I read The Hobbit out loud to my kids over the past few weeks, and I enjoyed it!!! For real! I did! I didn't merely like it the way I did last time I read it, I flat-out enjoyed it. It was fun. I looked forward to reading more. That has never happened for me with this book, and I am so excited that it did now! At last!
And I think it's totally because I was reading it out loud. So I was hearing the narration in my own voice. Not in the voice of a "a kindly but slightly condescending uncle telling a story to his nieces and nephews because they're all stuck at a family reunion and he feels he should be nice to them," as I put it in my review 6 years ago. I had fun with it, I enjoyed it, I liked it. Huzzah!
I mean, I still think Thorin is a twerp. And the plotting is too pantsy for my taste. And I wish Bard was in it 90 times as much as he is. Beorn too. Gandalf too. But I still truly enjoyed it, and this is just... huge for me, y'all. I have felt so bad for so many years that I don't love this book, because I love The Lord of the Rings so very deeply. Well, I may be on the road to loving it, and I'm at least far past liking it, into the realm of truly enjoying it. I count this as a huge win.
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for a lot of suspense and action and too many spiders. My 8-yr-old handled it fine.
Reading it out loud sounds like so much fun! This is my favorite so I'm glad that you enjoyed it so much!
ReplyDeleteMC, it really was! Especially because I could try to mimic some of the voices/speech patterns from the movie. Smaug was especially fun.
DeleteI'm glad too :-D
Never get's old. Glad it get's even better for you!
ReplyDeleteJoseph, yes, I feel like this is a minor triumph :-)
DeleteI'm glad you enjoyed it! It took me a few times of reading it to really appreciate it (probably because I started my Tolkien journey with The Silmarillion, so The Hobbit sort of came out of left field for me).
ReplyDeleteRM, I'm glad I'm not the only one who took a while to come around to appreciating this. I first read it in my teens and just... wasn't impressed. Never read LOTR because why would I spend 1000 pages reading a guy I didn't enjoy for 200 pages? Then the LOTR movies came out and changed my mind on that, but I tried this again and nope. Read it a third time when my first baby was born. Nope. Read it another time when I started falling in love with Bard the Bowman. Nope. Guess fifth time's the charm!
DeleteAnd yes, it is about as different from Silmarillion as you can possibly get, so I can see why you'd be like, "Um, what now?"
My mom just read this aloud to my siblings and I-no matter how many times I read this, it's still so fresh and new. <33
ReplyDeleteMEM, that's great! I love books that feel that way for me.
DeleteI have a few other rereads planned, but maybe I will get around to rereading this sometime this year! I also prefer LotR, but I really should revisit The Hobbit someday.
ReplyDeleteBeth, yeah, it's worth revisiting now and then :-) What are you rereading this year?
DeleteWell, I will be rereading _Midnight's Children_ by Salman Rushdie soon. I loved it when I first read it years ago.
DeleteBeth, oh, interesting! I've not read anything by Rushdie, but a college friend was a big fan of his.
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