Speaking of hobbits, Wannabe Nerd President Barack Obama would like to be a belated guest to this "Let's Talk About Tolkien!" party that is happening in Washington, for some reason.

President Obama is a fan of at least one comic book superhero, and Lord of the Rings devotees should be comforted to know they have a compatriot in the White House.

Obama revealed these and other details to two Scholastic News Kids Press Corps reporters in an exclusive July interview, which the kids magazine posted online this week.

“When I was your age… I’d probably gotten a little too old for the Hardy Boys and that stuff,” Obama told Topanga Sena, 10, of Orlando, Florida, and Jacob Schroeder, 11, of Albuquerque, New Mexico. “I think I was getting into the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit and stuff like that.”

“They weren’t just kind of adventure stories but they were stories that taught me about social problems,” Obama said of the books he favored in his pre-teen years. “Taught me about how people interact with each other…about how some people are kind and some people are cruel.”

Barack Obama's problem is probably that he learned a lot about how people interact with each other, but he did not pay close enough attention to learn how he should interact with hobbits and orcs or whatever other creatures he is dealing with these days. [Politico]