[deagol]

"Frodo was alive, but taken by the enemy."

This is the first thing that popped into my head when I started thinking about my first reading of the trilogy. I had purchsed The Return of the King paperback through mail order from Ballantine and it had not arrived by the time I had finished The Two Towers. It was the very first time I can remember being absolutely frantic about what would happen next and unable to find out.

I was introduced to The Hobbit at age 12 by a book club flyer at school and, at first glance, it did not look to be my cup of tea at all. Elves and goblins and magic rings? Oh . . . no, thank you. I don't think so. For perspective, as I recall, my reading material of choice that year had been the HMS Bounty trilogy. But my Language Arts teacher -- this was the '70s and we referred to English class as "Language Arts," can you dig it? -- who knew I was an avid reader, reommended it. Long story short, I devoured The Hobbit in two or three bites and found, somewhat surprisingly, that I still had a taste for the fairy tale. Two years later, as a freshman in high school I had an English teacher (in high school English class was just English class again) who would assign us one book to read -- in my day that book was The Catcher in the Rye -- and allow us to choose one. He had a cabinet in the class full of ratty old paperbacks, primarily of the fantasy and science fiction genre, and that is where I found out that there was a sequel to the funny little hobbit story -- and that the tale was, indeed, much darker and more sorrowful than I had at first imagined. It turned out that I had a latent taste for fantasy adventure after all, and I spent as much time as I could that school term and even my summer vacation poring over those books (once I got my hands on them), and even to this day, I always find something new and interesting to marvel at whenever I have occasion to open one.