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Maybe it's in the banjo?

Or maybe the lyrics?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSgnC5eQ5u0

Looks like chicken....

I've never actually knocked Tolkien's writing, just my own personal inability to reconcile the content. The thing I am often to be found having fun with is the fanboy/fangirl effect that these novels have upon certain readers. It’s the Star-Trek 'Trekkies' type phenomenon where the enamoured fans endeavour to live the fantasy beyond the book or the film and into their own lives as a part of their daily existence. 

I read the Hobbit at school when I was eight or nine years old… my first ‘big’ book. We read together it as a class (it was mainly narrated to us by our teacher) and we explored many aspects of the story within the lesson, between chapters. I have to say that I loved it at the time. The sense of escapism (surrendering the reality of this world to Tolkien’s world and its characters) was exhilarating and formative within the establishment of my life-long love of literature.

I read the Hobbit again to my first daughter when she was a tot, in bedtime instalments. Watching her face light up in anticipation and frown in trepidation as the story unfurled was truly magic. I knew she was living the story and experiencing the same wonder and exhilaration that I myself felt when I encountered the story as a child. The only problem was that the storytelling invigorated her senses and stimulated her mind to such an extent that sleep (or the possibility of it) was driven away by her involvement or investment within the story. We had to move the Hobbit instalments to pre-bedtime sessions in order for her to surrender to sleep at the appropriate time.

However, by that time my inner-cynicism for fantasy novels was well established and despite my thrill at experiencing my daughter’s involvement and enjoyment of the novel, I was reading a book about an annoying garden gnome in fairyland. The story no longer had/has any credibility within me. Something occurred during military service. At some point after the blunt-force trauma of active service I lost the capacity to suspend my disbelief. Fantasy novels; singing swords, wizards, dragons and elves… Spiderman, Superman, Wonderwoman et al… I just wanted to pick people up and shake them rigorously back to reality. I found the escapism of these fantasy genres to be juvenile, puerile and ridiculous to the point of cringe worthy embarrassment. 

A medical professional once cited this behaviour within me as a symptom of PTSD. I have mellowed since then, for sure; but I still can’t do fantasy within literature TV or movies.

I love literature from the likes of Hemingway and le Carré. The gritty reality of those writers; the stories and characters grounded in the real world. It’s like they could be true, like they could have happened or be happening. I can invest in these stories one hundred percent.

You mention ‘Gone with the Wind’ and that was a novel I knew of but had never read. I had accumulated pre-conceptions about it and thought it to be a 19th century romance story. I read it upon your recommendation and found it to be a fantastic literary adventure. Once read, never forgotten. There is plenty of magic within that book, but proper magic, it is grounded within human characters and realism.

I could read ‘Gone with the Wind’ again too. However, I couldn’t read Lord of the Gnomes this side of a lobotomy.

Dijon

Hopeless
it's when the 'reality game show' generation gets to vote.

To have family land; populated and passed down to generation after generation is a wonderful thing. There must be a real sense belonging, knowing exactly where you came from and how you came to be. To be a part of a place.

I've also always lived on small plots of land surrounded by concrete. A townie I suppose. I harbour no affinity with farming or tilling the land but I do experience a pull toward the coast. I love it where strong tempestuous seas collide with craggy gargantuan rocks. The perpetual conflict of waves breaking upon cliffs.

We spent numerous summer holidays when I was a child along the wild coasts of Cornwall and Devon. I am most alive during a violent coastal thunderstorm. I think I could happily live in a stone cottage on a rocky outcrop amongst wild seas with a dog and never want for a town or city or the people that occupy them. The purity and sheer power of nature to constantly remind me of just how inconsequential, puny, corrupt and irrelevant we vile humans are as a species.

I'm not sure either. There's not much mention in the UK of when Britain won it's independence from the US.

Britain was fighting France (as usual) all over the world. The French victory in the America was a bit of a side-show and although they won that battle, they actually lost the war. I think that french victory is what modern historians call 'The American Revolutionary War?'

Seriously. Back in school we learned an awful lot about the history of Canada and Mexico but little about the gap in between. Our only source of education re: the USA was endless re-runs of 'Happy-Days' and 'Top-Cat' on the T.V. I learned everything I know about South Canada/North Mexico from those shows.

Lapin  a La Cocotte

...hailed by novelist James Branch Cabell as "the most brilliant, the most candid, the most civilized, and most profound book yet written by any American woman."  Says the jacket.  Woolfesque, they say. I might have to give this a look

KFC Shareholders

It's universal. Expect nothing different here. You are dealing with human nature after all.

Tread very gently until you form relationships; at which point you will know which authors are mature enough to process an 'honest' constructive review.

I'm afraid that many take harsh critique very badly, no matter how valid, honest and constructive the opinion and advice might be. Despite what they might say in a biography etc. there are many authors who will accept nothing other than gushing praise and adoration, no matter whether their prose is pants or priceless.

As I said, human nature. This site is no different to the rest of the world. Like parents with ugly offspring, the majority of amateur writers run upon a heady mixture of inflated ego and disillusion and to those souls, constructive criticism can be deeply wounding. 

However, anyone who wants serious, in-depth totally objective literary opinion that is fair and honest, can pop a chapter into…

The Write Club -- Creative Writing and Literature Discussions Group → The Infamous ‘SHRED THREAD’

Not many do. It used to run on the old tNBW site and several writers benefitted hugely from a real, honest nuts and bolts appraisal of their prose. Their writing improved immensely once their eyes were opened.

Narcissists, egotists and the plain deluded? As you say; enemies for life.