This holiday season, I am closing out the year with a countdown of my top ten posts of the year!

For 2019, the number nine post was: LotRFI Pt.39–Sam’s “Meta” Moments

This was the third-most popular post from my First Impressions series this year! For those who haven’t followed the blog, this series was an attempt to reconstruct my early reading of The Lord of the Rings by writing a short blog post about each chapter.

In this post, I talked about how Sam’s ability to connect his life experience with the stories he had heard as a child were very meaningful to me:

I wanted to believe that these stories were real, that they mattered. This vision of how a story could impact the life of the listener/reader was very inspiring to me.

It was a great chance to reflect on my personal experience as a young reader of Tolkien!

Be sure to go see the whole post if you haven’t already!