Sorry for the series of blockquotes here (oh, so unfamilar!), but I know there are many of you who will enjoy this. I am reading through some missed e-mails from the past few weeks and just came across this one:

This evening I decided, for once, to crack open a good book instead of spending the evening bathed in the warm glow of The Corner.
So there I was twenty pages into J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth by Bradley J. Birzer, when the strangest thing happened. The author, surveying reviews of The Simarillion, wrote “Even National Review, which had unwaveringly supported Tolkien since the early 1960s, gave The Silmarillion but guarded praise. There ‘are gaps and bulges in the narrative,’ Richard Brookhiser complained. Still, Brookhiser compared Tolkien to Dante and concluded that the book ‘is a worthy prequel to The Lord of the Rings, and no discredit to the man who devoted so much time to it.’”
Tell me the truth: is this one of those I-can-check-out-anytime-but-never-leave sort of deals?