For a kid who grew up loving both Harry and Frodo, this may seem, uhm... (the word I'm looking for is in my language and I've no idea how foreigners may get this: may katapusan. Though its literal translation is "has an end" I don't think that that is the way it should be told).
For my tenth birthday (that was an October) my dad bought me my first ever book--HP and the Sorcerer's Stone. (The first I read is Jonathan Livingston Seagull, back in his library). See, I was this weird kid with no playmates and had children's versions of Brothers Grimm for barbie dolls. I used to read and reread my Reading textbooks, and those had pretty much a lot of Greek myths and soem of Philippine legends, much to my cousins' dislike because I never played with them.
Then came a time, and Dad got me Smith and Giles. I did not appreciate Smith until much much later, but Giles I thought ridiculous but in an amusing and not negative fashion. This was around the time the movie version of HP1 is out, and I saw in the book portion of the Sunday paper a comparison of Harry and Frodo. I saw 'Tolkien' and 'Lord of the Rings,' two names I've seen in my Smith and Giles. I read the article, and the eleven-year-old in me got dead curious and pestered my dad until I wormed out a promise that he'd give me LotR for Christmas.
For my birthday that year he got me The Hobbit, which I admit I thought did not exist. He told me it's the sequel, and that it's a nice book in itself, suitable for my age--the language and the plot. But I did not read that soon, because my Grandma got me Harry Potter and teh Goblet of Fire that very day. Three weeks later my mom awoke me in the dead of night and gave me FotR--under the idea that I was done with Hobbit.
I loved every word of the intro about Hobbits, and so before I reached chapter 2 (shadows of the past) I chucked FotR away and looked for Hobbit. My dad was right, I loved the book. And then there was this incident that got me almost expelled from Dominican College: after I had my project checked I took Hobbir out and read. Then my teacher confiscated the book. Eleven-year-old kid that I was, I cried, and when we were dismissed, I called my mom. She told me to calm down. After our talk I went to the faculty room and screamed in flawless English, "B****, come out, give me my book back!" And began a saga... until the matter was brought to the Department of Education in our municipality. Dominican College, after my elementary graduation, released my Good Moral Certificate that I needed for a science high school scholarship (in our land a science hs is very much desired by pretty much every kid, but "many are called and few are chosen.")
High School... four years enduring and growing to love the natural sciences, hand in hand with Tolkien and Rowling' s fantasies. The teachers in science thought I shouldn't be there, thinking the government gave me the wrong scholarship. But I survived, graduated. En route I finished The Silmarillion, which I love above all, and the rest of the LotR trilogy, not to mention until HP6. From those two authors sprung my love for literature in general: I discovered the South American writers and good writers from my own land, on the top of the list. There was Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, and then there was Amy Tan, and then there are the immortal Romantics. Before I graduated I became an editor in our paper and grabbed some high-school journ awards.
My teachers and the school admin were very disappointed in me, who did not take a science college degree yet passed the entrance exams in the top three schools. Nonetheless, as the best journalist of their school they let me go, thinking I would get a BA Journ in one of the universities and wouldn't be such an awful waste of the tax-payer's money... until they found out that I'm taking comparative literature instead. My former adviser wanted to skin me alive for this, but they can't complain, I've had no contract anyway.
So they had to accept that... and when she asked what made such a promising journalist or scientist choose lit, I answered in all my honesty: Harry Potter and Kurufinwe Feanaro.
