I love books. I always have. My parents read to me regularly in my childhood and I was always hauling books home from the library and classroom book fairs. My life was filled with The Wizard of Oz and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Little House on the Prairie (and one particular book about cephalopods I checked out of the library every chance I got. Yeah, it confuses me too.) Then I was introduced to The Chronicles of Narnia and The Sword in the Stone and A Wrinkle in Time and The Hero and The Crown. I devoured everything that came my way. In junior high I spent as much time as I could in the library because junior high is wretched and I wanted to get away from it as often as possible. As E.B. White said, "A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book." Books help you learn. Books help you think. Books help you encounter views and situations that are different from your own. Books help you define and articulate your world. Books, real books, good books, make an indelible impression on your soul.
The Lord of the Rings wasn't the first book to leave a impression on my psyche, but it may have made the deepest impression. I love the beauty of the language. I love how its written. I love that it's prose written like poetry, bright and clear and bittersweet. I love the great sweeping epicness of it that all hinges on the courage of one small person. And the thing I love most is the truth in it. I believe there's truth in all good literature--that thread running through it that winds around our hearts, those moments that linger in our minds and makes clear to us something we didn't quite know before. That something that impels us to reread a passage because it touches our souls. Tolkien put a lot of truth into The Lord of the Rings. He spoke about loyalty, love, and courage; hope even in the darkest hour, nobility, sacrifice, compassion. He spoke beautifully of profound truths that are equally as applicable to this world as to Middle Earth. And this, to me, may be the most profound:
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