Book of the week: The Hobbit

 SO Tolkien has been on my feed and on my radar for a while now it seems. I guess I've been in a nostalgic mood with books lately (Homer, Black Beauty now Tolkien). Also going in the 3rd week of audio I have confirmed that I need to know the story beforehand and I enjoy it when the reader does voices. I think that is usually a given when reading out loud so the listener knows who when and what/how but on those freebie volunteer apps I have it's not always the same person (especially when its a long book) so I am not always certain they do that. 

So anyway, The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien, for anyone who doesn't know, is a fantasy world of adventure. He created a world full of different cultures and then mashed them up to see how they can orbit around each other. The little hobbit (Bilbo Baggins) is more or less manipulated into sojourning to help the dwarfs gain back their mountain from a dragon who (in my opinion) fought for it and won, by a crafty grey wizard...who comes and goes when needed. Bilbo is from peoples who are just hunky-dory staying and living in their own part of the world, so their fighting skills are...lacking. However, Bilbo is very clever and has his wits about him to get them all out of (most) of the skirmishes they encounter. In this adventure he gains, a good group of friends, a dagger, some dwarf clothes, and a shiny magic ring (that ultimately causes all sorts of problems for his nephew). In the end, the dragon is defeated and there is a 5 armies battle in which no one truly wins anyway...or well they don't win the original prize of the mountain's gold because they have to work together to defeat more bad guys. Then Bilbo travels home with not much ado and the end! Tolkien was a master at creating, I think. His hobby (besides creating bedtime stories for his kids) was history and languages. This world is based on A LOT of history. You can also get a sense of how it was back then. This book shows adventure, death, good vs evil (ish), society, culture, morals, and more as well as all the processes of it. He didn't sugar coat anything. Just laid it all out there with a slim disguise of woohoo an adventure story with (a kind of) knight and dragon! These days that's a hard sell for today's kids. They want the knight and dragon without all the other mumbo-jumbo. But, eh, that just my 2-cents. 



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