Read or Listen?

[Thinlómien]

Reading beats listening, because it's more private and the characters have their own voices, not the actor's voice. (Not to mention that a bad or unfitting actor can ruin the whole story.) While reading you can go on with your own pace and check things that were said before or pause to think about some perceived or imagined incoherence or wise words uttered by the characters.

However, if "listening" includes being read aloud to by a parent or someone else close and loving, I would actually say "listening" because then it has all the magic of old storytelling and also the shared experience with someone important, if I may so without sounding all too cheesy.

[Hakon]

I voted read. I cannot listen to an audio book without getting bored. I usually end up reading something completely different when I am listening to an audio book.

[mormegil]

I have fairly long commutes so I enjoy listening to books. I think listening gives me a whole new dimension of it. It is paced and measured. I tend to speed read during the real exciting parts and I miss things.

[Laurinquë]

I tried to listen to the Fellowship on CD a few years ago, but first of all the CDs were from the library and were all scratched up, and more importantly, the book has too many details for you be able to listen to it and understand everything that happens. If your attention wavers for just a second you miss something important it seems. Reading it allows you to go back and see what you missed much more easily.

[Estelyn Telcontar]

Originally Posted by Thinlómien

However, if "listening" includes being read aloud to by a parent or someone else close and loving, I would actually say "listening" because then it has all the magic of old storytelling and also the shared experience with someone important, if I may so without sounding all too cheesy.

Lommy has a point there - though I would add the great pleasure, not of "hearing" the book being read aloud, but of "reading" it aloud myself. Tolkien's narrative lends itself so well to vocalisation of any kind, and I have at times, when I had no one to read to, read the book aloud to myself (in a quiet, secluded spot, of course, lest someone should consider me crazy). JRRT's language is so wonderfully suited to speech, not just to words on the page!

[Tuor in Gondolin]

Good point about reading some aloud, like prose poetry.
Most of the Ride of the Rohirrim almost draws you
to read it aloud. Btw, doing shows you how much PJ and
friends botched the charge of the Rohirrim in RotK.
It should have started in the dark, Theoden gives his speech,
horns blow, Theoden sounds Guthlaf's horn and calls to his lads,
charges while the sun appears on his shield, then on him and Snowmane,
then all the host, with the bad guys first panicking and then charging at them
(rather like George Custer's Michigan cavalry at J.E.B. Stuart's troopers
at Gettysburg). "Come on, you Wolverines!"

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Ha, once again Lommy and Esty managed to beat me in saying what I wanted to. Anyway, good that it's been said - I think Tolkien really managed to write a book which reaches the quality of the old sagas, not just in the setting, the theme of the story and things like this, but also in the way how it is suitable for reading aloud. Indeed, if we still were a culture of storytellers rather than readers and movie-watchers, I believe LotR would be a very good tale to narrate in that way. (Okay, in some way even better if it was written in verse )

Personally, I don't have that much experience with listening to LotR, though I have been listening to the Slovak radio adaptation of LotR, which is not pure reading, but acting, of course. It also has its spirit, but I need to second others on this one who have said that the reading makes the story a much more personalised and fitting your own imagination. I think the problem with the listening is that the actor puts his own diction into it, and he stresses things in some way, where you would read it differently yourself. The listening is already an interpretation - and you can think for yourself where to put the emphasis, for example, whether to read "to ISENGARD with doom we come", or "to Isengard with doom we COME", or "to Isengard WITH DOOM we come"... etc.

[Peregrin Took]

Read, of course! The book reigns supreme.

[Pitchwife]

I listened to a German radio adaptation years ago, which was very well done - very close to the text with few cuts if any (IIRC it did include Bombadil, as well as most of the songs and poems); it combined a narrator with actors doing the individual characters, most of the voices fitting the part.
I prefer reading anytime, however, as it's more personal as well as more interactive, so to speak - true, there's the backwards/forwards buttons on the tape recorder/cd-player (does anybody else still use a tape recorder?), but it's much easier to find the exact passage you're looking for in a book. Not to forget that you can decide for yourself (and discuss in a thread!) whether to pronounce the name of Galadriel's hubby Keleborn, Seleborn or Tseleborn (or even Tcheleborn, if you're Italian).

[FeRaL sHaDoW]

It’s always better when you read it. You decide the pace and get to make your own ideas about the characters and places.

[Nerwen]

Interesting. I have never heard a dramatisation of "Lord of the Rings", so I can't go from personal experience on that one. Generally, I've found adaptations of books create slight jarring, because the voices of the characters aren't the way I imagine them.

On the other hand, my first introduction to LOTR was being read to by my mother– she read it to my brothers and me every night for about a year... and that is where my mental image of the characters, including their voices, was set in the first place. (My mother has a fairly low voice and can imitate a male voice without much trouble.)