Gardening, family, Genealogy, nature walks, reading, movies, church choir, music. Scottish Highland Games. I'm an ardent anglophile as well.
First Lord of the Rings reading experience:
I was 13 and kept walking by the shelf that The Hobbit was on in my middle school library. Finally, I took it out and read it, and found it difficult but the most rewarding fiction reading besides Narnia that I had ever read. The next year, I checked Lord of the Rings out of my High School library, and read it each year of high school after that. I also read the Silmarillion in 11th grade and did a paper on it for English lit.