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The Platypus Reads

My wife and I have just finished reading The Lord of the Rings together. We started with the Silmarillion and then moved on to The Hobbit and so on. It's a journey that has taken us some eight months to complete. All this has put into my mind the importance of having favorite books; books that you turn to again and again over the years for insight, guidance, challenge, and comfort. My personal top three are, in chronological order (not order of preference):

The Oresteia by Aeschylus:

Aeschylus, as the greatest poet of the old tragedies in Athens, presents us with a struggle between conflicting claims of love, loyalty, and honor in a world doomed to destruction apart from a divine intervener and a human atonement.

The Idylls of the King by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

Tennyson, poet laureate to Queen Victoria, uses the Arthur legends as the backdrop for an elegy of the Victorian age; a civilization undone by its failure to live up to, and grasp the threat to the intellectual and moral foundations of, its own ideals.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien:

J.R.R. Tolkien, an Oxford don, presents us with the great epic of 20th century literature; a work that centers around a theme that stretches all the way back to Gilgamesh and Edan: death.

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