Ep 135 - LOTR: The Two Towers, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Overdue

Headgum

Craig Getting, Arts, Books, Podcasts, Literature, Comedy, Andrew Cunningham

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2015

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week we continue the Lord of the Rings saga with The Two Towers, a book that moves beyond Fellowship’s table-setting and dives right into the action. We spend time talking about why this book is more satisfying than the first as a standalone volume, and why the first book serves better as the first book of three than as its own story.

We also spend quite a bit of this episode talking about the mixed listener reaction to the Fellowship episode, about the way Tolkien treats “mythical” creatures within his own mythical world, and a little about just why Sam Gamgee is the best.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a head gum podcast.
0:30.0	Hey everybody, welcome to Overdo. This is a podcast about the books that you have been meaning to read. My name is Craig.
0:48.0	And my name is Andrew.
0:49.0	The Andrew I have undergone a transformation.
0:52.0	Last week I was Craig the Grey. And this week I am Craig the White.
0:57.0	I'm going to give you a lesson. And like we've gotten a few emails asking us,
1:01.0	hey, how do you guys do a podcast? We want to do a podcast. Here's podcast 101.
1:05.0	And you can pay me later for this little piece of advice.
1:08.0	If you get a bunch of reader emails telling you that you should read some books, some like beloved books that have been around for decades and decades,
1:19.0	the thing to do is not to like read them and then spend the whole podcast pooping all over them.
1:26.0	Well, and like, okay, okay, here's, here's where I say we didn't we didn't just tear them apart mercilessly the whole time.
1:36.0	I will say that we front loaded the podcasts with a lot of negativity that I do not think is like characteristic of our show.
1:44.0	Not always know.
1:45.0	Normally when we dislike something, we're so like worried that we got it wrong that we like,
1:52.0	I think we present the counter argument and then we come around to like either liking it or justifying why people could like it.
1:59.0	And yeah, the first part of our fellowship of the rings episode was like, this is a little negative.
2:05.0	I think some people sense my frustration. My co-host on appointment television, Catherine Van Erdogg said that her favorite part of listening to that episode was listening to me like slowly fall apart into a million pieces.
2:19.0	Well, and I got multiple people reaching out to me and some of them anecdotally in person saying that they thought that you balanced out the show nicely that you were doing a good job or the best job you could do defending Mr. Tolkien.
2:36.0	And what I'll say is the show, I will confess that the show in the episode had kind of been built up for me over months of like Craig's going to read these books.
2:46.0	And then I kind of leaned into a character of reacting to the book. So I'll confess that.
2:55.0	But I'll tell you that like the most annoying person in any room is the person who decides that they are not going to like like the universally beloved thing.
3:04.0	And they not only are they not going to like it, but they're going to like go on and on about how cool they are for not liking it.
	...

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