- Reading is vicarious experience.
These are mostly the miniatures that I
wrote stories about when I was a kid.
I've reflected on this a lot and I look back
and think of the whole question of memory.
I mean, what are we? What shapes us as human beings?
I grew up in the projects of Bayonne, New Jersey.
We were poor.
Other kids would go down the shore for the summer
and go to the beach or go to the mountains
with their family's credit.
We never went anywhere in the summer.
We just stayed in the same old place,
but books took me everywhere.
I read Lord of the Rings probably junior high school.
You know, it opens like with a dissertation on pipe weed
and then there's a birthday party
and I'm saying, "Where are the giant snakes?
Where are the scantily clad women?
What, there's no sword fights here, what's going on?"
But then it started picking up steam,
Rivendale and the Black Riders.
By the time I got to the Minds of Moria,
I had decided that this was
the greatest book that I'd ever read.
- [Narrator] The Lord of the Rings
describes the epic struggle of a band of humans and elves
led by a wizard named Gandalf and a hobbit called Frodo
who embark on a journey to save their world from evil.
One popular interpretation of Tolkien's novel
looks at it as an exploration of the famous phrase
power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
- It was so totally immersive.
Tolkien approached this thing as if he was writing history.
He had genealogies that went back
not only hundreds but thousands of years,
the rise and fall of kingdoms,
entire stories in a footnote.
That grounded this in reality so much.
Tolkien's greatest invention was the characters
who struggle with the temptation
of the ring and what to do with it.
They're all fighting these battles inside their hearts.
That can take place anywhere and anytime
and any space in all of human history.
And then Gandalf dies!
I can't explain the impact that had on me at 13.
It can't kill Gandalf.
Conan didn't die in the Conan books, you know (laughs)?
Tolkien just broke that rule
and I'll love him forever for it.
Just the minute you kill Gandalf,
the suspense of everything that follows
is 1000 times greater, 'cause now anybody could die.
Of course, it's had a profound effect
on my own willingness to kill characters
at the drop of a hat.
I'm thrilled that Game of Thrones is on the list.
What I wanted to do was take certain traditions of fantasy
by meld to it a level of grittiness and realism.
Your books, your stories should reflect
what you see in the real world around it.
Even a fantasy that has dragons should reflect the truth.
To be on the same list as Lord of the Rings
is very exciting.
If you are one of the six people in the world
who has not yet read J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings,
what are you waiting for?
Read Lord of the Rings and if you like it
as much as I do, vote for it.