Finished The Lord of the Rings today, whilst in a cafe drinking tea and eating strawberry mascarpone tart. Mmmm. Thoroughly enjoyed both.

[Co-worker] said that he’d read The Lord of the Rings many times, and had continued on to read the The Silmarillion and all of Christopher Tolkien’s histories of Middle Earth. I think I’ll leave it for a time before I read any of those, but I am sure that I’ll revisit the book. I love the way my mind slows down when I read it. I normally read quite fast, having had a lot of practice, but there is something in The Lord of the Rings that insists that my mind slow down and absorb it all.

My mind has to adjust in other ways, too. For an hour or two after I have read some of the book I find that my inner voice – my mental voice – becomes more lyrical, flowery even. There are less contractions, words are said in full – no more can’ts, rather, cannot. It is both disconcerting and wonderful.

I find sometimes that I have to read something in a certain fashion in order to understand it. For those who have read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, they will know what I mean when I say it was difficult to read. It was written as it would be spoken, thus ‘football’ became ‘fitba’. I found that in order to understand it, my mental voice sounded like Billy Connolly. Even though Billy is a Glaswegian and the novels characters were from Edinburgh, the general Scottish accent came through sufficiently for me to be able to translate it. Does this sound odd? Does anyone else find that they have to do the same?