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00:00Reading is vicarious experience.
00:06These are mostly the miniatures that I wrote stories about when I was a kid.
00:10I've reflected on this a lot, and I look back and think of the whole question of memory.
00:15I mean, what are we? What shapes us as human beings?
00:19I grew up in the projects of Bayonne, New Jersey.
00:22We were poor.
00:24Other kids would go down the shore for the summer and go to the beach or go to the mountains
00:29with their family's cars. We never went anywhere in the summer.
00:31We just stayed in the same old place.
00:33But books took me everywhere.
00:39I read Lord of the Rings, probably junior high school.
00:43You know, it opens, like, with a dissertation on pipeweed.
00:47And then there's a birthday party.
00:50And I'm saying, where are the giant snakes?
00:54Where are the scantily clad women?
00:56There's no sword fights here. What's going on?
01:00But then it started picking up steam.
01:03Rivendell and the Black Riders.
01:06By the time I got to the Mines of Moria,
01:09I had decided that this was the greatest book that I'd ever read.
01:14The Lord of the Rings describes the epic struggle of a band of humans and elves,
01:19led by a wizard named Gandalf and a hobbit called Frodo,
01:23who embark on a journey to save their world from evil.
01:27One popular interpretation of Tolkien's novel
01:30looks at it as an exploration of the famous phrase,
01:33power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
01:38It was so totally immersive.
01:41Tolkien approached this thing as if he was writing history.
01:44He had genealogies that went back not only hundreds but thousands of years
01:48to rise and fall of kingdoms, entire stories in a footnote
01:53that grounded this in reality so much.
01:57Tolkien's greatest invention was the characters who struggle
02:01with the temptation of the ring and what to do with it.
02:05They're all fighting these battles inside their hearts.
02:09That can take place anywhere, at any time, in any space in all of human history.
02:16And then Gandalf dies!
02:22I can't explain the impact that had on me at 13.
02:29You can't kill Gandalf.
02:32I mean, Conan didn't die in the Conan books, you know.
02:36Tolkien just broke that rule, and I'll love him forever for it.
02:41Because the minute you kill Gandalf,
02:43the suspense of everything that follows is a thousand times greater,
02:47because now anybody could die.
02:50Of course, it's had a profound effect on my own willingness
02:54to kill characters at the drop of a hat.
03:00I'm thrilled that Game of Thrones is on the list.
03:04What I wanted to do was take certain of the traditions of fantasy
03:08and bring a smile to it, a level of grittiness and realism.
03:13Your books, your stories should reflect what you see in the real world around you.
03:19Even a fantasy that has dragons should reflect the truth.
03:24To be on the same list with Lord of the Rings is very exciting.
03:28If you are one of the six people in the world
03:31who has not yet read J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings,
03:34what are you waiting for?
03:36Read Lord of the Rings, and if you like it as much as I do, vote for it.