May 20, 2003

Good Idea Lilly
Mr. Underhill

Lilly, that was a good idea to have our own "personal LOTR stories." So here's mine. I had read the Hobbit at age 11 and I really loved it. I really liked the Rankin-Bass cartoon also. Needless to say I was really into Bilbo, Gandalf, & Gollum at that time. So right after reading the Hobbit, I dove right into LOTR. I ran into a brick wall. I started the Fellowship, and I read about Bilbo and Frodo and Gandalf. But after Bilbo and Gandalf left the scene for a while, I got aggravated and quit reading. Later I went on to read TTT and ROTK on two consecutive days. I was really confused. I thought that Strider and Aragorn were 2 different people, I thought actually that Strider was an elf. :-) I also thought that Boromir was a walking tree. Don't know where I got that from ;-). I realize now that 11 was waaayyyyy too young to read LOTR. So years later, when I heard that they were making a Lord of the Rings movie, I tried again. This time I fell in love with the series. I read all three books, this time it took me a month, but at least I understood everything. I saw the movie and received a copy of LOTR for Christmas and immediately read it again. Reading it a 2nd time, I really understood the little details, and having the movie to fall back on, my visualization was way better. Since then, I have re-read the Hobbit, read the Silmarillion, Unfinished tales, re-read LOTR, and got my Dad and my sister both to read it. So although my brother, who's 10 somehow read it and got a lot out of it, I do recommend waiting at least until your teenage years to read LOTR. It is definitely an enjoyable experience, and one of the greatest books of all time IMHO.