• Full collection of four essays on J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” comprising “Lord of the Rings: the anti-adventure,” “Reader’s Guide to the Fellowship of the Ring,” “Reader’s Guide to the Two Towers,” and “The (True) Lord of the Ring.” Emphasis throughout is to suggest that it is not just wise but essential to encounter very, very suspiciously the influence the work very much hopes to have on you, which it argues is for valuing a false self rather than a true one, for clinging back to base — in a fundamental sense — rather than adventuring. Performs the work of “good therapist,” to what it argues is the “bad one” working away at the reader in the text.