I’ve always felt a little bad that as a writer I honestly don’t really read that many books. Let’s try to change that! 😉
The Wisdom of the Shire is a fun, little book that I picked up at the book store earlier last month while my wife and I were in the middle of watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy for her first time. Barnes & Noble had a huge display of Tolkien-related material out because The Hobbit was still in theaters, and after skimming through all of the random titles that they had gathered, I ended up walking out the door with this one. I guess it stood out to me because it was a relatively short read – important for somebody who really doesn’t read books these days! – and it also seemed to do a lot of relating hobbit life to human life, which was something that intrigued me…
You could probably say that I’ve been sort of romanticizing the Shire ever since watching those movies – I dunno, I guess it just seems like hobbit life might be a little simpler than this crazy one that I’m surrounded with these days, and thus as it’s not exactly feasible for one to pick up and move to Westfarthing myself, the next best thing seemed pretty appealing throughout this book in comparing and contrasting the two worlds and finding little ways to make this crazy, human world just a bit more relaxed and hobbit-like!
Things like taking the time to stop and enjoy your surroundings, welcoming time with family, and learning to deal with the negative forces in your life. Peculiarly enough, it’s where my whole bizarre gardening kick sprouted up from (see what I did there?!), and in a way I guess it was just a nice, simple read pointing out the obvious that more often than not most of us nonetheless take for granted.
At the end of it all, I think the essence of being a hobbit is simply in making the best with what you’ve got and enjoying every last morsel of it. Life doesn’t always have to be fast – every once in a while it’s important to slow things down, whether it be with a pint of beer, some smoke rings from a fresh bit of pipe weed, or even just a good book.
Next on deck is The Fellowship of the Ring … me thinks it’s going to take considerably longer to make my way through that one’s tiny print as compared to this read, but I’m also really looking forward to revisiting the original trilogy that got me hooked on Middle Earth more than 20 years ago just the same… 