Different Books

I wrapped up my re-read of The Lord of The Rings and promptly dove into Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary. It’s one of those books that’s been on my to-read list for ages, superseding The Martian (which in turn has languished there since I saw the film adaption nearly a decade ago.). And I’m reading it! Now!

And talk about literary whiplash!

Project Hail Mary is a really different book from The Lord of The Rings. Yes, the former is science-fiction and the latter high-fantasy; going from a story with magic rings and Elves to one about space mysteries and science experiments is bound to be a bit of a shift. But beyond that, the two books are written very, very differently. In Rings, Tolkien uses his prose to capture the feeling the world should evoke: chapters around the Hobbits have an almost Romantic quality to them, the grand adventures almost ironic against their bucolic world. But when the time comes, Tolkien slips smoothly into the epic mode; his descriptions of Théoden’s charge upon the Pelennor invoking the Odyssey or Beowulf. There’s a magnificent deliberateness to how Tolkien writes, he knows how words sound and what they conjure in the reader’s mind. A Hobbit’s casual speech makes them feel familiar to us, the archaic words used by Denethor tell us he is wise and august. It’s deliberate, it’s delightful, and it’s a lot.

Because of how dense its use of language is, not to mention its myriad references to a fictional history, The Lord of The Rings isn’t always the lightest book to read. It’s dense, it’s wonderful, and a book I fall in love more and more with every time I read it.

On the other hand, Project Hail Mary is almost frivolous with its prose. Much of it is written as a stream-of-consciousness. Not in the fashion of the modernist Ulysses, mind you, where Joyce delights in the interplay between thought and word, but in the way one would text a friend or livetweet an episode of Game of Thrones. It’s almost crude in its simpleness.

And yet it works for the narrative (in a way that it certainly wouldn’t for The Lord of The Rings). Swaths of the novel are the main character sciencing his way through dilemmas and the present tense, thinking-out-loud nature of the prose lends itself well to the scientific method. We’re in Ryland’s head as he puts forth a hypothesis, conducts the experiment, and examines the results, following along in real time as he tackles each problem. It makes science, which could be pretty dull to read about, feel like a fun adventure.

It also makes for a much lighter read. Project Hail Mary practically slips by. It’s incredibly easy to parse and super straight forward. It’s a very different book, one that I don’t need to think about as much as I read it (though, again, I do plumb the depths of my memory to remember some physics when it comes to experiments) and almost a bit of a break after the tome that is The Lord of The Rings. This is by no means a bad thing, it’s just a different book and a nice change of pace. After all, no point in only reading one thing — variety is the spice of life and all that. Or at least until I reread The Lord of The Rings for the ninth time.