I guess none of it just really ever interested me.
Hobbits and such? Is that like an elf or a goblin, or what? Nevermind, I don’t really care.
Am I alone?
No you’re not. There’s a guy (age 40) I work with who hasn’t seen or read LOTR. He has managed to avoid seeing Star Wars, Terminator, Alien, Matrix, Star Trek and just about any big movie series.
While I can understand that people don’t like those movies it is rather weird to meet someone who has never seen any of them.
Cool enough. I’m 34, and I saw the rest of those and their sequels, in the theater, and enjoyed all of them with the glaring execption of The Matrix, which I thought sucked big honking donkey balls.
Maybe there’s a correlation?
Ask the kids of two generations from now if they ever read The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Catcher in the Rye, The Tin Drum or any other classic and you might get similar results.
There will always be the odd person who haven’t seen this and that book or film. Obviously everybody won’t see everything. But what I’ve gathered from studies is that young people today
a) Read less litterature than the generation before
b) Eat more junk food than the generation before
c) Exercise in gyms more often than the generation before
Suggestion: the kids will live longer and know less. Beautiful combination.
34 is a kid these days? What’s the cut off?
Sorry, cactus, I may have misread your post…
But I have read any of those books, and I don’t do any of those things.
I guess I’m not sure what your point is.
What is this? A book and/or movie about jewellers perhaps.
^have NOT read any of those books
I read the Motley Crue book though 
Starring Michael Flatley?
I was going on a tangent of the whole “Can you believe this? I haven’t read lord of the rings!”-piece. Obviously everybody will have gaps in their cultural schooling, but I see trends where gaps are getting bigger in some social areas.
But that’s really a whole other discussion.
Hmmm. OK, again, fair enough. I did start this thread for the express purpose of soliciting other’s opinions on the matter.
But do you really see this as a “gap in my cultural schooling”? I mean, that seriously seems quite a bit far fetched.
In 1986 or so, when I was a sophomore in highschool, my friends were always walking around with “The Hobbit” or “Lord of the Rings” perched atop of their English lit’ book… It just turned me off I guess.
I had played D&D a few years before, maybe 4th through 6th grade. So I wasn’t completey unfamiliar with the context, as I see it.
Now that I consider it (thank you SDMB), maybe I was concerned about appearences, but those juvenile thoughts should be long gone by now…
It’s still just never interested me. Four years ago (? when did LOTR hit HBO?) I made it 15 minutes in, and the narrator thing (if I’m remembering correctly, it was a narrator turning pages in the movie, just like a book) really turned me off, then the movie started really, really slow, and I was forced to turn it off because I was in physical pain.
Physical pain, akin to Wuthering Heights.
I’ve read a few chapters of both The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring. Neither really pulled me in, so I didn’t continue. I’ve never had any urge to see the movies, either - the pictures I’ve seen in ads and so on certainly look gorgeous, but what’s that worth if I won’t enjoy the story? (C.f. Dances With Wolves :p)
And I rather liked Wuthering Heights, although it would have been better if it had been about 1/3 shorter!
Heh, I actually liked Dances with Wolves.
I guess there’s no accounting for taste. 
I think the thread title insinuates it, if I may say so. If you didn’t experience it as a “gap”, I don’t think you’d have brought the subject up.
Myself, I’m not so hardcore with must-reads or must-sees. I once read an artist say in an interview that “it doesn’t matter *what *you read as much as *that *you read”, to which I agree completely. There is a point to reading classics, since they are often very entertaining (classics are often classics for a reason) and part of the canon, so you might want to have an opinion of them.
At the same time, the point of reading is not to drop names, but to stimulate your intellect and creativity and make you a sharper individual. Any good piece of text will do this, and sometimes the very bext and inspiring words will come from those lesser known.
I think you raise an interesting point. People expect different things from a good story. Some works, as great as they may be, just don’t offer people what they are looking for.
For example, for me a good story is primarily about creating an imaginary world. The plot is mostly an excuse for giving us a sight-seeing tour of that world. For that reason LotR is a perfect story for me. Sure, there are whole chapters where the plot doesn’t advance that much, but we are given huge amounts of possibly unnecessary background information. I know that many people skip exactly those parts that interest me e.g. the songs and poems. If I say that the appendices are among the parts that I enjoy most, that that sounds like devastating criticism to many, but it isn’t meant that way.
On the other hand, I don’t care that much for drama. I respect that some dramas are great masterpieces beloved by many, but watching how made-up strangers spend five acts handling their own problems just doesn’t do that much for me.
So I can see a that a work that offers you the wrong things will probably never appeal to you and no amount of appreciation that it gets from others will do much about that.
I watched a little of LOTR because my husband wanted to. Otherwise, I’d never give it a second thought. I have no interest in it and I’m sick to death of the wave of enthusiasm for it. It’s not my cuppa tea.
My wife and I both found Matrix was horrible and laughable. I love the Middle-Earth books, they are my favorite books. My wife cannot enjoy the books or the movies. They bore her.
So I don’t think there is a correlation.
Jim I am actually a certifiable Tolkien nut. I have read the books Christopher Tolkien put together on the history of the writing of Middle Earth.
You’re not alone.
I’ve never seen or read LOTR either. I tried reading The Hobbit (is that even a separate book or part of the LOTR?) back in the 8th grade and was bored beyond belief. The whole movie thing strikes me as 10+ hours of boredom.
No, you’re certainly not alone. I’m not into elves and fairies and that kind of thing. Just no interest. I don’t rail against it, but I won’t be watching or reading about it. I bought the really expensive LOTR box set for my wife because she likes it, but I’ll never see it.
Due to many years of poverty, I haven’t been to the theater a lot of times, and the list of movies I haven’t seen includes all of the ones mentioned in this thread, and hundreds more. I never developed the love of sitting in the dark, watching people fifteen feet high and losing myself in their story. I couldn’t afford it. I spent most of my life learning how to be a musician, and developing other related interests.
As for it being a “gap in my cultural schooling” - take a long walk off a short pier.
Well, my mom and dad haven’t, either. This isn’t really the cultural company you want to be keeping, if I may say so.