Hello, people, I'm new here as well.
Regarding Iarwain's post, I have a personal story with Tolkien that relates to it.
Since I was a kid, I've always loved books, and I read them all, all that fell in my hands. Some years ago, I think 1999, someone talked to me about Tokien and LOTR, wich I had never read before.
Well, before I got my hands into it, I met some other people, I think the same kind of people that gave Iarwain a reason to post this. They told me things like: "LOTR is the best book ever written, don't mind reading anything else". I was angry with that, because I already had read Kakfa, Borges, Orwell, Dostoievsky, GG Marquez, and that kind of phrase sounds to me, even now, as an insult. There are so many good books in the world that I think it's impossible so tell anyone else wich is better.
Of course, you can always say wich one you like best, wich one is more like you. But even then there's a chance that another book exists, one that you never read, wich you would like better.
Because of that, I kept myself far from Tolkien (what I now is a silly thing to do). I only read LOTR two years after that, because a friend of mine bought the book and I read some pages and liked it.
Anyway, now I love Tolkien, I love LOTR and I read the Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales, and I think those stories are deep and beautiful, and they mean a lot to me. But I'll never say LOTR is better than "One hundred years of Solitude" (finished in 1970) or "Fictions" from JL Borges. Just to mention two books from the last century. But I won't say that those ones are better than LOTR neither.
By the way, there is in "Fictions" a story about a fantasy world made called Tlön, wich I reminded when I first read LOTR.
PS: I beg your pardon for my lousy English.
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