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Personally, I read the books when I was 12 (slightly before the Peter Jackson Fellowship came out), and I was hooked the whole way through. I literally had sleepless nights from just reading on through the morning.

But then the author goes on to quote LOTR quite extensively and brings up all sorts of economy tidbits ("the dwarves don't farm"), so they obviously have read LOTR.

The article wasn't actually about lotr