Have you read The Lord of the Rings?

My French is not very good, yet. Also, in the meantime I've seen the film  

harmonium.ro wrote: No. No one in my home country ever mentions this author, like he doesn't even exist. I don't think anything has been translated, also.

From what I have been able to gather, LotR was translated in Romanian, though I don't know any other details. Anyway, Alex, you should really make the effort to read it in the English original... Many of the translations are not very good, and some are downright horrible. The Italian one, which was one of the first to be published, is considered one of the best, and it's still full of mistakes (though not as bad as others I have seen in other languages).

I read it in very small parts (and in Finnish), took about a year I think.

Tarquin Underspoon wrote: I've read about 60% of it, little bits at a time, in some screwed up order like: All of The Two Towers Half of The Fellowship All of Return of the King   Then I went on to....   All of the Hobbit Like the first 20 pages of the Silmarillion....had I gone any further, I might have suffered a lethal overdose of folklore and family trees.   So yeah....I don't think I can vote either one safely here

The first part of the Silmarillion is a lot of mythology, but there are a lot of individual stories later on that are very good.

Yes, although Silmarillion is my favourite

I would recommed to any Tolkien first time reader to ''go by the book'' i.e. read his works in ''chronological'' order

The Silmarillion
The Hobbit
The LOTR

but that is just my opinion (I stop now otherwise I would turn this into another JRRT appreciation thread)

I read The Silmarillion first (in Italian, and in a translation that could only be called an abomination), and that did not turn me off. However, I have always loved mythology, folklore and epic literature, so I was probably predisposed to liking it. 

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were pretty much required reading for yer average teenager in the late '60's (of which I was one).  Or maybe I should not say 'yer average'.  Let's put it this way.  The ones who read LOTR also more than likely had that first Crimson album, maybe a Moodies or two, in their collection.  Or at least that's the way it was with my friends.   

Do NOT read the Silmarillion first.

Easy Money wrote: Hey Pat, now that I think about it, what is probably going on is that you are not logged on to the site when you vote. Although my home computer automatically logs me in, when I am on a work computer I have to take the time to log onto the site before I can vote in any polls. You can visit the site and read posts without being logged on, but you can't vote without being logged on.

I tried and failed with Lord Of The Rings many times in my teens & early 20's; tried again about 15 years ago, but this time read The Hobbit first... I then sailed through LOTR with no problem & enjoyed it immensely