When I was about seven, someone read me The Hobbit. That would be around 1975, two years after my father had left. My brother and I lived with our mother and a bunch of university dropouts with long hair and motorcycles who rented rooms in our house. I remember still a Led Zeppelin poster on the wall at the top of the first flight of stairs.
That was a very long time ago. Since then, I grew up, the movie trilogy came and went, Tolkien fandom exploded and then lost its way, and now we have a spate of second-rate visual productions that all miss what J.R.R. Tolkien was actually doing in his stories. Time to return to the books!