I'm currently reading an interesting
book about 'nerdy' topics like the title. It has a chapter devoted to Tolkien (at which I have yet to arrive), but there's another mention too.
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In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf's reading comes in the form of scrolls and prophesies to figure out what the hell is going on. He's blowing a lot of dust off this ****, too, because it always seems like no one has taken up this kind of thing for a long, long time. Even here in Middle-Earth, a world born from the very literate linguist J.R.R Tolkien, a place where books do exist, they're treated like something other people used to handle. And then--either in the novels or the films--Gandalf's reading of old legends and myths is more like a training montage from a Rocky movie than anything else.
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Offhand, I can't think of any reading for
pleasure that's done in the books. There are certainly no works of prose perused by the idle ME denizen.
The author, Ryan Britt, goes on:
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Plus, the suggestion that The Hobbit or There and Back Again exists as some sort of real book (Bilbo's life story?) is borderline insulting to a real memoirist. Because no one ever seems to read anyway, Bilbo writing his life story comes across like a delusional hobbyist deciding he can write a memoir, even though he's never read one.
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What about that? Why
would Bilbo make a written record of his adventures? Not for his heir, apparently, as he was already working on it when Gandalf and Balin came to call long before Frodo was born. Is there any merit to the author's claim?