CEO shooter Luigi Mangione laid out his motive on Good Reads

[NJCher]

53. early involvements in reading

I know nothing of fantasy and science fiction except that one of our posters here at DU is a lover of it. For whatever reason, I never spent any time reading it but that might have been because as an English major with a significant interest in languages, I was likely waist high in translations of Beowulf myself. I very much enjoyed reading your post filling me in on it, though, because someone I cared for very much back at that time was a LOTR enthusiast. Talked about it all the time. That's why I wondered what "grokking" me meant. Many, many decades later I finally find out. It is making me very nostalgic.

That you read the appendices because you couldn't let it go rang a bell. I've experienced that, too, but not with FF. I think it was with Clarence Darrow and Eugene V. Debs. I was obsessed with Darrow's work and also that of Debs. I thought about becoming a lawyer because of it, but ultimately rejected the idea because I didn't want to deal with peoples' most difficult, serious moments in life. Darrow most certainly did not have that compunction. To this day, however, I am still fascinated by him and Debs, and I ultimately did do legal work, much in the fashion of Darrow, and decades of organizing and forming unions, like Debs, I even met up with a person whose scholarly work involved the Pullman strike! So interesting/odd how life works out.

Now I'm thinking to check out the film LOTR, just so I can see what you mean about why it had such a hold on our culture back then. That was certainly interesting about your cousin's wife. And oddly enough--my own mother was very involved in elves and wizards!