The Hobbit

Over the weekend I finished reading The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.  For the second time.  When I was in middle school I read The Hobbit for school but it was so difficult for me to get through that I'd tried and failed to read it twice since then.  (Compare that to my almost yearly reading of Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia)

Although I love J.R.R. Tolkien's stories, they are so dense that I feel like they drag on foreeeever.

So I figured out how to read Tolkien -- in chunks.

My problem is that I like to read a book in one sitting.

For some reason, I can't do that with Tolkien -- hence the chunks.

I really, really loved reading through this story again -- there were so may things that I didn't remember, and now that the movies are coming out I wanted to refresh my memory.

Although now I'm aware of the tragedy awaiting me in the third movie, which is *not* cool.  (RIP my favorite dwarf...)

I feel like this story is probably the most epic, most grand-scale fantasy I've read or seen in a long time.  The sheer size of the adventure (over a year) and the breadth of what happens is staggering.

You take a quiet little homebody and drag him through the woods, mountains, rivers, valleys and caves of a wild and almost always dangerous land and somehow he survives.  Somehow, he turns into a hero, albeit not a perfect one.

Insert a mysterious grey wizard (who pops up and appears at will), a gaggle of dwarves (with several different colored hoods, all different ages), and crazy creatures like Beorn, the necromancer and the Elven King of Murkwood, plus a DRAGON *and* eagles and you have one heck of an adventure story.

I also like that J.R.R. didn't pander to an audience.  For example -- a lot of publishers pay attention to how many male/female characters there are in books, but I don't feel J.R.R. was excluding women from this story.  There just simply wasn't a woman in this tale.  (There are epic women later on in Lord of the Rings, however)

I love the voice of this book -- sort of Bilbo re-telling his adventures to the young Took nieces and nephews, sort of Gandalf explaining it to someone (maybe the aforementioned nieces and nephews)...

My favorite parts were the Mirkwood episode, the Smaug/Bilbo conversation (Bilbo accidentally introducing himself in a really epic riddle), the Smeagol/Bilbo game of riddles, and the songs.

What are your favorite parts of The Hobbit?  Favorite quotes?  Favorite characters?

First Line Friday No. 18

In honor of the The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey arriving at midnight in theaters everywhere this morning at precisely 12:01 (yours truly was seated near the front, dressed as Stryder), let's take a peek at the famous children's fantasy that spawned a new era in literature (along with Chronicles of Narnia and The Chronicles of Prydain, of course).

"In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.  Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort...(skipping a few paragraphs of description)...this hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins.  The Bagginses had lived in the neighborhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected; you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him.  This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected.  He may have lost the neighbors' respect, but he gained -- well, you will see whether he gained anything at the end."

--from The Hobbit (or There and Back Again) by J.R.R. Tolkien

I will admit to having a difficult time reading Tolkien -- his descriptions are seemingly endless and I find myself unable to go on any further after spending twenty pages with the same tree.  BUT, I love his stories.  They're incredible -- he created languages, maps, charts, dozens of characters, each worthy of our attention.  I don't know many authors who are capable of creating a very real, other world.

So, I'm going to give The Hobbit another go.  Here's why:

1. The first sentence is perfect -- you have the setting and the main character in very few words! 
2.  You know exactly HOW a hobbit is before you know WHAT it is -- a hobbit's main concern is comfort.
3.  Baggins.  Great name (one of the many great names Tolkien imagined while writing this epic).
4.  The story of an atypical, unique hobbit who gives up his comforts (literally) to go on an adventure...this has got to be the beginning to a great story!
5.  ...well, now I must see if and what he gained in the end.  Clever, Tolkien.

Did you see the movie last night?  Will you see it this weekend/next week?  Thoughts?

 See you on Monday with a review -- I'm reading a proper fairytale (I'll explain what I mean on Monday) and I'm quite thrilled about it.