Look, by the time my eighth-grade literature/language arts teacher pulled this one out I already knew I wasn't a Tolkien fan, having tried futilely to finish the LOTR trilogy. The story is great (like my parents before me, I love the movies) and of course it's a classic in its genre, but I'm just not that into the writing style. So it was a long couple of months, exacerbated by having to read and/or listen to it read out loud in class after struggling through the passages the night before, and that kind of puts me off wanting to try again.