This looks like the right place.
To find the origin of my Tolkien obsession, we have to go back about 12 years, where we find a 9 year old eagerly reading a grammar text. What, a grammar text? Yes, for this was no ordinary grammar book, filled with nothing but sentence diagramming exercises and information about the parts of speech. In the last pages, there were excerpts from novels that had been turned into some sort of assignment, mostly of the "correct the removed punctuation in this paragraph" sort, and one was from
The Fellowship of the Ring. After reading the passages several times and wondering where Mordor was, why Frodo wanted to go there and why Sam wanted to go with him, I went to ask my mother if we could go to the library to find this set of books called
The Lord of the Rings that I had just been reading about. Unfortunately, my mother is a lifelong member of the fantasy is not real literature society, and flatly refused to facilitate my "wasting my time" with such books. That put an end to my reading. Temporarily.
And so the years went by. Every time I went to a bookstore, I would walk past the Tolkien section, look at the books, and wonder if I would ever find out what happened in the rest of the story. Finally, my younger sister was assigned
The Hobbit as part of her book club. She hated it, but as soon as she put it down, I grabbed the book and read it cover to cover. The old curiosity was renewed instantly, and when
The Hobbit was dropped off at the library return desk, I left with a copy of
The Fellowship of the Ring, which was shortly followed by
The Two Towers and
The Return of the King. I've never turned back.
