Rereading Tolkien

[Formendacil]

It's interesting revisiting this nigh on eleven years later. Nothing I wrote before seems wrong (though I don't actually remember the writing of it).

In the decade plus since, I've found that my rate of re-reading has slowed, for two reasons: neither of which has much to do with the works themselves. Firstly, time has sped up, meaning that the self-assigned gap of appropriateness between necessary re-reads has increased.

The other is the constriction of time as children have entered the picture: I read so little now! Some of this, I am sure, is the bad habits of computer and smartphone, but much of it is trying to have something resembling a life of my own around the time-sucks of employment and parenting, such that while I *do* still read, the number of books I read overall has dropped--and if the rereading LotR takes up a more-or-less consistent ratio of books, the time required to read those books has increased.

I'm also waiting: I very much want to read all or part of The Hobbit and the LotR aloud to my children, and the first of them is not QUITE there (well, maybe he is for The Hobbit and I just haven't admitted the fact). So in the past couple years, there might be an element of "saving" it for an appropriate date.