to be) or The Lord of the Rings. The published document we have is a posthumous construction (for which his son really deserves co-author credit.)

I do believe it's important to continue to think of the published works in themselves, and not just as part of a vast secret being dribbled out with the rest of his papers. The new edition of his letters will surely illuminate our appreciation of them, but it would be disrespectful to forget that he published his books as stand-alone novels. The Lord of the Rings is unchanged (pace some lightly edited later editions), and it's a monumental work that merits a lifetime of re-re-rereading.

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snickererJan 2023

I asked it 'What hapoened to Gandalf after he fell down from the bridge, fighting the Balrog? Did he die?'

The answer was a story about Gandalf beeing hurt badly, beeing rescued by some random dwarfs, and so on.

I asked ChatGPT in which book this is described, and it told me that you can read about it on both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

So it makes up fun stories. This makes me wondering how much of its explantions about physics (which I don't understand completely) are made-up.

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