[collypops]

There's a curse that comes with watching a movie adaptation of a book before reading it, in that you can't not picture the faces of the actors that portray the characters.

I'd attempted to read The Fellowship of the Ring a few times as a kid, but never got into it. I watched the movie before I started it in earnest, and I feel I was kind of cheated by all of the visuals I wasn't able to conjure up myself. For that reason, some of my favourite parts of the book were those that were cut from the movie, such as Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-downs.

Thankfully, I went on to read The Two Towers and The Return of the King well before the movies were released, and enjoyed them much more because I got to inject a lot more of my imagination into them.