recommendation

Last night I finished reading what is quite possibly the finest piece of literature that I have read (for the first time) in the last 10 years: The Notion Club Papers by J.R.R. Tolkein, published in The History of the Lord of the Rings Part 4, ed. by Christopher Tolkein. It's the sort of thing that has you sucked in from the first paragraph ("[Little is known about this rare book, except that it appears to have been written after 1989, as an apocryphal imitation of the Inklings' Saga Book. The author identifies himself with the character called in the narrative Nicholas Guildford; but Titmouse has shown that this is a pseudonym, and is taken from a medieval dialogue, at one time read in the Schools of Oxford. His real identity remains unknown.]"). It's literature, it's satire, it's poking fun, it's linguistics, it's philosophy, it's philology, it's everything that, when I was young, I thought I would be surrounded by when I went to college and into the academic world. The fact that the vast majority of what I read in both my English lit. and philosophy courses so miserably failed to meet the standard which is greatly exceeded in this text was a big cause for my disillusionment with both (and hence a cause for why I am in Amsterdam writing a Ph.D. in logic rather than teaching high school English somewhere in the U.S.). This is the type of story that I want to write, it's the type of story I want to read. It is such a shame that when Tolkein broke off work on it to continue writing The Lord of the Rings he never returned to finish it. It will be a long time before I read anything as good as this again.