Book Report: The Hobbit

My Best Reader and I took turns reading The Hobbit to our Perfect Non-Reader as a bedtime book. It was wonderful.

I’m afraid that some of my voices for the various characters are unduly influenced by the John Huston in my head from the Rankin/Bass movie. That aired when YHB was eight, and I had a Cool Teacher^TM who hipped us third-graders (or whatever I was at the time) to it. I somehow got hold of the book on the day before it aired, read it through and then watched the thing. Among my recollections of that experience is watching the credits and thinking that there seemed to have been a lot of Japanese people involved in the animation; that would likely have been the first time I noticed such a thing.

My Best Reader had suggested that we would need to do a little editing on the fly, perhaps to avoid some of the more antiquated language and perhaps to shorten up some of the descriptions, as well as to alleviate any potentially nightmare-inducing tension (she does not get eaten by the sharks at this time). In the event, though, the language of the book itself worked well enough, mostly. I remember that The Hobbit is in some sense a children’s book, and is different in tone, content and pace from The Lord of the Rings, but I forget just how different. In particular, there are all these lovely little it-will-be-all-right markers, talking about how Bilbo thought in later years that this was the worst part, or how this was not the last time that he would wish for his hearth and kettle. That sort of thing generally annoys me when I come across it, but it was wonderful as I read aloud to a squirming and wiggling six-year-old, who (and this is even harder to remember) didn’t know how it would end.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.