The road goes ever on...

I was going to call this "Queer Lodgings," since I was reading that chapter in The Hobbit when I was staying in my daughter's hospital room. Happily, she has since been discharged, and I have since moved on all the way to "Concerning Hobbits" in The Fellowship of the Ring.

I have made several false starts on The Trilogy (note the allcaps) in the past decade or so, but I really believe I'm going to manage it this time. For a time, I believe I lost the ability to read. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it really was quite hard for me to finish anything for a while there. It was demoralizing and depressing.

I don't know if it's the fact that I'm re-reading something I already know quite well, or if it's because I'm re-reading my favorite book of all time, but so far, reading The Trilogy been a delight. I savored every page of The Hobbit, and intend to do the same with Fellowship. It was about this time 32 years ago that I read the book for the first time, and the memories of that first reading are with me still. In fact, I was giving serious consideration to giving full vent to my nostalgia by listening to the same music I did then, and using my mint condition copies of the same Ballentine paperback set I read back then. Money to buy saidsame music made me chicken out on the former, and my hopelessly OCD personality made me chicken out on the latter (Eeek! Is that a crease in the cover?), but I'm remembering that time just the same.

In fact, I've already made a pact with myself to re-read the trilogy at this same time of the year prior to the release of the film version of The Hobbit. It's not quite Christopher Lee's "every year" discipline, but it's a start.

Stay tuned for another post on a completely different topic within a few days time — I'm simply too tired to manage it right now, and my bed is calling...