The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien
Having read it
★★★☆☆
A book I read (but never finished!) back in my late primary school years as it seemed to be the thing to be reading at the time, mostly to appear you knew how and what to read... kids, eh?! Anyway, thirty or so years later I finally got around to reading the whole thing, from start to finish!
While reading it and, to be honest not thinking much of it as a story, I was vaguely reminded of that was very likely why I gave up reading it back in the day. Stuff happens and there are a couple of interesting moments but it don’t half plod along with prose that just seems to endlessly describe rather than dare to progress and help drive the pulse of intrigue, adventure and peril.
Still, book finished and returned to the modern, e-library!
A good passage
If you have ever seen a dragon in a pinch, you will realise that this was only poetical exaggeration applied to any hob-bit, even to Old Took’s great-grand-uncle Bullroarer, who was so huge (for a hobbit) that he could ride a horse. He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul’s head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.
A second good passage
Thieves! Fire! Murder! Such a thing had not happened since first he came to the Mountain! His rage passes description – the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted. His fire belched forth, the hall smoked, he shook the mountain-roots.