This Book Changed My Life

When I was a kid, I saw the Ralph Bakshi animated adaptation of "The Hobbit." It was so fun, so exciting and melancholy at the same time. That prompted me to read the book. I loved it even more than the movie. If they had only added the character of Beorn to the movie, but I can see why they didn't due to time. The fight with the spiders caught my imagination and the chapter "Riddles in the Dark" really hooked me to the point where I was trying to write my own riddles.

After that, a friend of my father, who was also a fan of Tolkien, talked to me about the books and realized how much I loved them. Soon after that, he died of a heart attack and his wife gave us all his books, including his Tolkien collection. I read through the Lord of the Rings and was amazed by the attention to detail that Tolkien put into it. That prompted me to write my own fantasy.

At first, my fiction was garbage. I mean Ed Wood bad. Bad DeviantArt fanfiction bad. As I grew up, I read the books a few more times, seeing quality before me and learning how to do my own quality writing. Then, when I went to college, I was talking to a girl I had just met and found out she liked the movies. When I asked if she'd read the books, she answered with a smile and "74 times." I was hooked even more as we talked for the next three hours about the books.

Now, we're still together after five years and working toward a place where we can get married. What I want to know is whether or not the books have affected people's lives like they did mine. Have you been prompted toward being a writer by reading them, or perhaps even pushed toward another book that affected you even more? Have you seen something in the books that affected the way you view life, or have you even met someone the way I met my fiancee?