I was fairly young when my mom handed me my first copy of The Hobbit. 9 I think...it was a long time ago. At any rate I was already an avid reader. My mom recently told me that the librarian at the library we always went to couldn't beleive I was actually reading all those books I was checking out.

Oh, it's not that I don't like poetry, but the comprehension questions that we get on it in English papers make it sound like every single word symbolises something else. It's those sort of poems I don't like so much… I like poems that tell a story (Tolkein's poetry for instance!), not the really abstract ones which never mean what it looks like they mean, if you see what I mean (?!). But the teachers always give us those. Probably because they know they're harder!
Oh, and in answer to the previous post, my English teacher does usually take us to see the plays, so she's not too bad really. When I was writing about Shakespeare being a pain, I wasn't referring to her. I was really referring to studying Macbeth two years ago with a different English teacher. Because it was a very advanced play for our age group, she went at baby-pace, explaining almost every word. I've always been good at English and I could follow Macbeth fine. It was a drag having to read at a fifth of the speed I was used to. I was usually five pages ahead of the rest of the class when we were reading it… So that was boring. We never got to go and see it either. [img]smilies/frown.gif[/img]

I feel for you on that issue. I've never read a book in any class at the pace I like to. I actually usually ending up reading it twice in the time it takes the class to read it once. [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

What I despised about my English classes was that the teacher had a certain set of answers to the comprehension and analysis questions that everyone had to come up with. They never allowed for divergent analyses of the books we were "forced" to read. I say forced, because the curriculum only had certain books we were allowed to study...none of this pick a book that you would want to read & analyze! And this was an American school...in Oklahoma! ACK! [img]smilies/eek.gif[/img]
Oh, I read The Hobbit when I was 7, and LOTR when I was eight or nine.

Same with my school. The Board of Studies would give us like 5 books to choose from, but then the teacher would come in and say. "These are your choices of book to study, and this is the book you will study." I always wished they'd let us vote for which book we wanted.

well...personally I enjoy analysing (otherwise known as ripping texts into minute pieces [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]) but I think LOTR is too close to me-I don't want to try and describe how everything in it makes me feel and hand it over to be "judged"!

Some books are interesting to analyse and discuss in class. Some are more enjoyable when they are thought over in private. I wish that opinions and justifying them would play a bigger part in the curriculum though. [img]smilies/frown.gif[/img]

Children can appreciate the Lord of the Rings. Intelligent minds can. I think it is important to read books like LotR, it boosts your thinking ability. :D
I read the books last year, at the age of 19, and read them to my twelve years old brother. He loved, and understood them. He's planning to make me read again for him.
I think it's movies, that show lots of "negative" stuff, while books have their own charm and morals.

Well,i have reading lotr since i was 5.now i was 14 and i have read the hobbit.im currently targeting the silmarillion

Tom, I first read LOTR at 12 and then again at 14 (The Hobbit at 11). No experience then of any kind of dramatisation or reading, except about one episode of the Jackanory "Hobbit" reading (partly acted). I'd be intrigued to know what things/scenes moved you most in the book (and if that has changed over the years of reading it), and whether you saw the films first.

Whe ifist read it i completely dont understand the book at all,and i was mostly influnced by the movie.