[JennyHallu]

You mean there's a club for people like us?

I'm 21, and I think I was 7 or 8 when my dad first read The Hobbit aloud to us. It must have been that age, or thereabouts, because my younger brother and sister sat rapt with me. The volume he read from was illustrated, and I remember my father creating separate voices and idiosyncracies for each and every dwarf, so that everything came alive for me on the page. I read The Hobbit for myself only a few weeks later (I learned to read before attending kindergarten, thanks to my father's stories), and when I was eleven I talked my grandparents into buying me a LotR boxed set that was in the Scholastic Books catalog my teacher sent home with us, and intended for much older students. My public school teachers were appalled. Those poor paperbacks! I read them so many times the bindings split. The Return of the King had been inadvertently re-edited into three volumes last time I saw them.

Homeschooling soon left me plenty of time to read at whatever "grade level" I chose, and I tackled the Silmarillion and a plethora of books of legend and myth, a passion directly aroused by the sense of epic and continuity in Tolkien's works. I usually had two or three books open at any given time (and scattered on flat surfaces throughout the house, to my mother's intense frustration).

Now, though, having married and moved half a country from my parent's house, I own no Tolkien but a cherished copy of The Hobbit, given me by my siblings for my high school graduation. Oh well.

I envy those of you who've read the books in multiple languages. It seems to me something that could give such an interesting perspective on the stories, but I don't speak anything but English well enough even to try.