I have several favorite websites, blogs, etc., but I don't check any of them regularly. As a result, I tend to binge-read several entries in a row. On occasion a posting will lead to thoughts I want to share but, because the post I'm responding to is sometimes weeks, if not months, old, my thoughts are no longer relevant to that site's comments section. "Professor Too-Late" is all about expressing those thoughts without posting them on someone else's site when everyone but me has moved on with their lives.
Professor Too-Late's delayed reaction to John Michaud's lighthearted defense of his preference for Tolkien's The Hobbit over The Lord of the Rings.
Contra just about every other irrationally offended reply to this post, I happen to agree with Mr. Michaud in preferring The Hobbit to LotR, and my opinion has nothing to do with LotR's "complexity," unless one is confusing complex with bloated. That's how I see it, what with the endless descriptions of feasts and chapter after chapter of hobbits hanging out with trees, etc. In any case, I'm surprised by many of the responders' faulty (not to mention hysterical--which is to say emotionally excessive) comparisons. First of all, Tolkien, though a gifted writer, was no Dostoyevsky, nor was he a Tolstoy. Likewise, LotR is nowhere near being in the same literary league as Crime and Punishment or War and Peace. What Mr. Michaud is doing here is expressing a preference for one work by an author to another work by that same author. Would any of these apparently high-minded responders really accuse someone who said she prefers Joyce's Dubliners to Ulysses--because Dubliners is a leaner, less satirical/parodic work--of "misunderstanding" Joyce? Perhaps so, but to do so would be to express one's own opinions and preferences regarding two of a single author's most famous works. As such, taking the level of umbrage that these responders have taken (granted, regarding the work of an author who was almost single-handedly the creator of an entire genre of fiction, and which is apparently the second most popular piece of fiction in the world,* but which is hardly near the top of the list of greatest works in Western literature) is an overreaction, in the grandest Internet tradition.
*We all realize that popularity doesn't necessarily equal greatness, don't we?
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