The Hobbit (Rankin and Bass movie edition) - J.R.R. Tolkien

This book represents the first act of reading over which I felt I had personal ownership; strangely enough, it was an act of conservation. This version of The Hobbit contains full-color illustrations from the 1977 Rankin and Bass cartoon version of Tolkien’s novel. The book was technically my parents’ but I took possession of it in 1994 when, discovering it on a shelf full of classic rock records, I discovered that many of the pages had been torn free of the binding and needed to be rearranged. After a painstaking process of referencing page numbers (or simply the corresponding art on pages that did not have numbers) I finally reconstituted the book and was able to discover for the first time the tale of Bilbo Baggins’ fascinating adventure from which the title of this collection is derived.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again. Illus. Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

My mother gave me the 1973 Collier paperback sometime around 1992 and it was the first real novel that I had ever read cover-to-cover. I quickly devoured the tale of the Pevensie children and their departure to Narnia through an old wardrobe and was eager to have more of the story. The Narnia series subsequently became a reading adventure that my mother and I took together, making our way through all seven books in the series over the next few years. The copy of Lewis’s novel that I have listed here is not, in fact, the one I had read as a child, although this hardback (one in a set of seven and bearing the Harper-Collins fire-and-water emblem) was still a gift from my mother, though much later. I think the original may now be in a box of books that my mother kept on the shelf of her elementary-school classroom. While this volume is the second in the series, which defers to Narnia chronology, I have always preferred reading the books in publication order, perhaps because of my original encounter with Narnia in the Collier edition.

You'll notice the movie tickets on the left are from the release of the film in 2008. They serve as bookmarks.

Lewis, C.S. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Illus. Pauline Baynes. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1978.