Follow Friday - Ulysses Killed All 108 of Penelope's Unwelcome Suitors

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - The Bookish Confections and Picture Me Reading.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: School is out! What is your favorite Summer Reading book?

Summer time for me always feels like Tolkien. I'm not as obsessive as Christopher Lee, who asserts that he rereads the entirety of The Lord of the Rings once a year, but I have reread Tolkien's work several times. And it almost always happens during the summer months. The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and works like The Tolkien Reader have all been on my summer reading list more than once.

But the most quintessentially "summer-ish" book for me is, and always has been The Hobbit. And it is all about how I first came to read the book. My father was, and remains a Tolkien fan. Probably not as much of a Tolkien fan as I am, but sufficiently enough of one to introduce me to The Hobbit at a fairly early age. When I was seven or eight, he began reading to book to me a page or two at a time as bedtime stories during summer break. When the school year started up again, this sort of petered out - I think we got through about a third of the book before we more or less just stopped. Shortly thereafter, the Rankin-Bass animated version aired on television, which I eagerly watched and loved.

When we moved to Tanzania just before I entered the fourth grade, my parents bought me John Huston's narrated album version of the Rankin-Bass adaptation. While in Tanzania, I pretty much wore the grooves out on the album by listening to it incessantly. Finally, in the summer in between my fourth and fifth grade school years, I sat down with The Hobbit again and started reading. I read through the night, and finished the book just as the sun started to rise. From then on, I was hooked. I read The Lord of the Rings over the next week, and moved on to The Silmarillion as soon as I could get my hands on it. I found Tolkien during my summers in between school years. When I return to his work, it always seems to be summer.

Go to previous Follow Friday: There Are Currently One Hundred and Seven Nobel Laureates in Literature

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: 17 U.S.C.§ 109 Supports the Existence of Used Book Stores in the United States

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