The Hobbit first

sartorias asked her readers, did you read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings first, and how did the experience go? She got a lot of interesting answers. Here's mine:

I read The Hobbit first. I was eleven and in the fifth grade when my teacher chose it as one of the books she read to us, chapter by chapter, in the final minutes of the school day. I was quite taken with it, but the real breakthrough came a few months later when I was offered the chance to borrow a copy. I grabbed the opportunity to read it for myself instead of just hearing it aloud, and to catch up on the Mirkwood chapter which I'd missed through being sick that day.

Like so many of the readers who'd written to Tolkien during the interval between H and LOTR, I was most enchanted by the historical and geographical vistas revealed in the story, with hints of so much more left untold. My teacher had told us there were sequels - she used the plural. Immediately after finishing the book I did something I'd never done before, which was to raid my own money and ride my bike down to a small local bookstore and buy copies of all four volumes.

From that point I was lost to the world. I read the whole thing again each year on the anniversary of my first reading. It took six years - achingly long years if you're an adolescent - before I found anyone else who'd read the books and wanted to discuss them. And that was a discussion group of the Mythopoeic Society. And there I've been ever since.