The Tolkien Reading Project
I first came across Tolkien when I was around 15 years old - a close friend was raving about this “Lord of the Rings” thing… My parents kindly took me to the big library in town every couple of weeks (I’ve been a voracious reader all my life) and was usually to be found in the Science Fiction section so I looked it up. Oddly there seemed to be 3 books by this Tolkien fellow, none of them called “Lord of the Rings”, but the one called “The Two Towers” sounded the most interesting so I added it to my pile of books to borrow…
Obviously that didn’t go too well but at some point later I must have figured things out because for my 18th Birthday I asked for the three volume Allen & Unwin hardback edition, which was about £7 per volume. Over the following couple of years I added a paperback “The Hobbit” (which I felt was a bit juvenile) and a hardback “Silmarillion” (frankly, impenetrable and abandoned after a few pages) and a hardback edition of the “Letters” (mildly interesting in parts).
Over the years I gave away or sold almost every book from my youth, partly due to house moves and partly in favour of e-books, but as my children have moved out and left behind empty rooms I’ve once again started to collect and physical books.
Not only collecting but looking at them anew, with fresh, older (and perhaps wiser) eyes and coming to realise just what a staggering achievement the entire legendarium was!
I had over the years re-read LoTR several times, mostly recently buying the single volume paperback as a handy-size source. Next came a hardback “Silmarillion” which on a proper re-read is actually a deeply profound work, brilliantly written. This was followed by the “The Annotated Hobbit” which proved just what a master of the retcon our author was. And that lead to a desire to read more about the process of the writing, to learn more details of the legendarium and to consider the criticism and reviews of the works, both academic and popular.
All told, I know have about six shelf-feet of books, well over a million words that I am working through…
I have listed all these owned works in the reading list here , and you can find my notes on each of the works by searching out the “tolkien” tag in my reviews section (also TBD).