Eight years after The Hobbit, and the shift in register is the first thing you notice. The narrator has stopped winking at you. The same world is now being taken entirely seriously.
It is slower than anyone expects, and the slowness is deliberate. A hundred pages pass before the hobbits are properly out of the Shire, which is what makes the loss of it mean anything later.
Read April 1988, with The Two Towers immediately after.
