There and Back Again: Rediscovering The Hobbit

I discovered The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was around 11 or 12. My family had taken an inexpensive apartment in Far Rockaway for the summer, in a grey, ordinary two-story frame house with a sagging porch and lush honeysuckle growing on a trellis near the swing that was perfect for reading and dreaming. We had only a few rooms upstairs and shared a bathroom, but it was as far away from our apartment building in Washington Heights as I could ever remember going.



My father and older...