Each year on March 25th, the day The Ring was destroyed, the Tolkien community celebrates Tolkien Reading Day in celebration of Tolkien’s work. Every year, the Tolkien Society introduces a theme for Tolkien Reading Day and for 2020, the theme is nature and industry.
Read more on Tolkien Reading Day and the reading suggestions by the Tolkien Society on tolkiensociety.org.
Now, you have read our title correctly. Over here on Middle-earth News, we’ve decided to turn Tolkien Reading Day into a Tolkien Reading Month for 2020. For a few years now, March turned into a month were I would deliberately pick a book by Tolkien and read it during the entire month and not just on Tolkien Reading Day. For me personally, this is usually The Silmarillion. Just as September feels like the perfect month to reread The Hobbit, March feels somehow like a Silmarillion month. Don’t ask me on the logic behind that, March just feels like it.
For this year, I’ve wanted to take things a step further and try to read only books by or about Tolkien. Part of me wants to spend as much time in Middle-earth as possible and the other part wants to see how many books I’ll manage to read. And since we all like challenges, the rest of the team decided to join. There are no rules to our personal reading project other than reading books by or about Tolkien and Middle-earth throughout the month of March.
My personal ‘to be read’-pile for March is:
- The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Roots of Tolkien’s Middle-earth by Robert A. Blackham
- The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter
- A Middle-earth Traveller by John Howe
What do you think of our little project? What are you going to read on Tolkien Reading Day?
