[Keeper of Dol Guldur]

No. Actually, reading the Lord of the Rings made me worse.

Seriously ... let's see ... in grade school and middle school I was an A+ student. Then in 9th grade I read the Lord of the Rings, and in high school and college I was a lazy, chronically bored, always sleeping mess of a C student.

And to top it off, I spent my waking hours in school drawing characters from the Lord of the Rings.

The only class I ever had a 100 average in was Trilogy ... a class where we read the Lord of the Rings.

And also, for four years I never felt the need to read anything non-Tolkien. That can't be good for expanding my horizons, I'm sure I missed out on loads of good reads, and I KNOW I missed out on a lot of reading for classes I could have been doing, but wasn't, because if I was going to read anything, it had to be LOTR.

On the bright side, some of the topics on this forum helped teach me good debate skills for college, and through all that drawing, I got better at everything from drawing horses to human musculature, all sorts of texture and shadow, and architecture and weapons.

Which is good, I suppose.

That's not to say the Lord of the Rings isn't the greatest book ever written ... it's a thrill ride, with some of the best writing ever, especially the suggestive parts Tolkien stuck in between all the great descriptive parts. The Father of Modern Myth.

Anyway, I'm actually a worse person. But I'm a better artist ... so there's some good that came of this.