Of all the good and bad going on in my life, I can find no better topic than how much I like Tolkien's world of Middle Earth.

Back at the dawn of time, when I was in Grade 8, we had an English teacher. One of the things he did, on Friday mornings, was to sit all the kids on the floor and read aloud to them. It fascinated me that everyone paid such close attention. The book geeks, like me, made sense. But the classroom bullies, who I thought wouldn't read but more likely couldn't, were just as rapt. I was a new transfer to that school for that grade - it was obvious that this reading had been going on for quite some time. I had no idea what the book was.

A few years later, someone pointed me to The Lord of the Rings. I read it, fascinated, many times through high school. It was then that I realized the book that had been read to me in Grade 8 was The Hobbit. I think I bought The Silmarillion the day it was published. In hardback - likely the most expensive book I had ever purchased. In University, I had all the pictures cut from various Brothers Hildebrandt calendars ringed around my room, in chronological order according to the storylines. I've collected the rest of the books over the decades since then. Asked for and recieved The Children of Hurin as recently as this past Christmas.

You can't read all of Tolkien's mythologies (and that's what the prequel books to LoTR are) because you like fiction. You have to read these books because you love anthropology, history, and folklore. Which, I do. I read Tolkien with the same satisfaction that I get reading the "real" mythologies of human cultures.