Yes!! Three times in fact!!
First up, Grade 9: When I first fell in love with Tolkien's works. I had actually just got the set (including "The Hobbit") and read them all at least twice in first semester. Then, secnd semester comes along and my English teacher gave us our indpendent reading assignment. I took this opportunity and asked her if it would be alright if I did mine on "The Hobbit", and she approved. This is when I delved deeper into the life of Tolkien, doing research on the beloved professor himself.
The next one was actually in first semester of this year: Once again, our English teacher gave us our independent reading assignment. The only difference this year was that it was more than that: we had to do a book fair. What it was was that we had to take three books that went along with the unit we were doing. Then we had to go and compare and contrast them. My first choice (don't worry, all this has a point) was the recent Harry Potter book (The Half Blood Prince), the second was The Diary of Ann frank and the last was The Return of the King. I chose these three because they appealed to me the most and there was one major thing they had in common: war. So this enabled me too look even deeper into the works of Tolkien (as well as Rowling).
The last time was second semester of this year, and I actually started a thread to
here to help me out with it. Another independent reading, except this time we had to do an analysis of the book. So, i chose The Silmarillion, probably one of the hardest books to do an analysis of. However, after reading it a second time, this opened up new questions in my head which led me to create four other threads:
Maiar or Man,
Who's King Now,
Symbollic Representations In The Lord of The Rings and
Numenorean Likenesses.
As you can see, doing all that work has really broadened my understanding of Tolkien's works and really makes me look at it with a different persepective.