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Last year was the Year Of Harry Potter at our house, but this will be the Year of the Rings.
Getting to introduce my girls to Harry and Hagrid and all the rest is definitely one of the great experiences of parenthood thus far, as the entire series will always rank high in my heart. We began reading the books with the girls over the summer and finished up the seventh one after a long car ride Thanksgiving weekend, interspersing the movies as we saw fit. My husband and I were already converts, and it was a true joy to watch our girls fall under the Hogwarts spell, sobbing at deaths (especially Sirius) and arguing over their favorite characters. Both girls were Hermione for Halloween, including Crookshanks, and it was a lovely experience for the whole family.
We spent some time rediscovering the Ramona Quimby books this summer, along with seeing the movie, but those were books the girls could read now on their own. So I dug out a hardback copy of The Hobbit I’d been saving, and that was our summer bedtime book this year. We finished with a viewing of the old animated version, which my girls did not fully appreciate, and then watched The Fellowship of the Rings, which they liked much better. Finally, last night we began reading Fellowship of the Rings, which opens with Bilbo Baggins’ eleventy-first birthday party. The girls hung on every word, and clamored for more when it was time for lights out. This will actually be my first trip through the entire series–I haven’t even seen all the movies–but as we parents know, sometimes we get to share a passion with our children, and other times, we have to enter theirs.
Of course, Harry Potter would not have been possible without Tolkien’s original mapping of lands far and faery–the Horcruxes alone owe a great debt to the ring that would rule them all. While I have more affection for the Potter books, I’m really looking forward to riding forward from Hobbiton again, with my girls along for the adventure.
Wow – I definitely see LoTR (not so much the Hobbit) as more secondary school fair. It’s great that your girls like it. We are still sort of slogging through the Little House books (on my part – Marigold is very into them) and I plan next Christmas’ series to be the Betsy-Tacy books, then Narnia, then L’Engle’s time quartet – then we’ll see. I had planned to read the Harry Potter books to my eldest at 8, but by that time, she wasn’t really willing to wait for me to read it to her bit by bit at night and finally ran with them herself so she could finish faster. After that, I didn’t really end up reading to her much, which was not how I had wanted things to go, but she just wanted to read things ta her pace (faster) and I had to give in.
We read one of the Betsy-Tacy books, but my girls didn’t love it–same with some of the others I was hoping they would fall in love with, like The Secret Garden (I’m hoping to try that again though). They loved the Hobbit so much, we figured LOTR was worth a shot, but also some friends of theirs have read them, which helps get my girls excited. As far as the L’Engle books, as much as I adore them, I think of them as middle-school books more than I do LOTR–we’ll see how it goes, I guess!
My Holly (she’s 11) and I are reading Magyk together…we each have our copy. Then she will take an Accelerated Reader test on it at school…it’s a win-win!
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