I just finished reading the main story of “The Return of The King”, having finished the previous two books since the New Year. I started with the “The Hobbit” before Christmas, which I have read more than once but not since the middle eighties. I am now working my way through the Indexes and History at the back of the book.

I wonder now why I didn’t try reading this earlier. I knew people at my school in 1978 who would haul around the big yellow and green 1974 edition in paperback. Did I enjoy it? Yes. What did I like best about it? The characters and the description.

Towards the end though I felt Tolkien’s style was becoming heavily medieval, in terms of sentence constructions, use of words and style. There seemed to be an over reliance on archaic forms of speech as well.

That’s another interesting thing I found: the way characters spoke: you can compare it to the wordy way Conan Doyle would spend an entire chapters talking about a single character, which in 19th century fiction was perfectly acceptable. Even the early 20th century speech was slower.

I’ve read all the Raymond Chandler novels so for comparison there is an over abundance of soliloquy its expected almost. I have also read a slew of SF novels from 1930s to1980s. “Nine Princes In Amber” is a great series which I think combines mainstream SF with fantasy, or maybe it is all fantasy, even “Glory Road” by Bob Heinlein is technically fantasy.

Tolkien also splits the book into the two story arcs of Sam and Frodo and the trio of Gimli, Legolas and Aragorn. He switches between them. Gandalf serves mainly as the author insertion.

I can think of only one other series where I read them at the speed I have and that is the Harry Potter series of books.

The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings were read entirely on Apple iPhones.

I found this item just now on what to do if your iTunes installation tanks, this procedure seems to be favored by the members of the BBS I found it on:

App data is stored in only two places, on your phone & in your iphone backup. When you do hit the sync button, all itunes content will be erased from your phone. Because you formatted your hard drive, your phone now sees your computer as a “new” computer & since the iphone, by design, syncs itunes content with one computer at a time, there is no way to prevent your itunes content from first being erased from your phone. If the same content is in your current itunes library, you simply sync it back. To preserve your app data, do this:

1. Disable auto sync when an ipod/iphone is connected in itunes, under preferences(under the edit menu if using windows).
2. Make sure your computer is authorized-Store>Authorize this Computer.
3. Make sure whatever contact & calendar applications you use on your computer are not empty-put fake entries in if you want, the important point is that they not be empty.
4. Connect your phone, itunes running, DO NOT SYNC, go up to File>Transfer Purchases-to make sure all purchased content is in your itunes library.
5. Right click your phone in the device pane & select “Reset Warnings”
6. Right click again and select “Backup”.
7. Right click again & select “Restore from Backup”. Select the backup you just made, if prompted to create another backup, decline.
8. Follow this by syncing your itunes content back to your phone, which you select, as before, from the various tabs.

If you follow these instructions, you will preserve your app data & you’ll be syncing to your “new” computer.

—(=Source https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2483630?start=0&tstart=0)