Each night, we travel a few leagues further into the book in which I once lost myself, or so some long-ago observer might have said as I read it for the sixth or seventh or eighth time, a solitary child who lost herself in books, and this book most of all. Your company is grand; you may well be the best companion I have taken on this journey, but I was never lonely when I read alone. I walked behind Sam and Strider, Gandalf and Gimli and Gollum, with Tolkien's hand upon my shoulder. This is not where I was lost, but where I found myself. (First published in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review)