Yes, I agree. Age has a great deal to do with it.

Lord of the Rings. Probably the biggest reason for this is *when* I encountered it. LOTR is tailor-made for the mind of a young adolescent. When everything is changing in your life and your worldview is expanding, encountering this text is often enormously influential.

I was 12 years old and a very scientifically-minded kid, but I was becoming disillusioned with the materialist paradigm of science. Encountering this world of myth and magic ‘re-enchanted’ the world for me and made me realize that I wasn’t the only person who felt like this.

And all the powerful themes in the book of course left a deep impression on me - death and immortality, power, corruption, friendship, hope, endurance, love, compassion, the nature of good and evil etc.