I recently finished rereading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in at least a decade. I read it at least a dozen times between the ages of 10 and approximately 21, but I stopped reading it after that because I had so much other reading to catch up on and so much less time to do it. I was also a little worried that I'd find myself liking it less. However, I decided to go back to the series last month, and I plowed right through them again.

It's still highly enjoyable world-building, mythologizing stuff, and I was well prepared for the little foibles I didn't used to think about, like the fact that three-quarters of the time Tolkien writes an action scene, his viewpoint character gets knocked out early on so he can summarize it after the fact. I also found new things to enjoy, like Tolkien's immense attention to detail at the level of scene, particularly how a natural landscape is put together. Finally, he had some damn good figurative language I didn't even remember, such as near the end, after the main climax, when he writes of the celebrating masses "Their joy was like swords..."

It wasn't quite as great an experience because of that you-can't-go-home-again aspect of your childhood favorites, but it was still completely worthwhile. I've already started rereading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which I also probably read into the double digits, then stopped). In much less nostalgic news, I'm also tackling Gravity's Rainbow for the first time.