Ah, me. It's rather close to the time of year when I first read LotR -- it was June, as I recall, when I was 11, which means it's 45 years ago. It was just about the time when the book was being "discovered" on college campuses, but that wasn't where I first noticed it (obviously
). For a month or two prior to that, my second brother (who was all of 13) had been devoutly reading what looked like a prayer book during Sunday Mass. Now, I knew him well enough to know that there was no way he was really that pious, so after we got home one Sunday, I snuck a look under the embossed plastic cover he'd put on the book, and discovered that it was one of the volumes of LotR. I'd never seen that particular brother so engrossed in any reading, so I decided I'd give it try and see what was so interesting to him.
I admit, it took a little effort to get into it, but not that much. By the time the hobbits left Bree, I was hooked. (and I'll also admit that I would been hooked more easily if not for Tom Bombadil. I was not the kind of kid who went for silliness. Very long story, and beside the point.)
I reacted to it in many ways. The most powerful single reaction was that I found in the character of Gandalf the adult role model I lacked, having come from an extremely dysfunctional family in which one parent was horribly abusive and the other was not allowed to bond with us. Tolkien was also one of the first authors I'd read who made me want to tell stories of my own, though he was not the last. But I loved the detail in the world he built, and that has been a strong influence in my own writing.