That's pretty cool! Here at Marquette we actually have a great deal of Tolkien's archives, including a lot of original manuscripts. Some librarian here had enough foresight in the 1950s to acquire them, even when no one else had really begun to pay attention to Tolkien yet. I'm sure Oxford is still upset over it, haha.

Yeah, re-reading The Hobbit I'm finding myself constantly annoyed with the seemingly interminable descriptions of Middle-Earth's geography. It's like, just say the barrels went down the river…I don't need ten pages describing every twist and turn the river takes on its way from Mirkwood to Lake-Town!

Also, now that summer is nearly upon me, here is my To-Read list for the immediate future. It's not set in stone by any means, but I'd like to have the first ten books or so read in the first few weeks of summer. I also just put in a bunch of interlibrary loan requests for various DVDs and DVD box sets, so hopefully some will arrive by the time I'm ready to start watching them.