Because when Gandalf stood on the bridge in Moria and shouted "You...shall not...pass!!!" I knew to the quick that the Balrog wasn't going to make it.

When Treebeard sees the destruction near Isengard...they didn't need to cue the angry music, I could hear it in my head anyway.

When the Fellowship attacks the Black Gate to distract Sauron from the Ring, with no hope of surviving -- is there a more noble and courageous act than that?

I'm not trying to pick on you, but I would hazard a guess that you didn't need the book to figure those out. And oddly enough, reading the book didn't ruin the movie, but only made it better. I wanted to see my imagination come to life -- better yet, someone with a better imagination than mine. (Unlike Star Wars Episode III, where I knew what was going to happen, and never really cared how. OK, they lava was cool.)

I tend to lose interest in the scattershot series where nothing ever progresses. Sure, when I was a kid, I watched things like Gilligan's Island, but that's because I thought they were going to get rescued every time. When I realized that the show would be over, and there was no hope of ever getting rescued, it became only an exercise in storytelling.

Compare that to Sheherazade, that's somewhere in between. Because obviously the story never ends, but each story begins where the last one left off. (In an interesting way, as opposed to Gilligan, where nothing has changed, they're on the same island as last time, and in fact, you could miss 12 episodes and it would still make sense.)

And when the story finally ends, it's bittersweet, because it's over in your mind, and not just on screen. And Gilligan's still on that ****** island.