Book Review: The Hobbit

According to my mom's note in the back of my copy of this book, I first read it when I was eight years old. I remember my sister had checked it out from the school library and I was intrigued by the pictures (the copy I own which was my parents' copy and which I actually read doesn't have pictures. I don't know what edition my sister had checked out). I'm not sure how many times I've read it since then. Maybe no other times. But I just reread it in two days so I guess it was pretty good?

I didn't read The Lord of the Rings until junior high and I remember restarting more than once. I reread Bilbo's birthday chapter a few times before I stuck with the book. And another time, I stalled partway through The Two Towers and left it for so long that I, much later, simply began again with The Fellowship of the Ring.

Apparently I had projected the parts of The Lord of the Rings I found boring and tedious onto The Hobbit as well. Turns out, there really aren't any boring and tedious parts of this book. I suppose there would be if the book were written from the perspective of one of the dwarves. How useless are those guys?! The first half of the book is simply Gandalf saving everybody every time they get in trouble. The second half of the book is Bilbo saving everybody after they get in trouble. The dwarves could have been eaten by the trolls at the beginning of their journey and nothing would have been different. Except maybe for making things easier at the end when it came time to divvy up the treasures with the humans and elves.

I suppose the dwarves were needed to call in Dain's dwarf army to give the humans and elves a chance against the goblin attack at the end. And it's not like having the dwarves die would have stopped the goblins since the dwarves weren't at fault in sparking their wrath. That was caused by Gandalf murdering their king in the dark when he could have just screamed, "Fly, you fools!"

What I'm trying to say is I understand why this book wasn't called The Dwarves. I was more upset by the death of Smaug than by the death of Thorin. If you haven't read this book yet, I'm just kidding! Nobody dies! *wink*

Is this the book that started the trend of having one fat kid in the group for comic relief?