Scan barcode
A review by isabellarobinson7
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
5.0
Rating: 5 nostalgia ridden stars
The first time I read The Hobbit, it took me several months. The second time I read The Hobbit, it took me a day.
Quite a few years ago, my mum purchased a copy of this book to read to my younger brother and I at night time before bed. We only made it a couple of chapters before my brother was bored, and Mum was never really into fantasy to begin with, so we put the book down. But I was not bored, and was developing an interest in fantasy from reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. So while the rest of my family forgot about Tolkien's masterpiece until the films were released, I discovered a genre that would ultimately take over my life (this was all a tad dramatic, but hey, Tolkien would approve).
But I was young, and Tolkien's traditional writing style seemed like another language to me. Sentences like Gandalf's famous "Do you mean to wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good on this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?" flew right over my head. What even were;;; those weird punctuation marks? Why didn't Gandalf just say "hello" or something back? It's safe to say that it took me a bit to get through The Hobbit first time around. But you know what? Young Isabella didn't care if it took her three years to finish this book, because she was loving every second.
Then another issue arose once I had actually finished it - no one I knew liked it, or anything similar. I can even remember another guy in my class reading The Hobbit around time I was, but never finished it because it was quote-unquote "boring" and "nothing happened". Did we read different books? Because whatever it was that I read was so interesting and action packed that it couldn't possibly be described as "boring" (I was a child and thought all my opinions were objective, cut me some slack).
And I had no idea where to go from there. Rereading The Hobbit never crossed my mind for some reason, and I wasn't old enough to tackle the tome-sized Lord of the Rings, so I dived into YA early. What I found disappointed me. This was right around the time when dystopia really boomed in the YA community, overshadowing what little fantasy there was, and so I rode the wave like everybody else. I read Divergent once when I was 10 and decided this would be my "new thing" since Tolkien-esque fantasy wasn't a socially acceptable interest to have. Then dystopia died down and I got lost in the sea of John Green-ish angsty YA contemporaries, none of which I really enjoyed like everyone seemed to. I thought that my issue was that I simply didn't like reading, and I read very little outside Rick Riordan for many years.
I read The Lord of the Rings in amongst this time, (naturally, I loved it and now I own three copies) and Tolkien's work once again caused me to frantically search for more fantasy worlds in books. My mistake was running to the YA shelves. Everyone seemed to continue with YA despite outgrowing the supposed age demographic, so I guess I never expected to look anywhere else. I read Six of Crows and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children the same year, and thought I had finally found my kind of book. But then I hit a dry spout again in 2018 when I realized that I had been reading the same quintessential YA tropes rehashed again and again, most of which I actually didn't like. I had a massive reading slump that year, and ended up just rereading Rick Riordan's entire middle-grade bibliography from start to finish.
I reverted back to my YA ransacking for the first few months of 2019 once I had come out of the slump and almost fell into another one (I was saved by the pure mindless enjoyment of Ready Player One). The real turning point came in June that year, when I finally braved the adult section of the library and found The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. Before long, I had bought all three books in the Mistborn trilogy (I now own three sets) and had completed all of Sanderson's Cosmere, including White Sand (plus some others, like both Skyward and Starsight, as well as Steelheart and the first Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians book). Last year was the best reading year I have ever had, both in quality and quantity, with an overall 3.2 stars average (which is high for me, considering I had entire years with only a couple new 5 star reads) over 170 books.
Now I am in a better place reading-wise than I have ever been before, finishing up book 10 in The Wheel of Time and anxiously awaiting Stormlight 4. So it seemed only fitting that I read The Hobbit for the second time, as it really was my gateway into what would eventually become my greatest passion - books.
(This was way longer than expected, but no one reads these anyway, so it is really only a pain for me when I want to go back and read this review.)
The first time I read The Hobbit, it took me several months. The second time I read The Hobbit, it took me a day.
Quite a few years ago, my mum purchased a copy of this book to read to my younger brother and I at night time before bed. We only made it a couple of chapters before my brother was bored, and Mum was never really into fantasy to begin with, so we put the book down. But I was not bored, and was developing an interest in fantasy from reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. So while the rest of my family forgot about Tolkien's masterpiece until the films were released, I discovered a genre that would ultimately take over my life (this was all a tad dramatic, but hey, Tolkien would approve).
But I was young, and Tolkien's traditional writing style seemed like another language to me. Sentences like Gandalf's famous "Do you mean to wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good on this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?" flew right over my head. What even were;;; those weird punctuation marks? Why didn't Gandalf just say "hello" or something back? It's safe to say that it took me a bit to get through The Hobbit first time around. But you know what? Young Isabella didn't care if it took her three years to finish this book, because she was loving every second.
Then another issue arose once I had actually finished it - no one I knew liked it, or anything similar. I can even remember another guy in my class reading The Hobbit around time I was, but never finished it because it was quote-unquote "boring" and "nothing happened". Did we read different books? Because whatever it was that I read was so interesting and action packed that it couldn't possibly be described as "boring" (I was a child and thought all my opinions were objective, cut me some slack).
And I had no idea where to go from there. Rereading The Hobbit never crossed my mind for some reason, and I wasn't old enough to tackle the tome-sized Lord of the Rings, so I dived into YA early. What I found disappointed me. This was right around the time when dystopia really boomed in the YA community, overshadowing what little fantasy there was, and so I rode the wave like everybody else. I read Divergent once when I was 10 and decided this would be my "new thing" since Tolkien-esque fantasy wasn't a socially acceptable interest to have. Then dystopia died down and I got lost in the sea of John Green-ish angsty YA contemporaries, none of which I really enjoyed like everyone seemed to. I thought that my issue was that I simply didn't like reading, and I read very little outside Rick Riordan for many years.
I read The Lord of the Rings in amongst this time, (naturally, I loved it and now I own three copies) and Tolkien's work once again caused me to frantically search for more fantasy worlds in books. My mistake was running to the YA shelves. Everyone seemed to continue with YA despite outgrowing the supposed age demographic, so I guess I never expected to look anywhere else. I read Six of Crows and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children the same year, and thought I had finally found my kind of book. But then I hit a dry spout again in 2018 when I realized that I had been reading the same quintessential YA tropes rehashed again and again, most of which I actually didn't like. I had a massive reading slump that year, and ended up just rereading Rick Riordan's entire middle-grade bibliography from start to finish.
I reverted back to my YA ransacking for the first few months of 2019 once I had come out of the slump and almost fell into another one (I was saved by the pure mindless enjoyment of Ready Player One). The real turning point came in June that year, when I finally braved the adult section of the library and found The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. Before long, I had bought all three books in the Mistborn trilogy (I now own three sets) and had completed all of Sanderson's Cosmere, including White Sand (plus some others, like both Skyward and Starsight, as well as Steelheart and the first Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians book). Last year was the best reading year I have ever had, both in quality and quantity, with an overall 3.2 stars average (which is high for me, considering I had entire years with only a couple new 5 star reads) over 170 books.
Now I am in a better place reading-wise than I have ever been before, finishing up book 10 in The Wheel of Time and anxiously awaiting Stormlight 4. So it seemed only fitting that I read The Hobbit for the second time, as it really was my gateway into what would eventually become my greatest passion - books.
(This was way longer than expected, but no one reads these anyway, so it is really only a pain for me when I want to go back and read this review.)