Now, just to display my geek prowess, I feel compelled to mention that not only have I read the Lord of the Rings fifteen times, I read the Silmarillion four times.
And I enjoyed doing it.
This doesn’t make me more of a fan or more geek than thou — I think the trick to reading the Silmarillion isn’t to approach it as a novel, but as a book on mythology. As a book on mythology, it kicks ass, but that has to be what you’re in the mood for, and what you expect to get.
That said, it’s certainly not for everyone, but now (via BoingBoing), I present THE ENTIRE SILMARILLION IN ONE THOUSAND WORDS.
ILUVATAR: Ahem.
AINUR: Wow! Existence!
ILUVATAR: *blows pitch pipe* LA!
AINUR: LA LA LA!
ILUVATAR: LA LA!
AINUR: LA LA!
MELKOR: This sucks. BUM BUM BA DUM!
AINUR: Um. . . la?
ILUVATAR: Ahem. LA!
MELKOR: Boop bop-a-doo-bop!
ILUVATAR: LA, dammit.
MELKOR: Bwam bardle ningle boom.
AINUR: . . .
ILUVATAR: Right, you’re out of the band.
MELKOR: Fine, I was leaving anyway.
Very well done and to the point.
That’s not Geek prowess, that’s Nerd prowess.
Geek prowess is reading the Lord of the Rings at the same time as troubleshooting a multi-protocol attack on a server and reading Clay Blair’s 2400 page history of the U-Boat campaigns in the Second World War* while defending something like “Aqua, a better GUI than KDE” on Slashdot.
* – Can be replaced by hardware hacks like a web server in a Hello Kitty Vibrator, or building a backyard railgun