Lets see if I can remember back that far....
It was 1975 and summer was in full swing in Seattle. I was walking about with my neighbor one warm night, and as we shared some pipeweed all rolled up in a ZigZag, he told me about this book he just read and enjoyed very much called The Hobbit. I asked what a Hobbit was, and he told me they were short care-free folk who like eating, drinking, & smoking! Said I'd be interested in reading it since I had finished one of Asimov's Foundation books and wanted something different to read. So he loaned me the paperback and said he was starting on the Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring. Read through The Hobbit and liked it, but thought it to be a bit juvenile. He said Fellowship Of The Ring was better and loaned me that paperback as he had just finished it. I read it through and indeed I enjoyed it much more than The Hobbit, so I read Two Towers as he had finished it. By this time I was eating the tale up, and I finished Two Towers while he had stalled a third of the way into Return of the King. After a couple weeks of bugging him about whether he finished it yet and he getting annoyed at me, I finally checked out an old 1957 copyright hardback of Return of the King out of the library and read on through. Loved the big fold-out map that was in the back of that hardback edition, so when I returned it I checked out Fellowship and Two Towers hardbacks and started reading the Trilogy all over again! When I checked out Return of the King the second time and finished it, I delved into the appendices and all they had to offer. Started learning the elven scripts and, lo & behold, I met a Tolkien geek babe in my senior year in high school. We would practice our Tengwar scripting and pass notes to each other, and sit by the flag pole at lunch telling tales to each other. When they started doing some renovation work on the bus-loading zone near the flag pole, we saw they had just poured fresh curbing, so we decided to cut the class after lunch and imprint 'Friends' in Tengwar. We made a couple mistakes, but it remained in that curb until 2005 when they totally re-worked the school and dug up the curbs and flagpole.
So yeah, I was a Tolkien geek since the summer of 1975. When word got out that the Silmarillion was going to be published, we geeks were overjoyed! Went to a book release line party and got my copy! Tried to read it, and couldn't get into it at all. I finally skipped the biblicy creation beginning and got into the meat of the book. Aside from a few takes of the Noldor and of Turin, it never really did that much for me. I enjoyed more Unfinished Tales when it came out, and I really enjoyed Children of Hurin when it came out a few years ago. Thought it was a proper treatment of the tale. I will always come back to read the Trilogy every now and again. I think I'm up to 11 readings in 38 years. Sadly, I have only read it through once since those PJ movies came out. I'm way passed due to read it through again.
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