>And how many times have you seen someone reading a book that size on the subway/bus/ferry? ;)

Good point. You may have convinced me.

I'd normally say "I bought a copy of ISO 8601". In this case I think the author thought it was a little funny to say "I bought iso 8601".

Don't forget that The Hobbit is an adaptation of a childrens book. I think a bit of slapstick fits right in.

Have a look http://blog.kaipakartik.com for the books I enjoyed reading

It's also the basis of the whole high fantasy western culture, including D&D.

I'm looking to read Asimov's Foundation series again. Maybe spend more time with Hyperion.

Cabin in the Woods

Looper

The Hobbit

House at the End of the Street

Can't remember much else really. Also seen Twilight but I'd only really recommend that as a date movie.

To points made by others though he was a professor of English at Oxford for many years prior and wrote copiously during that time.

How Ideas Spread - It was decent, I feel like it could be condensed into an infographic after the fact, and hold great value.

The Lean Startup - Excellent. Changed the way I do business.

A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1 - Great book, wonderful universe. Apparently Martin loves himself a good descriptions of clothes.

A Clash of Kings: A song of Ice and Fire, Book 2 - Great book.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid - Good book for a kid, pretty irritating kid though (the kid in the book, not mine).

The Andromeda Strain - Excellent!

Christ the Sum of All Spiritual Things - Great book! Very healthy view of a Christocentric theology.

Dracula - Sleeper hit of the year. This book was awesome.

Pippi Longstocking - Read this to my son, and we really enjoyed it.

The Secrets of Power Negotiating - Helped me out during the process of buying a house by understanding various negotiation gambits. Would recommend.

Scrum - Another book that changed the way I work. Would absolutely recommend it.

The Wizard of Oz - Much better than the movie.

The 4-Hour Workweek - .... It was "okay". I don't know. I'm still torn.

The Swiss Family Robinson - Awesome book, full of fun things to talk about with your kids.

The BFG - This was the start of the Roald Dahl stage for bedtime reading.. It's a great book, one of my favorite Dahl books.

Matilda - Reading this as an adult, it was not nearly as fun as when I was a kid, however my son loved it.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox - Fun and easy read for the kids.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Pretty decent book.

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator - Terrible. Absolutely terrible.

I do really honestly believe that Haskell needs a "paragon project" like Matrix or Jepsen that has proven itself useful to the world without respect to its Haskellness, and then show that this solution was much easier in Haskell.

I keep getting down-voted on this thread, and I expect it to continue. Friends thought I was nuts to give up on Lost after season 1, or The Hobbit after movie 1, or the GoT books after book 3. After years of hearing much talk and seeing no walk, I'm giving up on Haskell. More than that, I'm going to call out anyone talking it up to give specifics because literally everyone I've every spoken to about it gives it a very high regard, but have never, ever written a line of it.

I have lost count of the number of times I have re-read Tolkien's works. I first read The Hobbit in 7th grade, and went right on to LotR. It was some time before I was able to get my hands on a copy of The Silmarillion (the hard cover edition--I still have it), but I remember reading it almost straight through once I got it, because I was so keen to see what was in it after reading the appendices to LotR.

Early books: Arrow to the Sun and Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen and The Hobbit - all very stimulating to imagination.

Of course, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. When we bought my second son the hard-bound original stories of Thomas the Tank Engine, which was filled with wonderful art, he literally sat and paged through it for like 45 minutes straight. And he wasn't even 2 yet at the time.

I also read my kids "The Wizard of Oz", all the original "Winnie the Pooh" books, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and many others, including the usual short-form kids books like Dr. Seuss and P.D. Eastman when they were really little. I miss reading to my kids, but eventually we couldn't all fit in the bed together... (Plus, they're all adults now.)

That's probably one reason why I read.

To say that Pound's translation of the Analects was more profoundly important than the Tao and Faulkner's The Town and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Hobbit from my youth and The Three Little Pigs read nearly nightly to a child doesn't make sense.

Sometimes I walk through Castaneda's world.

Sometimes Knuth's.

Other's I am in my head with Vonnegut.

Profoundness is out in the world.

And many books point to it.

For instance, I read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy and genuinely thought that the Wizard's name was Grandalf.

I had a tough time in grade school learning to read and write, but I credit my Grandmother constantly reading to me for giving me a strong desire to learn to read myself.

"The C Programming Language" by K&R (I read this very young 12-13, it's life changing aspects probably had a lot to do with my age)

"The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien

"Welcome to the Monkey House" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

"plenty" perhaps oversells the genre pre-Tolkien, and also afaik Jack Vance didn't start writing until well after The Hobbit was published, so I'm not sure he belongs on your list - William Morris would have been a much better example as a direct precursor to both Tolkien and Lewis.

Book two he gets a little too nuts with sailing junk and wow that plot device at the end is awfully familiar, but it's still got some nice world building. Three's back to form (though I'd favor the first one, slightly).

The original contract is super short; the movie contract is extremely bloated... maybe it really does take a lawyer to call that bloating "an impressive piece of work". Impressive would have been to make a children's movie out of a children's book, instead of doing whatever with it and staining the careers of otherwise fine actors, just because it can't fight back and money is nice to have.

If this offends anyone; good. The existance of all these movies, their treatment of legit stories for children to turn them into brainless crap ala Star Wars, offends me as well.

YA, as pointed out in sister threads, includes books like Catcher in the Rye, The Hobbit, Ender's Game, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and so forth. Stereotypes like this one hurt these discussions quite a bit. Stereotypes also prevent people from reading good books.

> Young adults would be better served by ignoring YA in favor of the wider book world

I might agree with you if it was only authors who were intentionally targeting those genres. It's not. Publishers will take general books and market them as YA. I know of some really good authors who have been shoehorned into the YA market (Forthright, as one example).

> books written before the YA genres existed

YA has been around for over 200 years now. The YA category (as opposed to children's) came about around 1802 (per Wikipedia).

The problem with the Hobbit movies is just that they did that very badly.

Children's stories are better for this, as they are usually written with the view of being read aloud. Plus they also make better bedtime stories :)

There are a couple of good examples at 4:57 onwards. Link at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f3PFfK-9Gk

Edited to add there is a video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9qrZC7WUio of the 128k Spectrum version. Looking at the speed I suspect they pre-rendered the images in the background and used the extra memory to store them and then copy the completed image to display when needed.

Tolkien did, however, create a very detailed and very rich world. There's plenty of backdrop there on which to write new stories whether or not they hew to anything specific that's already been written in that universe. On the other hand, there are plenty of rich worlds that authors have built over time. And most of them don't carry the baggage and weight of expectations that anything associated with Tolkien inevitably would.

ADDED: As noted elsewhere, the rights to other Tolkien works would have to be obtained.

On the other hand, splitting a book that wasn't meant to be serial can make certain sections feel meaningless - they aren't meant to be taken separately. A perfect example is the movie adaptation of the Hobbit: you had two movies that felt unresolved and one movie that just dropped you in right before the climax of the book.

I was ensnared by franchise hype for the last couple of years, and seeing this film was the turning point for me to stop and reflect that not one of the dozen+ franchise movies I saw at the theater in this time managed to remotely live up to my expectations.

I believe all is not lost, though. Other industries have shown the public eventually fatigues from such exhaustive, quality-less milking. Personally I've had my fill of being duped with franchise marketing, and next time I start thinking of wasting my money on one more of these ridiculous plot-less, CGI-bloated rehashes, I'll look for a decent original movie to wash the temptation off.

The covers are some kind of faux-leather so they fall in between a hardback and paperback book; they are flexible, but the covers don't fold like a paperback. The binding was, in my opinion, excellent; you couldn't lay the book open, but you also didn't feel like you were cracking the spine when you were reading. The paper is quite thin but tough enough, and I didn't find that the other side showed through or anything. They were harder to read in dim light due to the smaller type, but they were laid out just like a full-sized book.

IIRC I paid something like $30 for the set on Amazon. I would absolutely buy other books bound in the exact same way.

I don't remember exact age, but I think I was 6yo, and I think I was already in first year of primary school, very early into it.

The rest is history, Hobbit was a big book and now I devour million-word epics for light weekend reading.

I also encountered the 8bit game, but much, much later, during my first forays into retrocomputing as 12yo :)

Memory is unreliable but I recall my high school class using a pretty good textbook that included Beowulf with both old English and modern translations, but also the chapter of The Hobbit where Bard shoots the dragon, which stylistically invited some interesting comparisons. It was a pretty good lesson for a high school kid who was also a fan of Tolkien, back before that was something you could be without reading any books.

I think I was a little slow, or at best normal in picking up reading as a kid. But for whatever reason, by about the age of 8 I was reading well ahead of the rest. So I never read The Cat in the Hat, but I read the The Hobbit long before most kids.

And I'm glad, because that second level is where the real power-tool lies. There's little point reading non-fiction at Cat in the Hat level. But there's plenty of facts available that are simpler to read than The Hobbit.

That isn't to say I didn't learn other stuff: my favorite childhood book was about science. But it had lots of pictures, and when fist got it, my parents read an explained it to me.

I adopted voices for the different characters to keep them interested, and to give them something to look forward to, I would not let them watch the movies until we finished reading the corresponding volume of the series. We had so much fun with this!

I'm extremely thankful for Christopher's work because the movies (which were released when I was a teenager) were my first introduction to his father's work.

Hmm, I doubt it. The Hobbit is fun, but many adults returning to LOTR think "gosh, this is long, dull and badly written". Here's an example, which is also a more interesting review than the unherd one:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n22/jenny-turner/reasons...

Perhaps nothing should be allowed to remain private. Perhaps privacy is an affront to the rights of the people. But I don't think so. I think everyone has special, private things from their lives - special things they would be upset to see appropriated and distorted at will by other people with little to no understanding or reverence for the meaning those things hold to you. Christopher is only different because the things that made his childhood special and to which he feels protective have become an unstoppable blockbuster film series.

Hell, I can sympathise. Maybe it's just snobbery, but damned if I don't feel disgusted by the shameless, opportunistic faux-Tolkienism whipped up by by New Zealanders in the wake of the films. Nobody in New Zealand gave a shit about Tolkien before the movies. It was only when people realised that it was going to be huge that suddenly everyone became a lifelong Tolkien fan and every farmer next to a film site was running a Hobbit tour... You know, my grandpa read The Hobbit to me when I was young, and he even has a photo from when he met Tolkien (before the books took off.)

Edit: On another note, I think it's a bit rich for Hackernews readers to criticise Christopher for snobbery/possessiveness - after all, the whole bloody point of Hackernews is to discourage average internet users, prevent that 'Eternal September' thing - and maintain a conversation to an elite-defined standard. Everyone has their own snobbish preferences I think.

- The Lord of The Rings

- The Hobbit

- Dracula

- The Little Prince

- Animal Farm

- Asterix and Obelix comicbooks

- Siddhartha

For the next time, I'm going to try "Necronmicon" (H. P. Lovecraft!)

(EDIT: Formatting and added "Siddhartha")

I had read the books as a teenager in the 80's, 20 years before the movies existed, the same paperback books from my father that we re-read together. I was happy to re-read them, because I had missed much of the poetry (as noted in other comments here) and forgotten some of the story. I had seen the movies in between, but I'm referring to the deeper stories and in-book legendaria that the movies didn't cover. Despite the changes and omissions (and Hollywood effects), I still think the movies did a good job, as good as could be expected.

BTW, we started reading Little House on the Prairie when my daughter was 4, and also read all of Narnia and a few others before Tolkein. Reading with your kids is a great way to re-discover the books of your childhood (or discover, because I'd never read LHotP).

This sucks, because I _need_ to know what's in the book.

While it is fair to say that one specific fundamentalist young-Earth creationist Baptist certainly turned me from “it isn’t true but it doesn’t matter” to “it is actively harmful for people to believe this”, I should also say that the liberal version of Catholicism at my school — liberal enough to not explicitly condemn abortion or homosexuality, even though this was the U.K. in the 1990s and Section 28 still in force — had terrible sex education which completely ignored the existence of e.g. chlamydia, and I do think that was due to the religion given how quickly I learned about it the moment I moved to the next step in my education.

The open-mindedness may have been good for me as a teenager going through a goth-paganism phase, but it also meant she gave my dad homeopathic remedies when he got bowel cancer, and she got Alzheimer’s 15 years younger than her mother “despite” her use of Bach flower remedies for memory.

[0] naturally this meant I learned to read the outer border of the Allen & Unwin edition of The Hobbit, and the text in the hand drawn maps inside: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/...

The world of the Lord of the Rings exists solely for the purpose of providing an explanation for the evolution of his made up elvish languages, which was the real interest of this professor of linguistics. That it was published at all was an accident of the fact that people liked the bedtime story he wrote for his son (The Hobbit) which drew inspiration from his linguistically-driven worldbuilding.

You can see the emotional story arc -- the shapes of the stories -- for more than 16,000 books.

I train a Word2Vec model on the vocabulary of all those books (almost 1.5 billion words) and then I use a clustering algorithm to score all those words on a sentiment scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 is the most negative and 10 is the most positive). Then I break the books into 50 equal-sized chunks and aggregate the positive and negative scores for each chunk.

You can click on any of the chart segments to see a word cloud of all the words that contributed to the positive and negative sentiment of that chunk. You can really see the ups and downs of the stories, as the protagonists struggle to overcome their obstacles, when you look at those charts!

Here are a few of my favorite example books to show people:

The Hobbit

http://prosecraft.io/library/j-r-r-tolkien/the-hobbit/

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

http://prosecraft.io/library/j-k-rowling/harry-potter-and-th...

Animal Farm

http://prosecraft.io/library/george-orwell/animal-farm/

I first encountered this method not through Vonnegut but through the "Hedonometer" project, at the University of Vermont Computational Story Lab. They use this technique on the twitter firehose, to measure the overall emotional arc of the world, as expressed in social media.

https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/

There's an excellent episode of the podcast Lexicon Valley where they discuss the hedonometer project, with the researchers at UVM who developed it...

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2015/0...

How much shovelware do I have to take before I am allowed to skip one? I don't even think Tolkien was the greatest author ever (there's just so much random stuff in LOTR for example), but for me there is bounds and leaps more humanity in one of any of those books than in all LOTR movies combined; so unless I missed the dude remarking that LOTR was horrible, and that he is making The Hobbit differently to make up for it, I know that for me this thing is going to be neither subtle, nor beautiful. I just didn't want to point all of this out in detail because it makes me seem like such a snob, I'll take the "troll" thanks. If this stuff is fine art for you, I'll be rolling in the dirt having fun.

My Dad reading to me as a kid are the most cherished memories I have. I'll never forget how wonderful it was to sit on the floor with my brothers while my dad settled into hid dads big old rocking chair to read to us.

My dad has always been a busy guy, so it means all the more to look back at my life and realize that my dad set aside 2+ hours a night just to read to me and my brothers for nearly 5 years. This display of consistency and loyalty to his family makes me emotional even now just thinking about it.

Additionally, the books my Dad read really helped me connect with him. He read to us the same books he read as a kid: A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, all of Sherlock Holmes, Peter Pan, and many more. Having been exposed to the same media, it helped my brothers and I relate to our dad, and makes our relationship stronger to this day.

Read to your kids. It's an easy "parent-child" activity, and if you start with material that's interesting, you'll both enjoy it.

I didn't know there were 3 films, so I was so annoyed at the ending that I went back and read The Hobbit. And you know what? The movie is actually a pretty good adaptation.

somewhat <SPOILER ALERT>:

The battle of five armies, which will show up in the last movie is likely to be much more epic than the book, based on Jackson's renditions of other battles of Middle Earth.

</SPOILER ALERT>

I would go one step further: Peter Jackson's adaptation has been nothing short of fantastic. He's been pretty faithful to the LoTR story, but his movies have sparked interest in Tolkein's universe among those who would have never known about it otherwise. None of my friends would even consider reading the Hobbit or LoTR, but they've all seen and enjoyed the movies. (A tiny minority even tried reading the book). Now, its something that we enjoy talking about over many afternoons

Strangely, the Fighting Fantasy series was also a big influence - a cousin gave me Citadel of Chaos just after it came out and it really pushed my interesting in books and a an only child I tracked down almost every solo roleplaying booking I could find.

I also loved Eric the Viking ( the Terry Jones version ), which I now read to my children and The Odysseus books that Tony Robinson wrote that kicked off an interest in mythology.

I read James Patterson's "The Beach House" on a pair of short plane flights this past summer. It's a commercial/pulp thriller. The MC doesn't acquire any superpowers during the story except for becoming a badass willing to take significant risks when his life and that of his friends is on the line.

Edit to add: Jack Ryan, especially in the early Tom Clancy novels.

In any story worth reading the main character won't stay "normal" for the duration. The protagonist's change through the course of the story is part of the point of telling a story.

The lecture playlists (so far) can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUxTFUltO4uXhEfqgI6GtIg/pla... .

Notable things about Tolkien's writing process:

- LotR was originally just meant to be a shorter sequel to The Hobbit. It's always fun to see his early notes about how few chapters he expects the book to take.

- When The Hobbit was first released, it was emphatically not part of the full legendarium that Tolkien was working on, re: the Silmarillion. He borrowed heavily from his private stories about the Elves, but it wasn't until he was writing LotR that he actually realized that everything was all connected into the same continuity.

- Tolkien was extremely conservative in his writing, in a waste-not attitude. He hated to just cut out things he had written, and instead would do a lot of recycling and reworking so that bits of dialogue and description he had done in earlier drafts would be preserved but with their context completely altered.

- Tolkien sometimes claimed that his worldbuilding started with a map, and then he placed a story inside of it, but looking through his early notes shows that's not quite true. He tended to think in terms of a series of adventures he wanted his characters to have, and would wiggle around locations on his still-nebulous maps to make the distances work (he was very particular about getting the distances and travel times all right!).

He chose them because they were the ones most compatible with the other published works, because his father could never revise them. (Unlike The Hobbit, which as revised to make it more compatible with upcoming The Lord of the Rings.)

He was specifically chosen for the job by his father, who may not have agreed with the choices but was unequivocal that Christopher was the one to make them. Christopher himself has said that he'd change some decisions if he were to make them again, but that's true for any author.

To me, I'd just as soon The Silmarillion bear Chrisopher's name. Not as a matter of honor, but as a matter of clarity to fans who want to know what's "really" Tolkien.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Hobbit-There-Back-Again/dp/0618150... or see the end of Return of the King where Frodo adds the "Lord of the Rings" title under Bilbo's title.

I reckon later graphical adventures - the Lucasarts ones for example, would provide a better shared experience. Can’t wait to try Monkey Island with mine when old enough.

I'll second the overwhelming thankfulness to Christopher Tolkien for everything he did to keep Middle-Earth alive. May his journey into the West be swift for I have no doubt that he would be welcomed into Valinor with open arms.

There are usually two different reasons why one might re-read a book. Sometimes it is to see the book again through older eyes which have seen and known more. Other times it is to try to re-capture the emotional experience of living in that story. I find that I tend to come back to certain books much more often for the second reason than for the first one. I might feel the desire to re-read Quantum Computing without Magic or Theory of Internal Combustion Engines once a decade at most. But when I'm feeling that the world is a confusing place and I need some simplicity in my life, I'm ready to take a journey to the Lonely Mountain.

A good recent example is The Hobbit. It should have been a lighthearted adventure (like the book), but was instead dragged out into a overwrought, heavy, 10 hour bore.

In contrast, while not an adventure, I really enjoyed Stranger Things because it just went for solid entertainment, not trying to make statements or be deep or whatever. And since Spielberg won't make movies like that anymore...

Maybe if filmmakers realized that the Oscars are a joke and not having one puts you in as fine a company as having one (Hitchcock, anyone?).

Tamora Pierce has written a number of kid appropriate fantasy books with solid writing and strong female characters. I have seen countless grade school girls get hooked on her work. Some of her books just start to get into more mature relationship themes, but it's enough to embarrass your kid a bit, not scar them.

As a child I enjoyed C.S. Lewis, but was personally affronted when I got to the last Narnia book and discovered that good story had been compromised for christian allegory. Lewis won't make your child a bible thumped any more than Pullman will make them an atheist. Just make sure you know what your kid is reading, and find opportunities to discus the material with them critically!

Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series is another excellent option. I believe when I read it in grade school I found the pacing too slow, so I skipped ahead a lot and inferred a number of plot points. Nonetheless, I'm certain I enjoyed it the first time, it influenced my view of fantasy literature, and I have returned to reread the series multiple times since.

The Hobbit is a great kids book.

Alison Croggon's Pellinor series is less well known, but perfect for pre/early teens that love fantasy.

The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia Wrede feature a princess who runs away from home to work for a dragon. Solid writing, strong female characters, Pratchett-esque subversion of fantasy tropes. Fun and appropriate for grade school kids.

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

That's off the top of my head. Of these books I consider Pullman, Le Guin, and Tolkien to be literature (worth an adult's time), while the others are just fun and well written.

For me, generally:

* Your Money or Your Life - Joe Dominguez (MUST READ)

* Is the American Dream Killing You? - Paul Stiles (MUST READ)

* Working Ourselves to Death - Diane Fassel

* Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (esp. the chapter The Wayfarer)

* The Hobbit - Tolkien

* The Hunt for Red October - Tom Clancy (amazing level of technical detail)

* 1984 - George Orwell (published in 1949 but never been more relevant)

Have fun!

Netflix is a double-edged sword. You no longer need to fill time for a format, so you can murder your darlings to your heart's content. On the other hand, there's such a tiny incentive to make a show shorter, that there aren't enough voices telling directors to cut the dead weight.

Every year or two I give a light reading to Andy Hertzfeld's compilation "Revolution in the Valley", which is a print edition of many (and probably some extras) of the stories available on www.folklore.org

I am also midway through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (Robert M. Pirsig) and I must recommend it. It's got a lot of philosophy in it that I think is both accessible and transcendent all at once. It's actively changing my world view.

In terms of skills acquired, I don't typically read for that purpose. I learn skills primarily by active work, not passive ingestion of information.

Why I left Goldman Sachs by Greg Smith (Good insight into the 2008 financial breakdown and a look into the day to day operations of Goldman Sachs)
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Left-Goldman-Sachs-Street/dp/14555...

The Hobbit
http://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-There-Again-Illustrated-Author/...

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques(Great intro into data mining)
http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Concepts-Techniques-Manage...

Programming Collective Intelligence(You can play around with actual implementations of the concepts in the previous book)
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...

Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick (Was really nice to see the details behind Mitnick's adventures)
http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wires-Adventures-Worlds-Wanted/d...

On War By Clausewitz(Really enjoyed this book.)http://www.amazon.com/War-Carl-von-Clausewitz/dp/1448676290

To presume that Tolkien would have had an understanding of the then state-of-the-art theories around continental drift is a bit hopeful. In fact, plate tectonics did come to be accepted until the 50s/60s, so Tolkien could barely have known of the theory when writing LOTR and especially not when drawing the initial map.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_maps#The_Lord_of_t...

Today, I would classify LotR as as Young Adult novel and not an adult piece of fiction. Honestly, it's themes were vastly mature compared to the Hobbit, however they weren't exceptionally mature for the time it was written. Consider that Return of the King came out in the same year as Lolita, and Fellowship/Two Towers came out in the same year as Lord of the Flies, which is another 'adult' novel that is arguably a Young Adult novel, although IMO deals with a much more mature subject.

Hobbits are a long lived race. Frodo had only recently 'came of age' when the story begins, IIRC at 33 years old. Considering the traditional ages of 'coming of age' I'd bet he was the maturity equivalent of ~15 years old, and he certainly behaves like it in the beginning.

IMO LotR was a great YA novel, just like The Hobbit was a great children's novel. They're amazing stories that you can sit down and read with you kids, but you're not necessarily going to be enjoying them as much as they are, and in 20-30 years time, your kids might be reading them to your grand kids and feeling the exact same way.

Related to this, something that has bothered me about using an e-book reader, and having a 2 year old son, is that I don't have the books on display for him to "stumble upon".

For now he's too young to discover new books off the shelf and read them to himself, but I'm conscious of this limitation with e-books. They're all "locked up" on the device. I got into reading because The Hobbit was on my parent's bookshelf and the cover of the dragon caught my attention.

I've thought about it for a while now and my solution is to read new e-books on a reader, and if they meet my ambiguous criteria of being "shelf worthy" I'll buy physical copies and put them on the shelf, in the hopes that my son will find them.

The Hobbit is already on there.

We went thru this with music and photography. Tape & vinyl gave way to CDs which gave way to MP3 & AAC & FLAC. Film gave way to terabyte hard drives & multi-gigabyte flash cards. Sure, there's an occasional nostalgic resurgence of vinyl and film, but those technologies are largely relegated to artisan use. I was at Kodak when the photo industry pivoted; it's little more than a brand and a mostly-sold patent portfolio now.

There's the old line that when a news headline asks a yes/no question, the answer is invariably "no". So...no, the Swiss watchmaker won't, on the whole, survive the digital age. The Movado on my desk and the Apple on my wrist cost about the same, but one's on my desk and the other is used every few minutes for a variety of purposes (from accurate-to-50ms-and-50m time to up-next calendar to notifications to backup telephone to exercise monitor to mapping to ...). Yeah, the mechanical version (even a mere quartz movement, akin to an old literal-pulp novel) appeals more to the base senses, but given which will actually get near-constant use, well, ask Kodak how their film business is holding up.

My experience with fantasy books is The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. I tried LotR first, throwed it away after a few pages and, following advice from an expert, bought The Hobbit, that was a quick and enjoyable read. Then I turned to LotR, much better that time. But the third part was painful, not because the food, but the endless tour into Mordor. I skipped most of it, just scanning through pages to see if someone interesting showed. I guess there's a detail level beyond what regular readers get lost.

I was a huge Tolkien fan as a child and tried to read the Silmarillion when I was about 10, having already read LOTR and The Hobbit multiple times by that age. I think I did finish the Silmarillion, but I found it tedious enough that I didn't look at Tolkien again for quite some years.

Even though the books were not published until after WW2, when aerial warfare became the new front of war, it seems that Tolkien's main experience in war was the hideous ground fighting in WWI, and he himself rebuffed attempts to find parallels to WW2 in the LOTR series.

So while the concept of aerial war was not unknown, it may not have been the dominant thinking in Tolkien's time. And so, the idea that something pivotal could be conducted by just flying in by night was just easy to overlook -- not as in, he didn't think about it at all, just that it wasn't really worth a serious mention. Yes, obviously Tolkien lived through the part of human history in which the A-Bomb was dropped (though the books were on their way to being written at that point). But he's someone with a boots-on-the-ground worldview staging his book in the fantasy world in which flight is often not naturally experienced by the protagonists.

Contrast that with the time I let them play Minecraft for a single month, for only a few hours a day, and only a few days a week. For the entire month and a few following months, it was practically the only thing that ever came out of any of their mouths.

The mapping in The Hobbit was finalised in 1936 and published in 1937, and was started in the late 1920s. Detailed maps of Middle Earth for TLOTR were produced in the 1940s, e.g. a contour map of Minas Morgul from 1944, although I can't find a date for the first rough maps.

To my mind there is a bit of a tension between Tolkien's "I started with a map..." comment and the fact that the story took a while to settle [0] down on the core theme of the One Ring and the need for a quest through Middle Earth (hence the map) that would destroy it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings#Writing

Not much, because it's too heavy to use standing up. Or rather, in the usual stand-up use cases (e.g., on a bus, boat, or train) you usually want to one-hand the device, and its weight prevents you from doing so.

> "The amount of time I spend using it while I have to hold it unsupported is minimal."

Is that because tablets naturally don't have "unsupported" use cases, or because the current implementation fulfills said use cases poorly, and therefore you don't use them that way?

> "Do people find the weight of hardcover books difficult to hold for long periods of time?"

While standing or one-handing it? Yes.

> "Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is about twice the weight of The Hobbit."

And how many times have you seen someone reading a book that size on the subway/bus/ferry? ;)

I've seen every error you can imagine, from the wrong table graphic being used to pathetic OCR errors or just plain typos. And the cover art, at least on most of the ebooks I've purchased, is nonexistent or extremely unimpressive. As a consumer, I certainly don't feel like ebooks are worth the prices being charged.

As far as a timeline goes, several are available, but I would try to steer away from most wiki sites, as they have been, in the eyes of some, 'polluted' by the handling of the IP by non-Tolkiens. (ie the movies and games like Shadow of Mordor)

Geography of Middle Earth is a somewhat complex topic, but the big deal is that it goes through some drastic changes as part of the Silmarillion called the War of Wrath. Other than that large shift, the geography is very consistent. Tolkien really, really loves his maps.

10 years later I came back and read it again. This time I had read more mythology and understood the Silmarillion as a book of mythology. I very much enjoyed it the second time. I think age, experience, and expectations had a lot to do with how I viewed it that second time. It's a totally different book than the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Anyone who isn't expecting that will end up disappointed.

2) The Lean Startup
(Read when I joined founders institute, was helpful in quite number ways. Doubled it with same course on udemy )

3) Banker to the poor - Md. Yunus
(Got a chance to interview Md.Yunus,)

4) Business Model Generation http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/book
(Quite a read, for business model generation. One can explain whole biz plan in 1 page)

5) The Dilbert principle

6) Steve Jobs

FICTION
1) The Hobbit
2) Ulysses
3) Sense of ending

I was taught by the "look and say" method, now not used in British schools at least. They teach phonics now. Interestingly my daughter is dyslexic and struggled horribly in school to learn by the phonics method. It was when I started teaching her the old fashioned way that she picked it up.

The Bible reference makes sense but I've always thought of it as similar to reading a history book. That's essentially what it is, a history of the beginning and the first 2 ages. Whereas The Hobbit & the trilogy are narrative accounts of a very small portion of the third age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_English_Bible

Tolkien was at Oxford in 1925 - 1959, and wrote The Hobbit and LOTR during that time frame.

NEB was kicked off in Oxford and Cambridge in 1946.

Later on, wasting time reading NNTP news at the uni was also actually a good investment for learning the language in a way that is useful at work.

For my kids, the games have again been the same thing, along with Harry Potter books.

I have recently been reading The Hobbit with my 6 year old son Benjamin stop he has become engrossed in the book somewhat and then just hearing about the Adventures of Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf as well of course as mine growing are a diary Norrie tilly tilly Bailey and wailing not forgetting the king Under the Mountain himself starring oakenshield Gollum Gollum

I read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy many times, and managed to see the name Grandalf instead of Gandalf every single time.

I was looking up a quote from a former Intel CEO just tonight and found out that his name wasn't Paul Ortelli, but Paul Otellini.

I insert letters that are not there, remove letters that are, and reorder whatever is left all the time.

Yet somehow, I'm also a speed reader.

The writing in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion echoes the style of the work he studied and taught. I understand that many modern readers find the style and language alien; after all, the English language and English literature evolved considerably since Beowulf. Tellingly, the author of the critique compares Tolkien to much later authors, all of whom use ordinary 20th-century (American) English. Tolkien is a modern writer who consciously adopted an older cadence, and the author of the critique does not seem to understand this.

(It's worth noting that The Hobbit and the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring use a whimsical, less-grandiose style. I don't have a good explanation for this, except to guess that they originated in bedtime stories for Tolkien's children.)