A use for academia.edu!

So, the website academia.edu tends to be highly panned by real academics -- it's free to upload your papers, but the website's attempts to get people to buy subscriptions are pretty desperate. (For instance, their myriad notifications that "Someone just viewed your paper X in an academia.edu search" give a misleading impression that more people are reading your work than truly are.) But one nice feature they have: if you download a paper, you can leave a note to the author explaining your reason for downloading. And I just received the following note:
I am taking a class about The Hobbit at my local bookstore in DC with Verilyn Flieger and she recommended this article.
Which is amazing that Dr. Flieger actually knows the article and recommend it to someone -- a lay reader, no less.** That really bucks me up. The essay in question is "Unraveling The Hobbit’s Strange Publication History: A Look at Possible Worlds, Modality, and Accessibility Relations," which was published in 2017 by the journal Fastitocalon (which now appears to be defunct). Since it's not actually an article I remember really well, I gave it another read, and I'm 99% percent sure the reason it earned Dr. Flieger's  recommendation was for its discussion of The Hobbit's publication history. Re-reading the piece, though, does make me wince. . . . although it's well-written, I've really smoothed out my academic prose style over the last three years. The re-read just makes me itch for some judicious edits. Alas.

 But still, what a nice message to have read.

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** Also, what an awesome idea to do community outreach like that.

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