What finally sold me on the Times Literary Supplement 

I am, I believe, the ideal reader for the TLS, which I have been reading for roughly thirty-five years. What makes me ideal is my high standing as a serious dilettante: that is, someone who feels he needs to know nearly everything, but not all that much of any one thing in particular and certainly nothing in the kind of depth that will weigh him down. [emphasis mine] I, for example, do not need but am nevertheless pleased to know the reception of Nietzsche's work in France, Lord Esher's plan to save the artists before the Second World War, and the history of cricket in Jamaica, all items I could only have acquired in the TLS. I find I can read endlessly about Socrates, Montaigne, Gibbon, Tolstoy, Proust, Henry James, and Wittgenstein, and the TLS has over the years supplied me with a rich abundance of items on these figures, though perhaps rather more than I require on James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and the Sisters Stephen and those of their friends who gathered at 29 Fitzroy Square.

Thanks, Lloyd 

More LOTR and NYRB 

I was therefore completely unprepared for the new film adaptation of the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, which was written and directed by the New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson. I took along to a preview a fourteen-year-old whose judgment I respect, and who had recently read the book. [emphasis mine] As we walked out of the theater three hours later, I said to him, "They really made a lot of stuff up for the movie." He patiently explained to me that everything in the movie is an almost literal recreation of the book. And when I went back to read the book again, I saw that he was right. The Balrog you see in the movie, a huge, hideous, roaring monster who takes up practically the whole screen, is just as Tolkien describes it. The whip is in the left hand, the blade in the right. I asked my fourteen-year-old com-panion, suddenly an indispensable aid to my understanding, whether the images on the screen matched the impressions he had formed when he was reading the book. "Pretty much," he said.