I got the Hobbit from my parents.
I'm pretty sure the origin of my interest was reading a classic Australian storybook called "
The Magic Pudding". There were rhymes on many pages, and my dad would do all the right voices. (the croaky one for the pudding, the squeaky penguin!
) Anyways, I discovered it again in the bookshelf again at the age of nine, found it funny and my dad told me I should read the Hobbit for a good book with songs, rhyming etc. I read the Hobbit in a month or so and eventually got LOTR and spent a whole year reading that, on and off.
So ... yeah. Whole obsessive nature developed from that.