Volume 49, Number 1 · January 17, 2002
Goblin Market
By Louis Menand
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
a film directed by Peter Jackson
I read The Lord of the Rings in 1963, when I was eleven, two years before the American paperback edition became a cult book on college campuses. My mother had ordered the book from England—it had an American publisher, Houghton Mifflin, but the American hardcover must have been unavailable, or else we thought it would be classier to own the British—and so I had a superior attitude toward the paperback and toward the Tolkien craze when they came along, like a person who has been summering in the Hamptons since the days when they were mostly potato fields. I felt pleased to have read the book before it was a book everyone read. It's a feeling one does not necessarily outgrow.
Review, 2168 words
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