His were usu­al­ly humor­ous sto­ries, full of mag­ic, and very often, they con­tained a con­nec­tion to the children’s lives, because it was pri­mar­i­ly for them that he invent­ed them.

–Sarah Zama

The fact that “much of the inspi­ra­tion of the Lord of the Rings came from [J.R.R. Tolkien’s] fam­i­ly,” Danielle Bur­gos writes at Bus­tle, has become an oft-repeat­ed piece of triv­ia, espe­cial­ly thanks to such pop­u­lar treat­ments of the author’s life as Humphrey Carter’s autho­rized biog­ra­phy, the Nicholas Hoult-star­ring biopic, Tolkien, and the Cather­ine McIl­waine-edit­ed col­lec­tion Tolkien: Mak­er of Mid­dle-Earth. As much as Tolkien drew on his exten­sive knowl­edge of Norse, Ger­man­ic, and oth­er mytholo­gies and lin­guis­tic his­to­ries, and from his har­row­ing expe­ri­ences in WWI, his career as a leg­endary fan­ta­sy author may nev­er have come about with­out his chil­dren.

“In just one exam­ple,” notes Bur­gos, a col­lec­tion of Tolkien’s let­ters shows that the char­ac­ter of Tom Bom­badil “was based on son Michael’s wood­en toy doll.” Tolkien’s old­est son John remarked before the release of the first Peter Jack­son adap­ta­tion, “It’s quite incred­i­ble. When I think when we were grow­ing up these were just sto­ries that we were told.”

Tolkien stren­u­ous­ly resist­ed the label of children’s author; he “firm­ly believed,” Maria Popo­va points out, “that there is no such thing as writ­ing for chil­dren.” But the degree to which his sto­ry­telling and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion devel­oped from his desire to enter­tain and edu­cate his kids can’t be over­stat­ed in the devel­op­ment of his ear­ly fic­tion.

We see this in a small way in the lit­tle-known chil­dren’s book Mr. Bliss, writ­ten and illus­trat­ed by Tolkien some­time in the 1930s, kept in a draw­er until 1957, and only pub­lished posthu­mous­ly in 1982. The sto­ry itself “was inspired by his first car, which he pur­chased in 1932.” As evi­dence of its impor­tance to the larg­er Tolkien canon, Popo­va writes, the author “went on to use two of the char­ac­ter names from the book, Gaffer Gamgee and Bof­fin, in The Lord of the Rings.” In oth­er respects, how­ev­er, Mr. Bliss is very unlike the medieval fan­tasies that sur­round­ed its com­po­si­tion.

The book, affec­tion­ate­ly hand­writ­ten and illus­trat­ed by Tolkien him­self — who, also unbe­knownst to many, was a ded­i­cat­ed artist — tells the sto­ry of Mr. Bliss, a lov­able eccen­tric known for his excep­tion­al­ly tall hats and his “girab­bits,” the giraffe-head­ed, rab­bit-bod­ied crea­tures that live in his back­yard. One day, Mr. Bliss decides to buy his very first motor car[.] But his first dri­ve en route to a friend’s house soon turns into a Rube Gold­berg machine of dis­as­ter as he col­lides with near­ly every­thing imag­in­able, then gets kid­napped by three bears.

Tolkien sub­mit­ted the book for pub­li­ca­tion after the run­away suc­cess of The Hob­bit cre­at­ed a mar­ket demand he had no par­tic­u­lar desire to meet, telling his pub­lish­er that the sto­ry was com­plete. But Mr. Bliss was reject­ed, osten­si­bly because its illus­tra­tions were too expen­sive to repro­duce. In truth, how­ev­er, the pub­lic want­ed more hob­bits, elves, dwarves, wiz­ards, and poet­ry and song in beau­ti­ful invent­ed lan­guages.

Tolkien would, of course, even­tu­al­ly deliv­er a “New Hob­bit,” in the form of the The Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy—books that weren’t specif­i­cal­ly “writ­ten for his chil­dren,” Sarah Zama writes, but in which “the sto­ry he had indeed cre­at­ed for his chil­dren weighed heav­i­ly.” See sev­er­al more Tolkien-illus­trat­ed pages from one of the trilogy’s whim­si­cal ear­ly ances­tors, Mr. Bliss, at Brain Pick­ings and pur­chase a copy of the book here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

How J.R.R. Tolkien Influ­enced Clas­sic Rock & Met­al: A Video Intro­duc­tion

The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhib­it in Gen­er­a­tions Is Com­ing to the U.S.: Orig­i­nal Draw­ings, Man­u­scripts, Maps & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

More than a few of us have a read­ing goal for 2021: a book a week, say. Some of us may have had the idea plant­ed in our heads long ago by Carl Sagan, in his capac­i­ty as cre­ator and host of the PBS series Cos­mos: A Per­son­al Voy­age. “If I were to read a book a week for my entire adult life­time,” he says in the clip above, “I would have read maybe a few thou­sand books. No more.” This is part of a longer mono­logue set in a library, a back­ground that pro­vides Sagan an ide­al visu­al ref­er­ence for how many vol­umes that is. Even seen as a por­tion of just the shelf space he stands by, it does­n’t look like a ter­ri­bly impres­sive amount. Indeed, it makes up “only tenth of a per­cent or so of the total num­ber of books in the library.”

The trick, Sagan adds, “is to know which books to read.” He him­self got start­ed address­ing this ques­tion rather ear­ly, hav­ing drawn up an ambi­tious read­ing list pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture while still an under­grad­u­ate at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go.

Sagan includ­ed (see the list here) every­thing from the Bible and Pla­to’s Repub­lic to André Gide’s The Immoral­ist and Aldous Hux­ley’s Young Archimedes to Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Cir­cuit Fun­da­men­tals and Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics: An Advanced Treat­ment — those last being course read­ings, but impres­sive ones nev­er­the­less. Though Sagan lived an abbre­vi­at­ed life, dying at the age of 62, we can rest assured that he nev­er­the­less got his few thou­sand books in. Can we do the same?

To gear up for your read­ing year to come, con­sid­er watch­ing this short doc­u­men­tary on the world’s most beau­ti­ful book­stores, which rec­om­mends dai­ly read­ing habits that add up to sur­pris­ing­ly many books over a life­time. But if you choose your books with­out dis­cern­ment, as Sagan implies, it does­n’t mat­ter how many you read. Before draw­ing up your own read­ing list, have a look at the ones oth­er seri­ous read­ers, writ­ers, and thinkers have used before: Charles Dar­win, for instance, or the many names in our per­son­al read­ing-list roundup includ­ing Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Jorge Luis Borges, Pat­ti Smith, Bill Gates, and David Bowie. Mark Twain also com­posed a read­ing list for kids and adults alike, but what­ev­er we take from it, we should enter the new year with one of his famous apho­risms in mind: “The man who does not read good books has no advan­tage over the man who can’t read them.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan’s Ambi­tious Col­lege Read­ing List: Pla­to, Shake­speare, Gide, and Plen­ty of Phi­los­o­phy, Math & Physics (1954)

What Did Charles Dar­win Read? See His Hand­writ­ten Read­ing List & Read Books from His Library Online

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

7 Tips for Read­ing More Books in a Year

100 Books to Read in a Life­time

29 Lists of Rec­om­mend­ed Books Cre­at­ed by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge Luis Borges, Pat­ti Smith, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

2020 has been a ter­ri­ble year. But that has­n’t stopped Bill Gates (as is his cus­tom) from choos­ing, he says, “five books that I enjoyed—some because they helped me go deep­er on a tough issue, oth­ers because they offered a wel­come change of pace.”

Below, you can read, in his own words, the selec­tions he pub­lished here.

Range: Why Gen­er­al­ists Tri­umph in a Spe­cial­ized World, by David Epstein. I start­ed fol­low­ing Epstein’s work after watch­ing his fan­tas­tic 2014 TED talk on sports per­for­mance. In this fas­ci­nat­ing book, he argues that although the world seems to demand more and more specialization—in your career, for example—what we actu­al­ly need is more peo­ple “who start broad and embrace diverse expe­ri­ences and per­spec­tives while they progress.” His exam­ples run from Roger Fed­er­er to Charles Dar­win to Cold War-era experts on Sovi­et affairs. I think his ideas even help explain some of Microsoft’s suc­cess, because we hired peo­ple who had real breadth with­in their field and across domains. If you’re a gen­er­al­ist who has ever felt over­shad­owed by your spe­cial­ist col­leagues, this book is for you. More on the book here.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incar­cer­a­tion in the Age of Col­or­blind­ness, by Michelle Alexan­der. Like many white peo­ple, I’ve tried to deep­en my under­stand­ing of sys­temic racism in recent months. Alexander’s book offers an eye-open­ing look into how the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem unfair­ly tar­gets com­mu­ni­ties of col­or, and espe­cial­ly Black com­mu­ni­ties. It’s espe­cial­ly good at explain­ing the his­to­ry and the num­bers behind mass incar­cer­a­tion. I was famil­iar with some of the data, but Alexan­der real­ly helps put it in con­text. I fin­ished the book more con­vinced than ever that we need a more just approach to sen­tenc­ing and more invest­ment in com­mu­ni­ties of col­or. More on the book here.

The Splen­did and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Fam­i­ly, and Defi­ance Dur­ing the Blitz, by Erik Lar­son. Some­times his­to­ry books end up feel­ing more rel­e­vant than their authors could have imag­ined. That’s the case with this bril­liant account of the years 1940 and 1941, when Eng­lish cit­i­zens spent almost every night hud­dled in base­ments and Tube sta­tions as Ger­many tried to bomb them into sub­mis­sion. The fear and anx­i­ety they felt—while much more severe than what we’re expe­ri­enc­ing with COVID-19—sounded famil­iar. Lar­son gives you a vivid sense of what life was like for aver­age cit­i­zens dur­ing this awful peri­od, and he does a great job pro­fil­ing some of the British lead­ers who saw them through the cri­sis, includ­ing Win­ston Churchill and his close advis­ers. Its scope is too nar­row to be the only book you ever read on World War II, but it’s a great addi­tion to the lit­er­a­ture focused on that trag­ic peri­od. More on the book here.

The Spy and the Trai­tor: The Great­est Espi­onage Sto­ry of the Cold War, by Ben Mac­in­tyre. This non­fic­tion account focus­es on Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB offi­cer who became a dou­ble agent for the British, and Aldrich Ames, the Amer­i­can turn­coat who like­ly betrayed him. Macintyre’s retelling of their sto­ries comes not only from West­ern sources (includ­ing Gordievsky him­self) but also from the Russ­ian per­spec­tive. It’s every bit as excit­ing as my favorite spy nov­els. More on the book here.

Breath from Salt: A Dead­ly Genet­ic Dis­ease, a New Era in Sci­ence, and the Patients and Fam­i­lies Who Changed Med­i­cine, by Bijal P. Trive­di. This book is tru­ly uplift­ing. It doc­u­ments a sto­ry of remark­able sci­en­tif­ic inno­va­tion and how it has improved the lives of almost all cys­tic fibro­sis patients and their fam­i­lies. This sto­ry is espe­cial­ly mean­ing­ful to me because I know fam­i­lies who’ve ben­e­fit­ed from the new med­i­cines described in this book. I sus­pect we’ll see many more books like this in the com­ing years, as bio­med­ical mir­a­cles emerge from labs at an ever-greater pace. More on the book here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Gates Describes His Biggest Fear: “I Rate the Chance of a Wide­spread Epi­dem­ic Far Worse Than Ebo­la at Well Over 50 Per­cent” (2015)

Take Big His­to­ry: A Free Short Course on 13.8 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry, Fund­ed by Bill Gates

Bill Gates Rec­om­mends 5 Thought-Pro­vok­ing Books to Read This Sum­mer

How Bill Gates Reads Books

Bill Gates Names His New Favorite Book of All Time