Lord of the Rings

   If any of you know me particularly well, you will have taken note that I love Lord of the Rings. Not just one of the books, all three; also loving The Hobbit. These are novels that I would quickly recommend to anyone that had any sort of attention span and loved authors that include details... about EVERYTHING. That is one of the things I love about Tolkien. He gives you detail about every little piece of information in the story and those places where he does not include the extra prose? He puts it in the appendices which you can find at the end of the third installment of the trilogy, or at the back of your trusty Lord of the Rings Collection. I for one, have three individual books and do not tote them around with me so when I need to look at the appendices(which I have never really done) and I only have The Fellowship of the Ring on hand and my appendices are at the back of my The Return of the King, I am out of luck.
   I am very lucky to be taking a Lord of the Rings class this trimester at school and when I say I am lucky, I am incredibly lucky to be taking part in this. I have already read through all of the books once(and am reading them again even though I do not like to re-read books) and am actually pretty excited to be reading them again. They get better with every reading it seems like and I seem to understand the mind of Tolkien a little better and what he really meant to put into his works. I never would have thought back in eighth grade when I read The Hobbit that The Lord of the Rings would be such a huge part of my life though and that it would have such a huge impact on me as a person. I remember in eighth grade when Mrs. Donahue handed us little paperback(or maybe they were hardback) covers of the book and I was not excited to read these books at all. I thought it would be this horrible work of fiction, because the author was so... old. Turns out though, he was not old, he was dead. Whoopsies! I grew to love the book though over the course of a month that we read it in and when everyone else stopped reading it at the end, I kept on reading and guess who got the best grade in that class? Oh yeah, that was me. At that point in my life, I just thought that it was a good piece of fiction. I was definitely not planning on reading the LotR trilogy.
    I started reading the trilogy at the beginning of my freshman year of high school, I am now a senior, and I thought that it was possibly the best book I had ever read. I had not reached the second book of the trilogy yet though(there are technically six books, I had just started the second) and I was not expecting what was about to happen. I made it two chapters into the second part of the Fellowship and I just stopped. Dead in my tracks. Just stopped. I had reached the chapter that was titled The Council of Elrond. This may perhaps be the longest chapter in any of the books and it is about 40 pages of the elves, men, dwarves, and hobbits deciding what they are going to do with this ring. I lost my interest there. Plus, I stopped for the fact that I had lost all of the reading time I had because the dreaded assigned reading had started up. Later during my freshman year I decided to come back to the book, after never thinking I would. The book just called to me. It urged me to go find it in the library again, pick it up once more. So, little fourteen year old me picked that book back up again and I poured over and analyzed ever single page of The Fellowship of the Ring. I had to relinquish the school's copy but my father gave me his copy(it's almost antique) and I finished the book on the last day of school.
   After not wanting to read it for so many years because my dad liked it, I am happy that I finally picked up the book and said yes to it. I have another funny story about this, but it will have to wait for another day. :)